These landlords made their tenant's lives living unliveable.
This Guy Was Cheating The Tenants And The Maid
“My landlord had a maid she used for 40 years that came to our house once a month. My roommates and I split the bill of $120 bucks and paid it directly to our landlord.
My roommate told the maid one day, ‘You are well worth the $120 we pay each month.’ It turns out the maid gave the landlord a considerable discount of $80 to clean our house and the landlord was pocketing the other $40 for about 8 months. This led to the maid quitting on the spot.
The landlord still stops by our house once a week to blame us for the maid quitting. She has also refused to honor any of the maintenance requests we put in. My roommates and I are very ready to move out come the summer.”
The Property Managers Tried To Squeeze $25,000 From Them
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“I subleased a room from my friend one summer while he did an internship. His three roommates also were out of town the entire summer but paid rent and their portion of utilities for the summer.
At the end of my sublease, I cleaned the house, moved my stuff out, and turned in my key. Three months later, I get served with a lawsuit for over $5,000, alleging excessive damages and cleaning fees. I sent them back a letter demanding an itemized list of all fees I was being sued for.
When I get the itemized listing, it’s absolutely stupid. For example, they’d charge me a $500 ‘chandelier cleaning charge’ to clean the dining room overhead light, then a $300 ‘chandelier maintenance fee,’ and then a $700 ‘chandelier replacement charge.’ $1500 to clean, maintain, and then throw away a chandelier? Nope.
They also obviously fluffed their expenses, charging me $25 to replace a lightbulb in the basement and charging me $750 for 2 hours of ‘lawn maintenance,’ which was the responsibility of the landlord in the lease anyways! It turns out they also filed a separate lawsuit against each of us, so they were suing us all for $25,000 total for what couldn’t have been more than $1,000 in expenses (covered by our security deposit).
Anyways, I work for the Housing Department of my city and sent them a response on my office letterhead saying that I refuse to pay for the damages and that they could come and get me if they wanted to try. I never got a response, but the suit was dropped and I promptly advised the city to deny them any future city contracts for what I alleged was extortion of a college student.
Get stuffed Jeanne, you cheap loser.”
You Do NOT Disobey Military Orders
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“While deployed, my wife remained at our home in Texas. The A/C broke in the middle of summer. They told her that the temperature wasn’t hot enough to constitute a repair. When she showed them pictures of the thermostat reading over 100 degrees indoors, they finally said that they would send a repairman but that I needed to be there because I was the primary name on the lease although she had power of attorney. I threatened to sue. The A/C was eventually Jerry-rigged (the repair guy told her that he was paid to do the bare minimum fix) near the end of summer.
Fast forward. I’m home, it’s getting hot again, and the A/C breaks again. Same story as before, claiming it wasn’t hot enough. This dragged on for awhile and I finally had orders to move to a new duty station. Gave them 30 days notice and moved out. They tried to tell me that I couldn’t leave the home with a broken air conditioner and they wouldn’t honor my military orders, I had to pay to fix the A/C, and I still wouldn’t get my deposit back. I once again threatened to sue and contacted the actual owner of the house. He was a cool dude living in New York and said he’d take care of it for me. He flew all the way to see me in Texas, fired the property managers, sued them himself, said I was actually the cleanest/most respectable tenet he’s had and eventually paid me double my deposit for my troubles. Nice guy.”
He Was Collecting Rent On A House He No Longer Owned!
“I never actually met him, but we nearly ended up taking him to court. We complained about a ton of broken things that he would never fix. When they did get fixed, it was by the unqualified worker that he hired from the Home Depot parking lot (no offense to those guys, but they didn’t fix our roof correctly).
Being college kids, we go to the free legal council our university offered, hoping we had some options to get things fixed. The lawyer found out that the house we were renting had been foreclosed on 2 months prior and the bank owned it now. Extremely ticked off, we decided to stop paying rent to this guy while we got our things in order (we never did get our two months rent back from when he didn’t own the house). About 6 weeks later, he comes by the house furious that we hadn’t paid rent in over a month. My roommate simply said, ‘We aren’t paying you anymore, get the heck off this property.’ This ticked him off even more and he started threatening my roommate until my roommate said, ‘We know you don’t own this place anymore and we are going to sue you for the money you stole from us.’ He shut up at this point and left, never to be heard from again. We didn’t sue him because each of us were only out like $600 dollars (rent was stupid cheap for 4 college kids in a big city).
We made a deal with the bank to pay them the same rent we had been paying in order to stay until graduation in May. We were also responsible for cleaning up the yard and they would get someone out there to fix a few big issues (roof and plumbing) since they were going to sell the house anyway. We held up our end and enjoyed our last few months of college without a cruddy landlord.”
There Were Two Families In The Apartment — One Human, One Squirrel
“When I was a kid, our slumlord refused to fix anything that broke in our house or do any preventative maintenance. The house had already had an electrical fire from a leaky upstairs bathroom, but he refused to fix any further leaks.
When I was about 13, a family of squirrels moved in to the space between the ceiling & roof in my room. I could hear them scratching and running all the time. They eventually scratched through the ceiling and left a few areas with small holes. I was always afraid they would drop into my room and attack.
Then, my ceiling started leaking when it rained, first in just one area and then gradually across the entire beam that ran across the ceiling. We set up buckets and I would fall asleep to the music of raindrops hitting different containers. The sound of water hitting carpet would wake me up in a panic and I’d have to find another bucket to catch the new drips.
One night while I was staying with a friend, the entire ceiling collapsed directly over my bed. All of the soaking wet sheetrock (drywall?) landed on my bed, desk, etc. And the entire family of squirrels was released into my room. They hid in my closet, under the bed, everywhere, and it took three days to get them all out.
That stupid landlord took another week before sending someone in to ‘fix’ it, and even then, it was only his son, who had zero experience/skill fixing anything.”
They Tried To Call The Power Company’s Bluff!
“It was an apartment complex, but this one stands out still.
They didn’t pay the power.
Not, ‘they forgot to pay the power.’ Not, ‘they were in financial trouble.’ They just wanted to see if they could call the power company’s bluff.
The power company killed and locked half the breakers in every building.
I dunno if you’ve ever seen a riot take shape, but try cutting off the AC and refrigeration for a few dozen Alabamians in the middle of June in a heat wave.”
She Was Judging Him For Having His Medication
“I used to get medication shipped to me. It was a self-administered shot with a spring-loaded needle casing. I had a safe disposal method, etc, all set up. It was a medical issue.
Well, the little coolers of medicine each month went to the main office of my cruddy apartment building. For the first year, everything was fine, but then my building was sold to a new company and we got a new weirdo running the place.
The first time my meds got shipped to me, I went down to get it from the office like always. First off, there is a massive sticker that said, ‘Refrigerate upon delivery.’ The previous people always just popped it into the fridge that was set up in the office for me. This woman did not. She left it in the sweltering back room instead. Rude and inconsiderate, but I could deal with it.
But then, when I asked for the meds, she did the thing where she mimed like she was handing it to me and then pulled it back when I reached for the box. She then asked me, ‘Are these needles? Are you having needles delivered?’
I was like, ‘That’s not any of your business. Give me my medication.’
She kept holding on to it and said: ‘Well, some of the neighbors are concerned because needles usually mean illegal substances…’
You freak, my neighbors have never seen my needles and even if they did, you can’t actually see the needle part because it’s all encased in a spring-loaded tube. There is no way my ‘neighbors are concerned’ about this, they have no clue that this is something I need.
I told her again that it wasn’t any of her business. She finally gave me the box, but she gave me the stink eye every time I received my medication after that. Theresa, you’re a nosy freak, you know that?”
There Were ‘Palm Sized Clumps’ Of Ants All Over…Enough Said
“Lived overseas, housing company managed multiple ‘landlord’ properties. I had multiple issues with them.
First incident, was that we noticed ants started making their way into the house. But, instead of normal places, they were on the ceiling, in clumps. Thousands of them, and they weren’t interested in food, they just were in palm-sized clumps along the edges of the ceiling. We called housing several times, to which one came out to look at them and say ‘sorry this is normal’ and didn’t want to do anything about it. They finally bought us special traps that helped.
The second and final time before we moved houses, I somehow pulled our oven door off, twice. The outer piece with the handle came away from the inner piece that faces the food. Once they drilled the door back together, the second time they just put it out of commission, and said I would have to wait until the owners of the home came over (we were in Japan, they lived in the US) and bought a new one. We were looking at almost two months until they would return. We complained that it was ridiculous to pay rent and not have a working oven for that long. The company then said instead we could buy an oven ourselves and then they would pay us back.
In the end, we complained so much about that house and what the company wasn’t helping us with, nor the owners, so they allowed us to move into a different house owned by the loveliest guy who came by once a month and did yard trimming for us.”
This Creep Used To Enter Their House When They Weren’t Even There…
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“They seemed like the nicest couple in the world when we first rented the place, they even invited us to dinner and we had a great time. About three months in we found out that they argue quite loudly and curse like truckers, not that big of a deal. Then my wife stepped on a piece of blue glass that was on our kitchen floor (we didn’t own any blue glasses).
Sure as heck I remembered that first dinner: they had blue glasses on the table. I set up a camera in the living room and over the next week caught this guy in our apartment when we weren’t home.
This freak was going through our dressers and playing with my wife’s underwear, caught him red-handed and gave him a nice beating and called the cops.
He tried playing it off like he smelt smoke and wanted to investigate, then I played back the previous weeks videos of him visiting on 3 separate occasions.
They locked him up, we found a new place really fast and never looked back.”
That Gas Cooker Could Have Killed Everyone In The Building
“I moved into a tiny studio apartment that was basically a single room with a sink in the cupboard, a bed, gas cooker from the 1980s, and a table. The room was in a large house with six other one-room apartments.
For the first couple of nights, I smelt some hints of gas but assumed it was just my imagination since I have a really crappy sense of smell.
I woke up in the middle of the night one night, to a VERY powerful smell of gas which seemed to be coming from the bottom of the cooker. I bolted out of bed, turned off the gas cut-off valve to my room, and sat on the garden wall at about 1 am trying to phone the landlord’s emergency contact number. His phone wasn’t turned on. I left a bunch of messages explaining the situation. In the end, I called the gas leak phone line, who sent out an engineer straight away. The dude disconnected the main gas line to the house since he was still reading a drop in pressure in the boiler. I wrote notes explaining why the gas was turned off (didn’t want to wake up my new neighbors) and posted them under the doors of the other flats and went back to bed.
I woke up at 7 am the next morning to pounding on my door and shouting. The landlord was outside, DEMANDING to know why I had turned off the gas to the house, screaming that it might be days before it could be reconnected and that it would mean seven tenants without hot water or cooking facilities. I demanded to know why the heck his ‘Emergency contact number’ didn’t work. He responded with, ‘I have young kids at home. If people phoned that number after 9 pm, it would wake them up, so I turn it off.’ I. Was. Freaking. Seething with rage. Glad to know emergencies only happen during waking hours.
The gas technician arrived, went to the boiler, then asked the Landlord to come down and see. They spent about twenty minutes there before the landlord came back up and mumbled some crap about how I was right to call the gas company to disconnect the house. Without explanation, he got every tenant a new electric cooker that afternoon; I’m guessing the thing had been leaking for ages.
Moron.”
A Literal Sea Of Cockroaches
“This was more recent when my SO and I were looking for a place together. We found a first floor one bedroom that my gut said ‘no’ about but we had been looking for close to 3 months and just wanted the search to be over. We sign the lease, get the keys, start moving my boxes of stuff to be moved in.
Surprise, lost! You got roaches The German kind, because get wrecked. These landlords were also family; a husband and wife with a son who acted as the liaison because the parents were not native English speakers. Yeah they could speak and understand English but not as well as their adult son. We called the son about the infestation. ‘Oh yeah haha, this is a city so there are roaches’ he said cheerfully.
I cussed him out. Because this was not a roach or two, but thousands. Everywhere. The molding on the ceiling was caked with roach filth. You don’t notice it during the walkthrough when the lights are on and people stomping about but upon our inspection it was evident that the roaches had been there for a long time. It was a couple who were there for 2 years before us and they had been living in this filth.
What occurred was 6 days of terrible experiences. At one point, the wife called me at 9:30pm, hysterical, because ‘why was I doing?’ ‘why was I such an awful person?’ For breaking the lease and moving out of their roach motel. Lots of screaming involved. I essentially told them to get lost for knowingly letting us move into their disgusting place.
We broke the lease and the landlords came over to collect the keys. Over the 6 days my boyfriend and I were there, we did not clean up a single roach after we killed them out. Hundreds of roach bodies on the floors. The husband took a look-see, shrugged, and said ‘It’s not that bad.’
What disgusts me most of all is in both situations, the landlords had children. I asked both sets of landlords, ‘how would you feel about your daughter living in these conditions?’ to which they could not answer. I despise slumlords. Most operate without a license and all their properties are gross biohazards.”
There Are Some Good Landlords Out There
“I’ve had bad luck with landlords for most of my life, but I just want to tell my story about my AMAZING landlord. Because she might be the only one out there.
I moved into my place last year, and had just settled in. I think it was a week. Anyway, I am home alone and watching a crazy storm happening out of my living room window thinking that some flash flooding would happen. Then I hear the water. It was flooding in under my door. The rain came in so hard the drain outside my door (at the bottom of 6 steps) couldn’t keep up with all the water and debris flying around.
My kitchen and living room flooded within minutes of the rain starting. I was able to get it mostly stopped by using every towel and sheet in my apartment to block the door. All the while trying to get ahold of my roommate and significant other but they were both at parties and wasted. I was trapped and alone.
Roommate got ahold of Landlord who had literally just hopped off a plane 30 minutes before the call. She came rushing over and just took over. She and her husband bailed water, cleaned the whole place and spent the whole night setting up pumps, dams. She had me go pour myself a strong drink and just relax.
They were out while waves of storms rolled in and threaten to flood the place again.
After we were all clear that night they went home, slept a couple of hours and were back to make sure this would never happen again.
This had been pretty traumatic to me as a couple of years previous, our city had a huge flood and I had been evacuated for over a week, but was one of the lucky people that didn’t lose anything in a neighborhood where a lot of people lost everything.
I am moving in a month and I am bummed that this awesome woman will not be my landlord anymore.”
This Guy Was Obsessed With Chem Trails
“Ceiling was leaking and called the landlord. He comes over with a ladder, gloves, a single shingle (that rhymes), and a bucket of roofing cement. Climbs up there to replace the shingle that flew off during a storm and the whole time he is telling me that the airplanes in the sky are controlling our minds with the chemicals they are raining down upon us. He puts the gloves on and dives his hand into the roofing cement. Spreads it on the roof with his hands and lays down the shingle. Once he was done, while still on the roof, he walks over to the edge next to the ladder and throws the gloves in my lawn. Keep in mind the gloves still covered in roofing cement. Then he gets down off of the ladder, packs it up and goes to walk away. As he is walking away he hits the back of my car with the ladder and leaves the gloves in my yard.”
Apparently, Their Breath Was Bad For The House
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“Lived in a cruddy 2 bedroom apartment with no ventilation. It was more like a glorified shoe-box than a house. One day I get mail from the landlord. She wrote a letter saying that she was walking past the property the other day and they noticed mildew on the corner of the front window. The letter said that this was really bad for the house and we had to get rid of it. This was a little weird and pedantic, but okay, whatever, I’ll clean it.
But the letter went on to say that we should take steps to prevent it from coming back. The letter included a list of things that caused mildew and recommend that we avoid doing things that can cause mildew. Get to the last item on the list: ‘Breathing’
Breathing can cause mildew. The landlord tried to ask me to stop breathing in my apartment.”
A Homophobic Control Freak That Forced Herself On Their Property
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“Lived in a house with, among other flatmates, a lovely young gay man whose mother owned the house and was a crazy evangelical Christian maniac. She didn’t live there but came round whenever she wanted in the guise of visiting her son even when he wasn’t around (in my country it is illegal for landlords to enter the house without giving all tenants 48 hours notice, unless there’s a genuine emergency). She pressured him and put her son down constantly because of his orientation. She would leave incredibly offensive and homophobic ‘reading material’ on the hallway table mixed in with his mail and threatened to disown him if he went to a real, accredited university instead of a useless indoctrination center disguised as a tertiary institute.
She insisted on decorating the house herself, complete with Christian platitudes implying that only Christians are worthwhile people (am atheist – she knew this from the beginning, I think she may have dreamed of converting the poor ignorant atheist) and an entire bookshelf filled with such gems as guides on how to be a good Christian wife (to be fair, these had solid entertainment value).
She would come round at 6am and mow the lawns in her bra. I’d get up to make a coffee and she’d yell about how I left a book or a jersey or whatever in MY living room – I’m talking a single personal item, not a big mess. If I came home in the morning after a night out and she was around, she would make snarky comments implying I was a loose woman.
When she decided the kitchen wasn’t clean enough (again, she didn’t live there and this was not a designated flat inspection so she had no right to say a darn thing) she wrote an angry note in ALL CAPS in permanent marker on the wall. It was so big she must have stood on a chair to write the top couple of lines.
She decided me and my friends drank too much, so she posted an AA pamphlet on the toilet door and circled every reference to God or religion.
She was generally a nasty, toxic person to be around who felt the need to control everyone around her. She had no leg to stand on to make us change, because we weren’t doing anything to damage the property and it was my home, NOT hers. So she just made everyone around her miserable instead.
When I moved out, she started only letting rooms to Christian international students, which was probably better for everyone involved. Except I am 99%sure she was exploiting and controlling the new tenants thanks to their ignorance of our tenancy laws.”