The landlord's case is usually won or lost before the filing.

Before you file: the demand (the “3-day demand”).

Under O.C.G.A. § 44-7-50, possession must be demanded before a dispossessory affidavit can be filed. Practitioners call this the “3-day demand,” though the statute does not prescribe a specific waiting period. The demand can be oral, but in practice it is written, delivered by a method you can document, and preserved in a file that you can produce to the court. Tenant counsel will ask about the demand first. So will the judge, if the case is contested.

Grounds for a dispossessory.

Georgia dispossessory actions rest on one of three grounds:

1. Nonpayment of rent. The most common ground. Requires an accurate rent ledger and a demand.
2. Holdover after the term. The tenant's right to occupy has expired and the tenant has not vacated.
3. Breach of the lease. Any material lease violation, supported by the lease itself and documentation of the breach.

The affidavit should state the ground plainly and accurately. Overstating the claim (for example, alleging both nonpayment and holdover when only one applies) invites dismissal.

The affidavit.

The dispossessory affidavit is a sworn document. It should identify the parties correctly, describe the premises accurately, state the grounds, and — if money is sought — set out the amount with reference to the ledger. Errors in the affidavit are not minor. They can void service, create grounds for dismissal, and, where made knowingly, expose the filer.

Service.

Service is not the landlord's task. It is carried out by a sheriff, marshal, or court-approved server. Two points are worth noting:

• Personal service is required for a money judgment. If the tenant is served by posting-and-mailing, the court's power to enter a money judgment for past-due rent is limited. The possession judgment remains available, but the collection pathway narrows.
• Diligent-effort standard. Tack-and-mail is a fallback after personal service has been attempted with diligence. A process server's return that shows a single attempt on a single day is vulnerable.

What happens if the tenant answers.

An answer schedules a hearing. The hearing is short and evidence-based. A landlord who arrives with a clean ledger, an executed lease, documented notice, a proof of service, and a short chronology will usually prevail where the facts support the case. A landlord who arrives with verbal testimony about rent paid "sometime last month" will usually not.

Common defects that lose cases.

In practice, experienced tenant counsel report that most landlord-side cases that fail do so at the very first step — the demand, the service, the affidavit. The defects below recur across the docket with enough regularity that a landlord reviewing a contested filing should check each of them before walking into court.

• No demand, or no proof of demand.
• Affidavit signed by someone without authority to sign for the property.
• Wrong legal entity as plaintiff (for example, an LLC that does not hold title).
• Service return that does not support personal service where a money judgment is sought.
• Ledger inconsistencies between what the landlord states in the affidavit and what the tenant's payment records show.
• Notice to vacate delivered in a way that cannot be proved (an unrecorded call, a text message on a number the tenant denies is theirs).
• Attempts at "self-help" — changing locks, removing belongings, shutting off utilities — which are unlawful in Georgia and can generate counterclaims that exceed the rent at issue.

Writs, appeals, and execution.

A writ of possession generally will not issue until seven days after judgment, giving the tenant time to appeal under O.C.G.A. § 44-7-56. If the tenant appeals, the court may require continued payment of rent into the registry. If no appeal is filed and the tenant does not vacate, the sheriff or marshal executes the writ. The landlord does not.

Money judgments and collection.

A money judgment for rent is separate from the possession judgment. Collection — garnishment, post-judgment interrogatories, and liens — is governed by Title 18 and is a separate workstream. A money judgment without a collection plan is an accounting entry, not a recovery.

Cash for keys as a considered strategy.

“Cash for keys” is a negotiated exit in which the landlord pays the tenant an agreed sum in exchange for vacating the premises voluntarily, on an agreed date, in an agreed condition, and with a release of claims. It is not a cynical practice. In many cases, it is the lowest-cost resolution for both sides.

The arithmetic is straightforward. A contested dispossessory with a plausible counterclaim can involve two or three months of lost rent during the pendency, make-ready costs after judgment, attorney fees that are not always fully shifted even under a fee clause, and record consequences for a tenant who may end up in the same housing market again. A negotiated payment of a few thousand dollars — scaled to the market and the facts — can resolve all of that in days rather than weeks.

Cash for keys is not appropriate in every case. Where the tenant has no plausible counterclaim and the landlord has a clean filing, the dispossessory process is usually the right path. But for landlords entering rentals, a reserve line item earmarked for cash-for-keys negotiations — not a contingency, a budgeted line — is the mark of a serious operator.

Business structure and title.

How title is held and through which entity a landlord does business affects both liability exposure and, in a contested case, the identification of the proper plaintiff. Several practices recur across experienced Georgia investors:

• Hold title in an LLC, not individually. This creates a layer of liability separation. The LLC — not the individual investor — is the named plaintiff in the dispossessory and the named defendant in any counterclaim.
• Finance through DSCR loans where possible. Debt Service Coverage Ratio loans are underwritten to the property’s rental economics and permit purchase in the entity name rather than in the individual borrower’s name. This reinforces the separation.
• Use generic, non-identifying entity names. “Peachtree Construction LLC” or similar names carry less public information than “[Owner Name] Properties LLC” and complicate casual lookups by parties who might otherwise aggregate the owner’s portfolio for litigation purposes.
• Maintain degrees of separation. Where an owner holds multiple properties, separating them across multiple single-purpose entities limits the cross-contamination of any one claim.

None of this is a substitute for operational discipline. It is a complement to it. An investor with a well-structured entity stack and a sloppy lease will still lose cases that a well-structured investor with a clean lease would win.

The upstream question.

For investors and portfolio owners, the procedural discipline described here is only one layer. The more durable question is whether the underwriting, the reserves, the lease, and the screening process were sized for this kind of event in the first place. Eviction risk is priced into the business when the lease is signed, not when the demand is made. See Module 5 — Investment Frame for a longer treatment.

See also: the landlord pre-filing checklist.