Have you ever wondered why getting an apartment often feels like it’s more trying than applying for a job? These people are the reason why.
This piece is based on an AskReddit thread. Link on the last page.
1/13. I had an older couple who decided to quit paying their rent, but they had pretty good excuses so I didn’t evict them until after three months of not paying.
When I tried to garnish the man’s wages. I was told he worked for Coca-Cola. Turns out they’d never heard of him, but after a little digging I found out they had both been arrested for selling cocaine. The officer showed me mugshots dating back to the early 80s!
Finally went down to the court house to file an unlawful detainer on them.
When we had our day in court, the female, who was usually dressed nicely, with fake nails, and an expensive weave, showed up looking like an old hag. The guy was using a walker (eye roll- this guy didn’t need one). They claimed I was a slum lord and never fixed anything, but I had receipts from every repair including a new AC unit.
-MClovechild
2/13. So this guy gets evicted for non-payment. But instead of trashing the place like most people do, he cut off chunks of drywall, put dead fish in the walls, and sealed them back up.
The new tenants couldn’t figure out the smell for weeks. They got the place professionally cleaned a few times, searched endlessly. Eventually, they figured something must have died in the walls, and figured out what had happened.
-LaserBeamsCattleProd
3/13. I had a tenant remove the kitchen island and bring it outside by the pool because they “needed an outdoor serving area.”
-SunshineSexWorker
4/13. When I was younger, my parents bought a cheap house in a neighboring town and fixed it up to rent. Two young women moved in, and they were great. Just out of college, working entry-level and kind of getting by, no trouble.
Then they called at 6pm on Christmas Eve because they were “having an emergency.” (continued…)
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My dad called back when we got home from church service and asked what was wong. They said they had found a spider and they wanted him to come kill it.
Being far too kind-hearted, he went out on Christmas Eve to kill their spider. They seemed to think this was normal, like about on par with what you’d expect your landlord to do if your water pipes burst on Christmas Eve – the least he could do given the situation.
Not a horror story by any stretch, but such a weird occurrence. After that, my dad told me that I was not allowed to move out until I could kill my own spiders, because… I mean, seriously.
-ally-saurus
5/13. My mom had some tenants in a rental property who apparently were serial crap sacks and would live in a place until they got evicted, then move on to the next place.
They’d do things like not pay rent while claiming AC was broken or some other property related issue then avoid actually letting it be examined or fixed.
Long story short, after getting evicted they waited until the very last minute to move out, left a bunch of their stuff behind, and filled a microwave with hot dogs which they left to rot.
While my mom was in the process of getting a court order the TV show “Hot Bench” (a Judge Judy spinoff) called and asked them to come on. Everyone got flown out to LA and my mom got her money and the crap sacks got berated on national daytime TV, so I suppose it worked out in the end.
-BighouseJD
6/13. My parents had some tenants when I was probably 7 or 8 that never paid the rent and they wound up getting evicted. My parents decided that they would save some money and we would just clean the place up ourselves.
That was their worst idea ever. (continued…)
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I didn’t know what a lot of the stuff I saw that day was until much later in life. The first thing I saw when we walked in the door was a fish tank full of dead, exotic fish. In the bedroom we found used condoms, used tampons, and used needles. Like, just laying around. Once we saw that bedroom my parents gave up and hired a cleaner but I heard what else they found.
They found a cat shoved into the toilet of the master bedroom. For those who are wondering, my parents did report them for animal abuse/neglect but unfortunately nothing came of it.
-thedollgirl
7/13. When I was in property management, we had a guy dump marbles down the drain because his sink was clogged. He said it would push the clog out. It did in a way, it pushed it further down into the city line and they had to come out and unclog it for the whole building of 30 or so units. He did not like it when we forwarded him the city bill.
-arakele
8/13. I was a landlord when my girlfriend moved in with me, and she had an empty condo. First 2 renters where fine, but then there was Kevin. Kevin was a single male, good income, seemed like a perfect tenant.
We get into month three and the rent checks stop coming in. So we go to the condo to find out what the deal is. Kevin looks frantically through his papers and is all like “I lost the money order, sorry”. We do a little more looking and it turns out he has a roommate he had neglected to mention, a large, silent, muscular man.
Kevin’s no-named roommate turns out to be a dangerous sex offender who is out on parole. We were right across the street from a school, old Kevin was violating sex offender legislation. Thank god he left without much of a fight and were able to dump the condo at a modest profit.
-ooo-ooo-oooyeah
9/13. I was subletting a room in my house to an 18yr old couple. Real nice, considerate, devout Christians. I had to leave for 2 weeks and asked them to keep the place neat and in order. I even told them I would pay them for the trouble.
Unfortunately for them, I came back a couple of days early. (continued…)
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They had completely trashed the entire house (crack den status), moved the mattress down into the living room. They had gone through all of our stuff and incorporated it into their stuff. They adopted 2 cats after we left, and there was kitty litter on every square inch of carpet.
There were used condoms strewn everywhere, the whole house smelled like cigarettes, and they had pawned my $800 drum set and stolen most of my sentimental keepsakes I had kept in a small box since I was a child.
I called the cops, but before they arrived, these kids left with their parents who “didn’t care” what their kids had done. Unreal.
-Da_Wuff_Princess
10/13. My parents have owned properties for a while, so there are a number, but the one that I’m personally invested in is the last tenant.
They decided to rent out my childhood home and I suggested it to a coworker. I had worked with this woman for several years, and thought she and her family were decent people. I trusted them.
They pulled out and sold 100-year-old hardwood trim, removed the central air unit and sold it, and just generally mucked the place up.
They then proceeded to skip town after being kicked out once they found out that their wages were being garnished (show up to your court dates, kids).
-I_Am_A_Wookie_AMA
11/13. I have a crazy, manipulative tenant. She looks after the place well, but I wonder if the psychological damage is worth it.
Early on in the tenancy she complained about the shower curtain sticking to her. It’s a shower-over-bath setup, and since she pays her rent reliably and keeps the place clean, we thought, “Oh, okay, what the hell” and paid to have a glass screen put in. (continued…)
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After it’s installed I get a complaint from her about how she has to turn the shower head 45 degrees to stop the water hitting the ground. I go to inspect and find that the glass is inexplicably at the other end of the bath.
Turns out she’d insisted that the installer ignore our instructions and put it in the wrong, for reasons unknown.
I told her that since she’d countermanded our instructions on something we were paying for that was now a permanent fixture in our property, that she was bloody lucky we didn’t charge her for it and that she was going to have to live with the setup she’d insisted on.
Next, she asked if she could put a cat flap in the back door. We agreed, on the provision that she pay for it herself (see, we’re learning) and that it be a proper cat flap, not some home-dodgy version.
She puts in a rubber-flap cat door, which I personally wouldn’t have gone with but whatever. She’s happy. We let it go.
Little did we know what that was leading towards.
After the first Winter in the house, she emails us copies of her electrical bills and says that the house needs better heating because her bills are too high.
Looking at the bills, we agree that the house must need better heating, and we invest in a new $7,000 furnace.
She tries to tell us where to put it and we tell her that the installers have designated spot X as the most effective, and that we’re not open to alternatives. We instruct the installers to refuse to shift the unit (learning!) to another location unless they deem it to be superior, because she’s not paying for the damn thing, we are.
After the installation, the installer says to us, “Hey, just to let you know, the reason her bills were so high last year is that she pulled the cat flap into the ‘open’ position and left it hooked up that way all winter.”
Yes, she created a deliberate hole between inside and outside, left it fully opened for an entire season, then complained that her heating wasn’t effective, all so she could score an expensive new heater that wasn’t required.
At this point, I started thinking, “Is she really that manipulative?” (continued…)
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Would anyone deliberately freeze themselves just to make me fork out thousands of dollars for new heating? Is it really that important to her to screw me over for no purpose? Surely not.
Then she pretended she was going to get a dog and talked us into replacing her fence. Then she “cancelled” the dog.
Lately, she has started texting us about putting a fence in her front yard because there are “police in the streets and dead bodies everywhere”.
Think I’m gonna take my chances with a new tenant.
-Totes_Incognito_Yo
12/13. I rented a two-bedroom unit, rented to two women in their twenties. Pretty quickly, they started to complain that they had roaches. I thought that was weird because the previous tenant had no roach problem, and we had the place thoroughly cleaned before they moved in.
Nobody else in the building was having a problem, so we thought maybe one of the girls had brought them along with them.
Fast forward a few months and the two of them up and skipped town.
We get the key and check the unit and it is trashed. There were open ketchup bottles on the counter, glasses, plates, cutlery, clothes, shoes, food just all over the place. And roaches…lots of them.
We called junk removers – they don’t remove junk unless it’s roach free. So we called pest control; they advise us to call a junk removed before they can get rid of the roaches.
-m2k88
13/13. One day we were served a notice that one of our tenants was taking us to small claims court. Why? Because her in-unit washing machine was not working. Had she reported the problem to management? Nope. The maintenance man and I entered the unit that afternoon to fix the washing machine. The problem? It was unplugged.
-SmellyMickey