Week 32 – Cannabis-gate: It’s a raid! 👮‍♀️🚨😱

After a difficult early spring with our Cherry Tree house, we were getting ourselves back on track and were looking forward to making big strides over the summer when … Cannabis-gate struck!

Hayley and her dad bought a house back in 2012 and have rented it out ever since. One day, as she was coming home from work, Hayley drove past this house and was surprised to see a police van outside it. She parked up and went to see what was up.

The police officers had smashed the front door in, and with good reason too! The entire house had been converted into a cannabis farm!

We had smelled it out on the street a few weeks back when walking past and some of the neighbours who knew us had complained to us, but we suspected they were just heavy users, dealers at worst, but never growers!

After the neighbourly complaints, we thought we should act and requested an inspection of the property from the estate agents who manage the letting. They gave three weeks notice and… found… nothing.

What we have since learned from the neighbours is that the night before the inspection, our tenants had been hard at work throughout the night drilling and painting and sanding. At 3 and 4am, vans arrived with furniture to make the house look lived in. But we weren’t to know all this until it was all over.

Anyway, back to the raid. Hayley stood and watched as bag after bag after bag after bag of cannabis plants were carried out by the police officers. The van was absolutely crammed with them and more was still coming out! They had to fetch a spare van to carry it all!

Hayley’s dad arrived with a new lock for the door and one of the police officers helped to fit it.

No one had been found in the house when they raided it, although the neighbours said it had been close! They’d heard our tenants in the house only an hour earlier.

Even the police had been shocked by the quantity of cannabis in the property. They seized 200 plants at around £500 each = that’s about £100,000 worth of cannabis! Clearly not an amateur job!

Once the police were done, we could get in and assess the damage… to be continued in Part Two…