Kathleen Weinrich doesn’t beat around the bush: She doesn’t know where she’d be living without her landlord, Randall Schoning.

“I’m a felon and he let me in,” Weinrich, 33, said Tuesday.

Weinrich has a résumé at which many landlords would look askance: Oregon court records show she had convictions on her record by the time she moved into the trailer off Baker Road in 2010. And she’s been in jail again since she started renting the house; in March 2015, she was convicted of identity theft and first-degree theft.

Weinrich says she’s lived in the trailer in Deschutes River Woods since October 2010 — through the end of her marriage, the start of a new relationship and the growth of her two young daughters. Prior to that, she says, she lived in motels.

Schoning owns more than 80 properties here, according to county property records, and started buying property in Deschutes County in 1978, he said in an interview Wednesday. He estimated he’s only sold about five in the years since.

Although both landlord and tenants acknowledge the houses might not be Awbrey Butte material — “We elected to acquire more and fix them up later,” Schoning said — the essentials work.

“I adore the crap out of Randy for giving me the opportunity to rent from him,” Weinrich said.

Schoning says he tries to keep tenants that other landlords might reject.

Some of the properties are notable: he owns the house at the intersection of NW Newport Avenue and NW 15th Street where a tenant allegedly shot two men using an AK-47 in late April.

He also recently sold his share of the Fireside Condominiums, also on NW Newport Avenue, which made the news when it was sold: the buyer gave notice to tenants, saying he planned to renovate the building. That ended up displacing more than 40 longtime tenants, Schoning said, though he says that at the time of the sale he had been promised the tenants would not be forced to move out. His ex-wife also owned some condos in the building.

The tenants at some of his most troubled properties — those that have seen the highest number of calls for service from the police in the past decade, which includes Weinrich’s — say he’s been an attentive landlord.

Weinrich said Schoning paid $10,000 to fix her septic system, for example, while another tenant, Jeremiah Furbush, said Schoning sent someone to repair his old roof. Furbush, 40, has lived in a home near St. Charles Bend for about six years.

“He’s a fair guy, as far as I know,” Furbush said.

Tiffany Grimm lives with her boyfriend and their 2-year-old in a white two-bedroom house on SE Fourth Street, which has seen more than 100 calls for service from police since 2006.

Grimm has lived in the house since early 2014, and she says she deals mainly with Schoning’s business associate, a woman named Marcie. Attempts to contact Schoenberg through Schoning were unsuccessful.

Grimm said neighbors had complained about noise at their house, which likely generated the calls for service from the police; and there was a break-in during a prior tenant’s stay, she said. But after a call from Marcie, Grimm said she was being more diligent about the noise and hadn’t gotten any complaints since.

And the house — built in the 1930s — is well-built and maintained, Grimm said.

“They built it very sturdy,” Grimm said, standing out on her front stoop Tuesday morning holding her dog, Butters. “Those were the loggers then, they sure knew what they were doing.”

Schoning says he checks the credit histories of potential tenants, but that he is willing to look past criminal convictions and works out payment plans for tenants who are late on monthly rent.

Although that may be a risk most landlords aren’t willing to take, Schoning feels he’s helping people out who otherwise wouldn’t have a place to go — especially in Bend, where the rental vacancy rate is so low.

He also says he rarely knows whether police have been at his properties.

“Unless I happen to stumble by, I’m not being made aware or told of the problems I may have,” Schoning said. “It’s a flaw in the system.”

He said that had he known about the multiple recent calls for service at the house where the suspects in the shooting on NW Newport Avenue lived, for example, he would have intervened earlier.

When responding to incidents at rented homes, police are reluctant to contact landlords unless a situation is dire, although there’s no “hard line” or threshold for when a property owner is contacted, said Bend Police Lt. Clint Burleigh.

“We don’t want to displace families or people from a residence,” Burleigh said. “We want to solve a problem.”

Sometimes that means sending an incident through the criminal justice system, and sometimes that means contacting the landlord. But the latter can mean that tenants who may have created problems in their current neighborhood just move to another house and another neighborhood, Burleigh said.

City code does allow the city to initiate civil procedures against a property owner in the event that repeated and persistent nuisances aren’t addressed.

City code states the civil procedure can begin if three separate incidents — from a list of crimes such as assault, prostitution and other sexual offenses — occur within 30 days.

The police chief is required to notify the property owner at that point, which can be the first time a landlord learns about the issues at the property, as Schoning indicated.

“Most landlords don’t know anything until they get that letter,” Burleigh said.

— Reporter: 541-383-0376,

cwithycombe@bendbulletin.com

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected. In the original version, the relationship between Randy Schoning and Marci Schoenberg was incorrect. They are business associates, not siblings. The Bulletin regrets the error.