When I arrived to move in on the agreed-upon date, I discovered that my landlord had not yet moved out. We awkwardly lived together in a one-bedroom for four days.
My family moved into a home across the street from the owners. This home was going to be their retirement home. On multiple occasions, they would just show up and just let themselves in with no notice. One day, I was taking a shower and stepped out to see the owner’s wife and her friends looking in the bathroom window. Another time, my wife and I were doing the deed on the couch when they walked in. They acted like all of this was normal.
My landlady lived above our flat, and she would come down to our flat to do her laundry. It was like a subleasing situation, and our flats were only separated by a staircase. We didn’t know about the laundry before we moved in. My particular horror story is of the time she came into the bathroom to do her laundry while I was peeing. But instead of walking out and apologizing, she simply screamed for, and I am not exaggerating, a good 20 seconds, like she was in a horror movie. I just looked at her in shock. After the screaming, she turned around, took her laundry, and left to go back to her flat upstairs. I have never experienced anything like it…
I spent an entire year in my apartment with no hot water. I would reach out to the landlord and she would send the maintenance man (her boyfriend), who would look at the circuit breaker and tell me it was on. Once a month, I would reach out. Eventually, mushrooms started growing out of the walls and my kitchen bubbled from the pipes. I refused to pay rent until she fixed it. Then shit started coming up from my shower drain. Professionals got involved. The landlord wanted me to ignore the plumber and buy the products to unclog the drain myself. I refused, and the landlord got sued and all but blamed me for her costly mistake.
I had a landlord who lived above my husband and me, and he and his girlfriend would get into screaming matches. The girlfriend would literally become hoarse from screaming at him. She would stomp her feet and they would both throw things at each other. We ended up trying to get out of our lease because the fighting was multiple times a week, typically late at night, and would last for hours. We attempted to contact them and let them know their behavior was inappropriate. One time, when we called multiple times in a row to get them to stop fighting late at night, the landlord stomped his feet on the floor above us in response to the call and yelled, ‘Fuck you!’ at us.
Our last landlord called me to ask if we were home because he needed to get into the backyard, which was only accessible through the house. I told him we weren’t, and he said no problem, so we assumed everything was good. We discovered the next day that the landlord had jumped over the garage in the back to get in the backyard to put down rat poison. How did we find this out? When our 10-month-old puppy found it and ate it the next morning while out for her morning pee. THE LANDLORD POISONED OUR DOG. Thankfully, she survived because my husband happened to be home, but still. And then the next month, he raised the rent.
My landlord announced that he was going to renovate the kitchen, which was just so he could increase the rent. This ‘renovation’ involved taking the whole kitchen out, doing nothing for eight weeks, then putting in a new kitchen with less storage space and a faulty oven. The rent did go up.
I once rented a studio apartment from a coworker who, when I went to move out, didn’t want to return any of my security deposit because I was ‘shitty’ to him at work. I was a supervisor, and part of my job was keeping others on task and making sure our department’s most important tasks were done first and foremost. I threatened to take him to small claims court, and he returned my $650 deposit to me in crumpled ones, fives, and tens. My guess is that he hadn’t actually saved my deposit, but spent it and then had to hastily gather some money to pay me back and not go to court. Work was awkward after that.
My husband and I were eager to move out of state, picked the first apartment we were approved for, and that’s all she wrote. We had rented for years before but had been lucky with good landlords. But this place? Yikes. I only started to read reviews and gain insight once we were moved in, and it was not good. The landlords were suing basically four out of every five tenants upon move-out for ridiculous things, but then I learned just how crooked they were. They would purposely tear up carpet, ruin walls, and take pictures, then blame the tenant.”
I videotaped myself cleaning everything upon move-out, locking the door, and turning in the key. I also took massive numbers of pictures of EVERYTHING, all dated, etc. When I went to the office, I asked about the final walk-through, and the landlord said I didn’t need to be there. RED FLAG, so I made sure I told her that was okay, because I FILMED EVERYTHING.
My friend and I caught my landlord looking through the building garbage outside, and when he noticed us, he looked startled and started asking questions about the kinds of sparkling water I was buying. It also took him a solid two weeks in the dead of winter to fix my broken furnace, and he did not provide me with any temporary heaters. Once the heater was fixed, he blamed my cats and said they had to go or I needed to pay more into the deposit. The damage had nothing to do with my cats, but I still gave him more money. He ‘accidentally’ showed my friend/neighbor a porn magazine while he was signing the lease and pretended like he shouldn’t have seen that.
I can keep going. He also constantly made comments alluding to my sex life/boyfriends. He was absolutely awful. A true testament to what a tenant will put up with to score below-market rent. I lived there for eight years.