Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Massachusetts

Re: non payment of back rent, vacating home, leaving damages

My advice is to find a local attorney to help you pursue the tenant for back rent and damages. If there was a lease, check to see if it allows you to add costs of collection.

There's a means to get an actual address from a P.O. box but you will need a lawyer for that.

Using social security number, I have been able to locate people's current addresses via a service that a few lawyers have or by another one that many big landlords use (and I happen to have a membership in that).

It can be frustrating. I sometimes find out where the tenant lives a year or two down the road, but I might find that they have only a few hundred dollars in their bank account which hardly pays for the collection effort. If they have a car, however, not wholly debt-laiden, you can have it "repo'd" to satisfy a judgment. I had such luck once. Do you know if the tenant owns his or her own car? Anything else of value? Is he or she likely to still be in state? Does he or she have a job that makes decent money?

Good luck.