Sunday, August 2, 2020

Landlord Tries To Rip Tenant Off, Ends Up Paying Over $6.5K


We love a good revenge tale of a shady, cheap landlord getting it in the end. In this case, the landlord tried to rip the tenant off for $400, and they end up having to pay over $6K. Now that is what I'm talking about. 

1.

Text - r/ProRevenge u/SnooOwls1775 • 6d + Join 1 1 Landlord tries to rip me off for £400, ends up having to pay me over £6.5k Last year I moved out of a house that I had rented for 5 years with no problems. I always had a good relationship with the landlord. There are 2 relevant bits of background to this story: 1. In the UK, where I live, the standard practice when renting a house is to sign a tenancy agreement for a year. At the end of the year, if you want to stay in the house and the landlor

2.

Text - notice. Alternatively you can sign a new 1-year tenancy agreement each year, which isn't really necessary but some landlords want it. My landlord wanted me to sign a new tenancy agreement each year - fine, whatever. So, since I rented the house for 5 years, there were 5 tenancy agreements in total. 2. By law the landlord was required to protect my security deposit. That meant that she had to put it into a special kind of account within 30 days of receiving it. The tenant then receives log

3.

Text - So, l'd been living in the house for almost 5 years and I gave notice to end the tenancy, because I was buying a house. After l'd given notice, the landlord emailed me to ask if I was planning to hire a gardener to ensure that the garden would be returned to the (pretty manicured) state it was in when I moved in. I thought this was strange, because my tenancy agreement explicitly forbade me from doing the sorts of things in the garden that would have been necessary to maintain its origina

4.

Text - Ireplied to the landlord's email about the garden. I quoted the part of the tenancy agreement that forbade me from doing certain things in the garden, and expressed my confusion. I asked her to clarify what her expectations were about the state of the garden, given what it said in the tenancy agreement. She didn't reply, but a couple of weeks later, I received an email from her husband/boyfriend telling me that the landlord was anxious about the garden and I should ensure that it is retur

5.

Text - Without any guidance about the garden, I just did my best with it. My boyfriend, who is an experienced gardener, did the work here - I asked him just to do whatever he thought was best. He cut back bushes and cleared loads of stuff - I spent a few hundred £££ on having garden waste removed. I knew that technically I did not need to do that, but wanted to do what I could to keep relations good between me and the landlord.

6.

Text - I moved out, the tenancy ended, and after not hearing anything from the landlord for a couple of weeks, and not having my deposit back, I emailed the landlord to ask about the deposit. Having ignored my queries about the garden before the end of the tenancy, she chose this moment to announce that she wanted to deduct £400 from my deposit to carry out work on the garden. There followed a really time-wasting back-and- forth by email in which I pointed out that the terms of the tenancy agree

7.

Text - Meanwhile, I could not log into the account where my deposit was being held. I contacted the company and it turned out that my landlord had 'accidentally' input my email address incorrectly when registering the deposit .. which I found very strange, because she had emailed me successfully dozens of times throughout the time I was living in the house, so she definitely knew my email address. Without being able to log in, I was unable to officially dispute any deductions she was proposing.

8.

Text - I had a long back-and-forth with the deposit company, after which I finally gained access to my deposit account. When I got into it, I looked at the info and noticed that the landlord had not protected my deposit until the day after I gave her notice to end the tenancy. That meant she protected my deposit well after the 30- day deadline by which she was supposed to do it by law. There are penalties for landlords that fail to comply with the laws around tenancy deposits: if they break the

9.

Text - I emailed the landlady a bit more firmly than I had previously (things had been cordial but increasingly frosty). I pointed out that she could not make any deductions from my deposit because she had not complied with the law. She responded by sending me quite a tantrummy, insulting email and authorising the return of my full deposit. So, yay for the deposit back, but what a bitch insulting me when I hadn't done anything wrong. I was pissed off by the fact that she tried to rip me off and

10.

Text - This is when things started to get a bit more exciting. As I said above, landlords who don't comply with the law around tenancy deposits have to pay between 1 and 3 times the value of the deposit in compensation, plus return the full deposit, if they get taken to court. The documentation from the tenancy deposit scheme proved that she had broken the law. I'd already had my deposit back, but it was clear that if I took her to court, I would receive a minimum of that amount again. Except, o

11.

Text - It would cost me a couple of hundred £ to take her to court, and I was 100% willing to do that - in fact, at this point I was relishing that prospect. In order to take her to court, I first had to send her a 'letter before action' in which I set out my complaint against her and gave her an opportunity to make an offer to avoid going to court. I had a barrister friend who was helping me out at this point with advice, for free. The landlord replied to my letter quite dismissively, basically

12.

Text - When the money landed in my bank account, I emailed her to explain that I would have dropped my complaint against her immediately had she at any point offered a sincere apology (which was true, at least up until that final email where she insulted me). I also said that I hoped she would deal more fairly and reasonably with future tenants. She didn't reply. I hope that I will never again be a tenant, but having spent many years being dicked around by shitty landlords and letting agents, it

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