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 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.
Although I carefully documented minor cosmetic damage that existed before I moved in, my landlord still tried to withhold my security deposit and threatened to sue for additional damages. He had even signed off on the documentation, but he tried to claim I had forged his signature! Then he said that since I didn’t get the oven professionally cleaned, he was going to charge me an extra $600. Nowhere in my lease did it say I had to do that, and he was throwing them out anyway! I had seen other people move out in the months before mine, and there were old ovens piling up outside the dumpster. I had to take him to small claims court to get my deposit back and for him to stop harassing me.
While I was working from home, we asked our landlord to look at the basement because it kept flooding. We thought he’d set up an appointment. Instead, he just walked into the apartment unexpected and unannounced with his ‘handyman,’ who we once found lurking outside our window, just minutes after I finished a meeting online. When my partner confronted him about this, he responded by sending us a letter saying that I ‘gave’ him permission to be in the house. Yeah, I gave him permission after he was already inside the house and said he was going to the basement.
Thank god I wasn’t in the shower or something. He proceeded to not return our full deposit despite doing a move-out walk-through and confirming everything was fine. We are taking him to small claims court.
My junior year of college, a group of friends and I rented out some apartments that were dubbed ‘the Solars’ because of the solariums that were attached to each apartment. Halfway through the school year, one of my roommates moved out and a new one took his place. There was a three-night window where our new roommate moved in and our old roommate waited for his parents to drive up on the weekend and help him move out. During that three-day window, our old roommate staged his bed and furniture in the solarium for a few nights so our new roommate could move in. On the third night, around 1 a.m., a very large man let himself into our apartment while we were all sleeping and started screaming. He flipped our kitchen table, pounded on our doors, and stormed out. After calling the police, we found out that man was actually THE LANDLORD, and the person we had met when we signed the lease was only the listing agent.
When confronted by the police, the landlord told them that he had seen furniture in the solarium and was convinced we had a squatter living there. The landlord demanded extra rent for allowing an additional person to sleep in the solarium. Furthermore, since there was a ‘strange truck’ in the parking lot, our landlord went on to tell the police that this squatter living in the solarium must be running an illegal chop shop and using the truck to distribute the parts. The truck belonged to our roommate’s parents, who had just arrived to help him move the next day.The next few months consisted of our landlord sitting in his car and watching our apartment from the parking lot. He continued to call us daily demanding that we pay him $1,000 for the mystery squatter. We filed a police report for harassment and terminated the lease.
