Paying rent sucks, but having to deal with a creepy or strict landlord is almost worse! These tenants dish on the shadiest things they've caught their landlord doing.
Showing Some Skin

“He was this bearded British dude who always wore hideous knitted sweaters. He was nice enough if you ignored the fact that he was a total pervert. He lived in an apartment in the building next door and kept the debit/credit machine on a spot on his desk that you had to lean over to reach, and as a result, your chest would dangle as close to his face as possible. The girls in my building would all go pay rent together because no one wanted to be alone with him.
He was very touchy and would creep up and tickle you. It wasn’t uncommon to wake up and find him in your room (all of the units were just one room) ‘inspecting’ something. We’d find him asleep on the couch in the front hall and stuff and the people who lived in his buildings said he’d sometimes take baths in other people’s bathrooms.
The building was lived in mainly by people who didn’t plan on staying for long so it was part of the rental agreement that you couldn’t live there for more than a year but it was common knowledge that if you were a girl who approached him while wearing something revealing you could get an extension. I really liked the place despite him so I used that method and got 14 months. One girl purposely answered the door to him in her underwear and got 16 months.”
Forget Landlords, These People Are Stalkers!

“My worst landlord story? We had been renting an apartment for about seven years and had a couple of rent increases but it was always just before or just after an upgrade so we didn’t mind. The rental agency was great and responsive UNTIL the owner of the building sold it to some crazy people who wanted to do their own management.
We had already put in notice that we were going to be moving out because we had just bought a new house, and the notice was given to the old rental company a few days before the old owner sold to the new owner of the building. Because we had been renting for so long we were just on a month-to-month arrangement. They wanted us to sign another lease. We were already paid through our departure date so that made no sense. The woman was obviously determined on getting us out of there. She came by every morning and walked around the apartments looking inside and then opening them, claiming ‘Oh I keep forgetting which ones are the empty ones.’ That was a complete lie as all of them were occupied. She had her child peeing on the walkway outside my apartment one morning and then tried to say the stench was bad and I wasn’t cleaning up after my pet. I thought maybe my neighbor’s dog had peed outside my apartment, but it was a puppy and very rambunctious so sometimes it just got excited. I didn’t have a pet, but we will get to how she (the landlord) was caught in her own lie.
I came home one evening to see her sneaking out my back door. I went around the side of the building where I knew she would come out and asked what she was doing or what she was looking for. She said ‘Oh, I was just on your back porch. I didn’t go inside. ‘ I told her I had just pulled up in the parking lot, why would she be telling me she didn’t go inside. I told her ‘let’s go look at the back door.’ It was ajar and I have those slide locks that I lock every single day before I go to work. The slide was undone.
About a week before we were moving out, we had a friend come and help us move some items. He and my husband were moving a dresser and my husband tripped down the last step and the dresser careened into the wall, knocking a huge hole. Our friend was a contractor so was planning to come by a couple of days later and fix the hole. I got to work and about five minutes after I got there, she called me and said she would be deducting the cost to fix the hole from our deposit.
There was no way she could have known unless she went into the apartment just after I left. I asked her how she even knew about the hole and she started stammering. She said she had evidence that I could not refute and emailed me a video. I was floored. Somehow she had a video from inside my apartment showing the hole. She shouldn’t have been there anyhow without notice to me, with no emergency, but I asked how she got the video and she admitted that she had gone inside. I showed her my previous lease and statutes from state landlord-tenant law that said what she had done was not permissible. She said that ‘where she came from’ it was usual to put security measures in properties. I told her I ‘appreciated her concerns’ but there would be a problem if I found a camera in my house. She got so red in the face I thought she would burst. I told her she needed to leave immediately, and she said she was calling the police. I told her that was great because then they could search my house for her camera. They arrived about 15 minutes later. I told them I suspected someone had been in my apartment without permission. She contended she was permitted to be there since she was the landlord. I told them she had planted a camera somewhere and was spying on us. They found the THREE cameras and took them in as evidence of a stalking complaint.
They caught her coming into my house no less than 20 times in two weeks and looking through my belongings. One caught her kicking my neighbor’s dog.
She ended up getting charges for harassment, stalking, and animal cruelty.
Her husband tried to keep up the heat by threatening us to keep the deposit. He tried to file eviction papers, but we were already moving.
I decided just to go along with his little game. I went to court and showed our notice given to the previous rental company by certified mail, my closing documents for the purchase of our new home, videos of us moving in to the new house, videos of every single moment of our moving out of the old place, photographs of every room and everything we cleaned (over 400 pictures that I took of every corner, baseboard, cabinet, corners of the back porch, et cetera) receipts for the drywall patch where our friend fixed it, receipts for the paint where we repaired any scuffs, the videos of his wife going into our house as part of the official police report. Not only did we NOT have to forfeit our deposit, but we also got damages and a restraining order against them. It was glorious.”
He Had A Smile Like Hannibal Lector

“A crazy cat lady without cats describes her best. I rented the first floor apartment in her house. The doorbells and mailboxes were behind a large metal gate on the driveway to the garage… and it was always locked. People could not ring and mail could not get delivered. I got a cheap doorbell from Amazon and thought that would solve it. Landlady secretly stole the battery from it at night and told me the mailman probably did it. (The mailman was more annoyed than anyone that he couldn’t reach the mailbox, or get anyone to open the gate. He yelled to me from the parking lot if he had mail for me.) After two months, and me starting to look for a new place, landlady informed me she had gone through her notes of who visited me, when, and how long people stayed, and it was ‘too hectic’ for her to keep track. (I was the only tenant and usually away for work all day. My only visitors were there on weekends).
Due to that, she had installed a security camera right outside my door. She also went through my trash, and if a glass had accidentally found its way into the regular kitchen trash, it would stand on my stairs (filthy as it was), with a note to please put glass in the container across the street.
After three months, I left in a hurry and moved to a place a few streets away. The landlord here was ~1000 years old, nearly blind (according to himself), and he fancied himself a handyman. He ‘repaired’ a leaking bathroom sink after breaking into my apartment by removing all the pipes in the bathroom and leaving it like that for 3 days ‘to get spare parts’. The bathroom was under water, and the water to the kitchen had been turned off.
After that, I changed the locks and asked him to not ‘repair’ things that were not broken, and wait for me to come home if he needed to check something. The only reason I had caught him in the bathroom mess was someone giving me a ride home from work, so I arrived 30 minutes earlier than usual. The landlord openly admitted he thought I wouldn’t be home that early. After this little fallout, I never caught him in my apartment again… but 2 weeks later, he replaced all locks in the house, including mine.
Having access again, he moved furniture around (usually for access to radiators, pipes and other things to ‘repair’) when I wasn’t at home. I kept locking doors in the apartment, except for the living room and kitchen, just to find insane amounts of huge, slow flies in there. Like, hundreds. Called pest control, they could not find the source. I found it a few months after moving out: landlord, in a sports fishing store, buying bait, smiling at me like Hannibal Lector.”
Just The Absolutely Worst Kind Of Person

“My two friends and I were moving into a house together. Before we moved in, the landlord wanted to meet us to sign the paperwork, etc. He set up a meeting for 3:30 at a Golden Corral about 25 miles away from the rental property. We were already pretty annoyed at having to take off work to be there and having to drive so far.
One of my roommates is black, and he showed up to the meeting about 10 minutes before myself and the other roommate did. He entered the restaurant, told the hostess he was looking for the table with Ward (the landlord’s name) and was directed to the table. He introduced himself to the landlord and took a seat. The landlord immediately excused himself to go to the bathroom, then went and sat in his car until I showed up. When I did and saw him in the car (I had met him previously), he was quite upset that we didn’t all show up together and kept saying, ‘Was I just supposed to sit there with a person like that until you arrived?’
He then spent the rest of the meeting making thinly veiled prejudiced comments towards my black roommate. Things like, ‘Are you moving from an apartment? I don’t want you bringing roaches and gangs with you.’
To cap it off, when we were leaving, he spent about five minutes telling the teenage hostess how beautiful she is, and that he got her schedule from the manager so he will be sure to be there every day she is.
So not only was he a bigot but he was openly hitting on a child. What a piece of work.”
The Craziest Landlord In Louisiana

“I had the craziest landlord ever out in Louisiana.
She inspected the apartments monthly and expected everything to be perfectly clean. You would get an eviction notice if your stove was not free of any kind of grease or debris. She also lived on the property so she was nosy about everything people were doing.
We all had balconies but we were not permitted to bring out chairs and sit on them. I didn’t know about this rule until I came out one morning and noticed my chair was missing. I found it down by her office. I guess that was my punishment.
We were, of course, required to clean up after our pets however, the landlord kept a stray cat portion of the property. There were over 35 cats that wandered the property, would poop everywhere, throw up, and fight all night. It was nothing new to walk outside of our door and find a pile of poop, cat hair, or throw up. She would leave dishes of food in just about every corner of the property, and in Louisiana, it’s very hot with a lot of flies so you can imagine what that was like.I could never understand why she was such a clean freak but yet let these cats poop all over the community. I even tried to call the city about it and they said there was nothing they could do. The owner of the property could not be found because Louisiana’s process is practically impossible.
When we moved out I did not do a final cleaning on purpose. If she’s not going to clean up after her cat I’m not going to clean up after myself. Although, while we live there I kept it very clean.”
Crazy Old Mr. Miller

“Okay. I have one.
I rented a 500acre ranch with an old ranch house from a 95-year-old man. He lived in town (a small hill country town in Texas) where his live-in nurses cared for him, and the ranch was 5 min outside of town.
I was very thankful because the ranch was really pretty and peaceful and the rent was only $400 a month. The house had four large porches and the rooms were huge; lucking into that place is still a highlight of my life.
I was in my 30’s and I visited the owner in town to show him pictures of what I was doing to the house. I was allowed to do anything as long as it was an improvement. I planted a garden, some trees, laid slate tile (blue and cream 18′ tiles, checkerboard pattern), etc
I seriously thought we had become friends, like grandpa-style, because he acted so dang happy to see me. My boyfriend and I would take him meals from Whataburger, we took him to eat in town, our families sang xmas carols to him, etc. This man was old but he had full use of his facilities.
So when I moved out and went to tell him goodbye…..it was sad for me. I was almost crying.
That man looked me straight in the eye and seriously said ‘I gotta have ya. At least once. I want to make love to you.’
You can not believe how shocked I was. The man was 98 by then. ‘Mr.Oldie!! I have a boyfriend!’
I walked straight out the front door. His nurse was sitting there outside having a ciggie.
‘I… I can’t believe what just happened…I can’t even say it…I’m not positive it could be true…’
She said ‘Oh no, did he try to put the moves on you,?!’
Of course, I said ‘Yes?’
Then she told me that every time people came to visit she had to wrestle with him to put his pants on. And that part of her duties was to return the various adult toys he ordered.
And that was the last time I ever saw old Mr. Miller.”
They Got The Last Laugh On These Landladies

“I lived in a very nice boarding house in Neutral Bay Sydney Australia. It had a lot of rooms, occupied mostly by young adults from the bush. It had great views of the harbor, a good shared kitchen and lounge areas, and the rooms themselves were pretty clean, albeit dated. I rented a great room and also a garage for my car. I’d also got a really good friend a room there, his name was Mark.
The downside was the two sneaky landlady’s, they were sisters and probably in their late 50’s. Several times I entered my room to find things had moved slightly. A couple of times I left a heater on in my room during the day in winter and was asked to turn it off when I was out, how did they know it was on?
After living there for about a year I went to one of the sisters to pay my rent. We had rent books which they signed when we paid. I hand over the money and rent the book and she says she doesn’t have a pen and will sign it later.
The next day I’m in the lounge room and the other sister asks me for the rent, I tell her I paid it to her sister and she asks to see my rent book, I think you can see where this is going. Of course, it’s not signed and when she checks with her sister she denies I paid her. I really liked living there but this is just a blatant rip-off.
I tell Mark and he’s really ticked off and that’s that. A couple of days later Mark says his brother has a couple of spare rooms in his house and if I want to go, I know the house and it’s a great place, so yeah.
The sisters had been hounding me for the rent every day and I was trying to avoid them so Mark took my stuff and put it in my car, lots of trips as I had so much junk back then. At midnight on a Wednesday, we jumped in my car and bolted.
As we’re driving away Mark tells me he left them a present, I say what? He says he put rotting prawn heads in the vents of his room, a lot of prawn heads!
I heard from one of the residents that Mark and I were not very popular and that the prawn smell had made his room unrentable.
This all happened over 30 years ago, even now I think what he did was heavy-handed, but what a great friend”
Never A Dull Moment Under This Roof

“Oh ho boy, buckle up kiddos this is a heck of a wild ride.
So, I moved into my first apartment with my then-fiance literally a week after we graduated. Took a while to find a place that’d take two younguns with no prior renting history, and two Kitty cats (even if they were pure bundles of love and purrs). Finally we did, which, in retrospect probably should’ve been a red flag. Anywho, we meet with the landlady, who seems pretty chill, has a little kid who’s super cute, maybe 3-4 years old, and this horrendous mostly-hairless dog that looked pretty much like a hairy b-hole. I don’t mean that the dog looked like a goblin. Like his skin was gross, puckered butthole material.
We move in, she’s super nice, the dog isn’t too yappy and the building is made of literally poured concrete. No sound from upstairs or the landlady’s place. Really nice. Then…comes the second week.
Now, I’m not one to judge, kiddos can be a bit of a pain. Parenting is tough right? Well…. Remember how I mentioned solid concrete walls and the nice and quiet apartment? Suddenly I hear the kid SCREAMING. And then I hear HER start screaming. ‘LANDLADYS CHILD GET YOUR BUTT BACK IN THE BATH YOU ARE SOAKING THE ENTIRE APARTMENT!!’. Hey man, I get it. Soaked apartment, wet kiddo, screaming, running around.
Except this was FAR from the last time. It was loud enough and frequent enough to make us wonder if we need to get CPS involved. But we’re young, new tenants, have no evidence besides the screaming, and don’t really know what is all involved in that. So we kinda keep an ear out for anything breaking, or whatever.
Three months of this, kid screaming at Mom, mom screaming at kid we’re sitting with the window open and hear mom tell the kid, ‘come back, we have to go!’ The kid straight up yells back, ‘No, I will f** KILL you, mom!’ This child is 3-4 years old and correctly using this level of cursing. My fiance and I are slack jawed. And predictably she starts screaming, he starts screaming yada yada yada.
I really REALLY wish that was the end of it.
My (at this point) wife and I decide that we should move to a two-bedroom apartment. As luck would have it, the diagonally-upstairs neighbour is moving out of a two-bedroom house! So we jump on it. Get the papers signed and start moving our stuff out. Landlady says she’ll give us $100 of the first month’s rent if we finish cleaning the place. We’ve been in there and that’s no big deal. She’s really happy we’re moving up there because now her brother and his girlfriend can move into our old place. We’re moving up, getting stuff sorted and it’s the day before her brother is supposed to move in. My wife and I both head off to work, planning to finish up when we get home and have it all sorted by morning so they can move in. I get a call at work from the landlady SCREAMING about how the apartment isn’t ready.
I tell her, ‘You said I had until tomorrow morning, we’ve got to vacuum and finish moving the things left in the kitchen upstairs.’ I’ve been surprisingly mature about it since I was 18ish and this 30-something was screaming at me. Apparently she told her brother he could move in that day and so he was there getting ready to move stuff in and the floors are still kinda messed up. Nothing that our vacuum couldn’t fix up in 20 minutes. I tried telling her that she said he wasn’t moving in till the morning and neither my wife nor myself would be leaving work (it was about 11:30 am at this point). She screams for a bit, then hangs up. I get an angry text saying that our carpet effed up her vacuum and she’s going to make us pay for a new one.
When we get home, she’s at the door ready to start yelling. We’re really not interested, just wanted to finish cleaning, moving the last few things and be done with it. As I’m trying to carry something out the door, she waltzed through the front door with the kid on her hip, blocking me from leaving. She starts screaming at me, cursing heavily, with her child literally on her hip. I just stand still and calmly reiterate that she said we had to tomorrow, we’d have it done tonight etc etc but she’s freaking the heck out. At one point I’m like, ‘can you put the kiddo back in your place, he really doesn’t need to hear this.’ Big mistake. More yelling, cursing, threats of eviction. Eventually we get all our stuff out, place cleaned, and settled in our new place. Things are a bit tense in the hallways when we see each other but eventually things mellow out. For two months.
In the middle of the night there are suddenly screaming voices, breaking windows and a ton more incoherent screaming coming from below us. My wife and I slept as heavy as the dead but this rukkus they were kicking up…. Canada could’ve heard it. I’m convinced there’s a robbery taking place so I grab my weapon (spoiler: I’m from the US), and head out of the bedroom, clearing our apartment before venturing outside. I call out to the neighbours, and Nigel pops his head out, white as a baby albino rhino’s butt. I tell him to go inside, lock the door, and don’t open it for anyone except me.
I clear the hallway, and carefully make my way to the stairwell, clearing down and up quickly before heading down. As I’m peeking through the door right outside of the landlady’s place I hear the police coming. Now, I can legally carry the weapon I had but I didn’t really feel like having THAT conversation at 2-3 am. I legged it back upstairs, knocked to let baby-albino-rhino-butt Nigel know that the cops are here now.
The next morning, the brother comes and thanks me and my wife for calling the cops. We explain we didn’t, and he thought that we called once the landlady threw her brother’s girlfriend through the sliding glass door.
She was soon evicted.”
Ah Yes! That Should Do The Trick

“The house I lived in last year was in a constant state of disrepair, partly from the strain of having 11 people in, and partly because of the mismanagement of the property owners.
When a shower stopped working, I walked into my room one day to find a very tiny elderly Chinese man who spoke absolutely no English (and I speak no Chinese) attempting to patch a two-by-three-foot, irregular hole in the drywall. He had apparently cut it open to access some plumbing but didn’t find what he wanted. I ended up covering it with a poster and hoping they wouldn’t come back.
When the roof started leaking over the winter causing water damage in my closet, the solution was to have a crew (including the same man that cut the hole in my wall) nail plywood over the top of a section of the roof and shingle it. It took them three weeks.
Our heater also stopped working in November. It was an oil furnace that ran out of fuel despite being purportedly filled in September (which we paid for). It never actually started working properly again, so it was a rough winter.
The landlord also refused to get a plumber to fix our kitchen sink, which was completely unusable for three months because of some fault that was never explained to us. I suspect one of my roommates clogged it with his nasty cooking.
Midway through the lease, our actual property manager (effectively the landlord, the company’s ‘liaison’) was arrested for fraud and fired. We went through two temporary agents before getting a new one, who immediately ignored us and every request we submitted. At least the fraud guy was nice.”
That’s Why You Read Reviews!

“A few friends and I rented a lousy apartment in downtown Iowa City from a company that owns most of the rental properties in the city whether it be through the company we rented from or one of their sister companies. We failed to read any reviews on the company until after we found out how crooked they are. Come to find out, they’re in a lawsuit almost every year, and are so big that they can push their customers around and get what they want because who else are people going to rent from? They don’t have competition. Oh and their office is open from 10 am-4 pm four days a week.
Despite having turned inaccurate damage reports prior to moving in, they still charged us for said damages. We were charged over $200 to replace six functioning batteries in the fire alarms. Another $150 or so went to replacing the hollow core front door with a hairline crack between the deadbolt and the door latch (taught us to look at the frickin’ doors before moving in somewhere). They replaced all four sets of blinds in the bedrooms. Blinds they charged us $60 each to replace. Blinds we could have gotten at Walmart for under $20 apiece.
Our biggest gripe with this company was how they worded their lease agreement. When you read it at first (all of us tenants AND our parents read it), they make it sound like you are paying for 12 months on a year lease (makes sense, right?), but you are actually going to end up paying 13 months of rent (don’t ask me to explain because I still don’t understand it). We ended up telling them to keep our deposit to cover the rogue 13th month, we sent them a check for the remaining balance for the damages, etc., and washed our hands of the entire thing.”