From experience, having a lame landlord is a pain in the behind. But, to be fair it's got to be a pretty bad deal on both sides of the coin. I mean imagine having a bad tenant and having to rely on their (late) rent to keep the building running or getting complaints from other tenants weekly because of one bad seed. All bad.
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No One Is That Good In Bed!
We got home to a house that stunk of smoke as they had used the fireplace incorrectly, wax was everywhere from candles they had burnt, and there a massive stain on our bedspread. That stain would not come out and those sheets had to be chucked. My husband still can’t talk about it without a vein bulging out of his neck.
I can laugh now, looking back on it.”
They Gutted The Place
“My brother rented out one of his three houses. It was a three-story house with a small single unattached garage. Well, we heard through the grapevine that the police kicked in their door to arrest the tenants over the weekend, but they weren’t home. After contacting the sheriff’s department, he learned that said tenants had skipped the state, fleeing prosecution. My brother served an eviction notice to the residence and posted it on the door for thirty days. He got a call one week later from the tenants. They were asking him to put their stuff in a storage. He went over to the house to check it out and discovered they’d gutted the house. They called back and said they’d send him a money gram to pay for the storage. He asked about the twenty thousand dollars worth the damage. They argued back and forth and the tenants said forget it, keep the crap. He never heard from them again. He talked to the city and they told him that he needed to wait one more month before he could take their stuff out on the curb.
I and my brother went over there to clean out the apartment and believe me when I tell you – they gutted it. I mean they literally gutted it. They’d knocked out interior walls on each floor except the top. They’d pulled all the copper wiring out of the walls, to sell I guess. They had extension cords running up the stairs from the several outlets they’d wired into the breaker box. The ceiling fans were gone. I assume they sold them. The bathroom sink was gone. The copper water lines were gone. Their furniture was O’Sullivan brand particle board furniture and was all bubbled and from drinks being spilt on them. The mattresses were all stained, no frames, and no sheets. They just had a blanket thrown over them. The only thing we found that was halfway interesting was an old television in the third-floor bedroom. When I picked it up to carry it out to the dumpster, it was super light and shouldn’t have been. I tapped the screen and discovered they’d slipped a curved piece of plastic in where the screen was supposed to be and removed the guts. After removing the back, we found their ‘pharmacy’ and about a hundred dollars in singles. I pocketed the money and discarded the substances.
They even pulled down the kitchen cabinets that had been newly installed before renting to them and according to one of the guys across the street, (who came to pick through the trash we set out) they’d sold the kitchen cabinets three months after moving in. Everyone on the block was told that they’d bought the house and were slowly remodeling.
My brother was so ticked, he just put the house up for sale and sold it as is because he couldn’t afford to fix all the damage they had done.”
Her Excuse For The Carpet Burn Didn’t Hold Water
“I have a couple of good ones:
I got a call from my tenants saying there was a water leak, I arrived to find that the tap on the back of the house was pulled off the wall and leaking water everywhere, I asked the tenant what happened and she told me that it was just like that when she went outside. I turned the water off and while fixing the pipe I heard banging and saw the garden shed shaking like it was about to fall down.
I went over and had a look to find a pony ‘hidden’ in the shed. When I asked the tenant about it said, ‘Well, when I had it tied to the house, water started coming out’.
I had to take the bond of the same tenant as when I went in for final inspection, I found that the lounge room floor was covered in burns from a clothes iron. When she was told that she would lose her bond, her excuse was, ‘because you are kicking me out, I got stressed, and when I’m stressed, I drink. I just wanted to get back at you for kicking me out’.
So very classy…”
The Mother Was So Sweet At First…
“My brother had a family as a tenant in one of his houses. It was a recently renovated old Victorian home in a great area right on a river. It had a massive yard and was the perfect place to raise a family.
The tenant family of seemed super cool. And my brother is such a good fellow in that he really likes to help people out. And this family seemed like interesting and trustworthy people, so he even gave them a bit of a deal on their rent.
The mother took in children from abused homes and I guess she would foster troubled youths. She got a little something-something from the government for her troubles. But she was passionate about helping these kids. Mostly, children in their early to mid-teens. I remember there was a trans girl and a couple hard done street kids mixed in with her own kids, one of which was a newborn. Despite a few of them being from broken homes, they were all friendly. All in all, there were maybe a total of 6 or 7 in the household. They helped with yard upkeep and loved their newly adopted family.
They lived there for over a year. And my brother would regularly give them things. He got a new bbq one year and just gave them his older one which was only a year old. He would sometimes get music or movie tickets from his work and he’d give them to his tenants. He was just an all-around helpful guy and would check in on his tenants every couple of months.
Anyway, my brother fell on some hard times and due to whatever problems he found himself in, he was forced to sell one of his two properties. He gave the tenants the legally required three months notice plus an extra month just because he felt so bad and even went out of his way to share the names of some other landlords he trusted.
The family said they understand and there was no harm and no foul done. Then after moving out, my brother went to the property to find the upstairs bathroom flooded and seeping to the lower floor. There was trash scattered everywhere, holes in the wall, graffiti scribbled across the walls in giant sharpies saying, ‘forget you whiteboy’ and things of that nature. Kitchen cabinets were pulled from the wall and smashed, it truly looked like a bomb went off. There was complete, and utter destruction of his recently renovated property. But the worst was yet to come.
For the past few months that this family lived there, the mother of this group of destruction decided to throw her newborn’s excrement filled diapers in the basement. There were crap filled diaper bombs piled high, spread and smeared at the bottom of the stairway and along the walls. No courtesy bag. No tight burrito spirals. Just loosey goosey butt to stairwell poopie diapers. It was like a doo-doo-doomsday down there.
All in all, I think it all cost my brother around $70,000 and another four months to get the property ready for sale. He had taken loans from my parents and grandma and generally just hated himself for a while. He spoke to a lawyer from what I recall but was told for some reason insurance or landlord law related that he’d spend another arm and a leg going after someone who doesn’t have much money, to begin with.
Needless to say, she didn’t get her damage deposit back.”
They Moved Out So Quickly, The Landlords Got Suspicious
“This was at my parent’s place, maybe 12 years ago:
They rented out the house to what seemed like a nice family with both parents, kids, and stable jobs. They paid their rent on time and never caused any issues. After a year or so, my mom wanted to drop by to see how things were going. You need to give notice before an inspection, and we couldn’t get them on the phone, so we left a note on the door.
The next day, the guy showed up at our house and handed me a cheque for next month’s rent. He told me they were leaving, so long, goodbye. Apparently, they bought a new house in a much nicer neighborhood. My parents thought this was a little odd, so they went to see the rented house and that’s when they learned the truth.