Landlords pushing their luck

[DrunkenZombiee]

So this rant is going to happen here to stop be from biting the head off someone who walks through the door.

So I have been doing some pretty long hours lately (18 hour average per day this week) and i have been leaving the Mrs to sort out the general running of the house etc.

My landlords are the biggest waste of space ever they do not care about the house and will not do anything to keep in a good repair, they just want money and to do as little as possible.

So over a week ago the washing machine in the house we are renting decided to spring a leak, making it unusable. We contact the letting agent right away as we should and he sends someone round to take a look, the guy they sent was pretty good just said it was uneconomical to repair and they should get a new one.

6 days pass, no washing machine, I am snowed under with work and finally get round to asking the Mrs if she has heard anything.... Answer.... No. She emails the letting agent and he promises to get back to us by the end of the day...

2 days pass. Still nothing. The Mrs emails the letting agent again as i am snowed under still with work.

2 days pass.. We are now present day today, I have had very little sleep and have been working UK and US time to fulfill contractual obligations and got the work in at 4 am last night. The Mrs calls me from work at 10 am and forwards me the email from the letting agent saying that we have an agreement to say that we would replace any white goods if they wear out. At this stage i know they are lying as we wanted to use our own white good s that we had when we moved into the property but they would not let us saying that the ones that were there would have to remain nadda nadda.

So just in case I pull out our contract on a break from work and read it all again. Nothing mentioned in the contract and nothing in the inventory fine print either.

So I call the letting agent up, say there is nothing in our contract to stipulate this so give us a new washing machine ASAP please. The agent now says some BS about how it was verbal and it had been confirmed by the previous letting agent that we signed our contract with before he took over the letting of the property. So I say to him, if its not in writing you are on very shaky ground, you will need to proove this in a court of law which you cant easily. So he isn't backing down and by this stage i am fuming. Rather than laying into the prick there and then I rang up the previous letting agent who we had signed the contract with and with some temporary Schizophrenia was very polite and praising explaining the situation and asking if they could tell me if this would normally be in the contract and if they had received any communication from the letting agent or landlord recently about the property. She checked the emails and asked around and guess what no they had not.

So at this stage i know full well that they are just pushing their luck and flat out lying to me.

I call the letting agent back... Just got in touch with our old letting agent and they have confirmed that you have not been in contact with them this year nor has the landlord. They have confirmed that they do not know of any such agreement. By this stage a lay into the guy saying that if the landlord is not going to meet their contractual obligations then neither do I need to and that his name as a letting agent is going to get tarnished if he continues to forwards lies to us and break his promises with regards to getting back to us in good time.
So by this stage he is pretty damn worried as he as an irate customer on the line with proof that he is very much putting the interests of the landlord to the extent of lying for them to the tenants.

I say a load of BS about how i am more concerned that anything more serious happens to the property and if himself and the landlord continue down the same path there could be more serious repercussions. Scare the willies out of him talking about how there was no trust in the relationship and he needs to fulfill his promises etc...

So... its been almost 2 weeks without a washing machine... I call their bluff, tell them they are lying and give him a lecture on how to run his business and to contact the authorities about his practice... 15 mins late I get a call asking when do we want it delivered.

Why is there no professional integrity from others anymore. i feel like i am the only one who actually is delivering on promises.

Anyway I know this kind of thing happens a lot and there are a lot of bad landlords around so don't put up with any BS. A verbal agreement doesn't mean anything, only if there is recorded proof.

Rant over I feel better!

Comment here if you also have useless landlords.

DZ.

[Tutonic]

That's pretty shoddy, I'm glad you appear to have 'won' though.

One of the best bits of advice anyone ever gave me is this: When moving into rented accommodation, get your camera out and take photos of everything. EVERYTHING. In as much details as humanly possible. Take the photos to your landlord, and tell them you're not signing anything until they sign the photos, to confirm the state that the property is in as you arrive.

This will (usually) stop them pulling the old "You've ruined the carpet, give me £1000 to replace it" trick. It's certainly saved me from getting stung in the past.

[Penfold]

Happens.

The letting agents are in an insidious position. On one hand they have you, an irate tenant, giving them grief and the same on the other side an irate landlord. Either way it sounds like they messed up in preparing the contracts and are trying to cover their asses. Idiots. Suck it up.

If they didn't want to have to replace white goods in the property then they either don't supply any in the first place or write in the contract that white goods be not be replaced if faulty and out of warranty. You can't do that verbally and it needs to be in the contract.  If you wanted to take your own white goods in then frankly I'm amazed they wouldn't let you. It would have saved them a lot of grief.

I'm not commenting here as I have a useless landlord, I'm commenting here as I'm a really great landlord (imho). In the last months I've put in new bathrooms, new kitchens, new carpets, repainted and bought new white goods for various tenants - either ongoing or new. While interest rates are low it's an opportunity to do so without it costing me anything. Landlords aren't all bad !

Good luck!

[Benny]

Indeed Mr Pen. I've had the otherside too, I've had tennants who have decimated the garden, torn carpets, ruined walls and then disputed the deposit. Ended up in arbitration and all sorts and the landlord always loses out.

Glad you sorted it DM, if everyone acted professionally and avoided the bs, this world would be a better place.

[ArithonUK]

Oh, where to start....

My company was based in a 150 year old listed building on the outskirts of Maidstone. The building was shared office space which the landlord had owned from the mid nineteen eighties.
We had three rooms on the second floor and a store room on the ground floor that we rented. We moved in in 1998 and were there until June 2012.

One day I will write a book about the entire experience from insurance fraudsters and knock-off designer merchandise selling by other tenants to police raids and strange visitors, but that's another much longer story.

The original landlord sold up in 2007 to a fly-by-night buy-to-rent operator named Mr Hopes whose previous experience of office letting was zero. This guy was accustomed to bullying students in flop-houses and no idea how to deal with a large group of business professionals who demanded the landlord meet the letter of his commitments. By the end of 2008, after several verbal duels with one of the other tenants, a new management company took over. This one run by a pair of "financial advisors" calling themselves “Intellectual Equity”. They informed us they were buying the building. Things rumbled on, but the building didn't change hands. Then in December 2009 Intellectual Equity announced they were moving out and the building was being managed by another company. We were then contacted by our cleaning lady to say she'd tried to contact the new management to get paid and found that the building was "in administration", the company TouchStone were the administrators on behalf of the bank that held the mortgage and that they believed the building was empty!

After a lot of convincing, TouchStone accepted that the building was, in fact, occupied but wouldn’t give us a rental agreement, without which we couldn’t pay rent. They informed us that although they’d been collecting rent until December, Intellectual Equity hadn’t been paying any since June! They'd pocketed it and done a runner!

Touchstone did nothing. Literally. The situation continued in the same holding pattern for two years, throughout which time, the bank visited, but TouchStone never did and the other tenants moved out one after another. Then last May, I turned up for work to find the office locked. The locks had been changed! Mr Hopes had come back and staked his claim. He had our entire company (servers, paperwork, furniture, etc. ) inside the building and refused to admit us!

He claimed that he had been the landlord the whole time and that Intellectual Equity had run a scam on him pretending to buy, then putting a hold on the mortgage, sending the building into administration.

TouchStone had told Hopes we had refused to pay any rent and had sub-let the building to other tenants. His demand was two years back-rent on the spot, or he’d ship everything we had off to storage.

Because we had been honest, we had accrued all the back-rent in our company accounts, so we paid him and got a written agreement we could stay put for four weeks before moving out, which we did.

The kicker is, if we had moved out, even a week earlier, we’d have pocketed £10,000. A good deed never goes unpunished.

We spent two years as unpaid cleaners & caretakers, looking after the building, fending off bailiffs (looking for Intellectual Equity) and paying bills. And all the thanks we got was that Mr Hopes stole our office Dyson vacuum!

The old building is now let out as a house-share and we keep getting their mail forwarded to us, so we know they're mostly benefit claimants.