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Landlords, what a joke.

toffee_pie

toffee_pie

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So, I recently departed my flat here and was waiting a few weeks for my deposit, turns out Mr xxx xxx xxx from Sevenoaks is as bad as all the other landlords out there.

Deposit Held £895 Deductions as follows: Outstanding Rent Cleaning & Carpet Cleaning. £99.00 Chip marks to table £30.00 Under unit light bulbs £10.00 Decoration contribution towards marks, scuff marks etc as per check out report £756.00

Now i need to contact the dispute service to get my funds back (need new exhaust!)

Out of interest attached is a letter i am going to send across to the dispute agency, plus original and final check in reports

This is why i am saving up for a house.... :blink:

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Arb2FnABJvO-uVbnGLZFmghL5EYK

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Arb2FnABJvO-uVcH36gcM4fagWdf

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Arb2FnABJvO-uVlkFIOlDw1FV-6F
 
Sorry for your woes man and I hope it gets resolved. I am actually a landlord myseld and I am really glad to have my tenant. He's been there 3.5 years and I've only seen him twice. Pays his rent on time and I don't charge a lot of rent. His deposit is protected and frankly the way I see it he is looking after my flat - rather than me milking him to line my pockets.

I am just gutted that I really didnt want to be a landlord in the first place, and now the flat is up for sale he will end up with a nasty landlord who will take advantage of a nice man. I just hope you get sorted mate....exhast and all. :D
 
Used to have it every time when we rented.
The place would be cleaner than when we moved in, and we'd always turn a mess of a garden into a nice tidy one, adding plants and flowers.

No wonder landlords get a bad rep.

Yesterday a friend was asked to leave the place he's lived in for the last 17 years for asking to have the faulty boiler repaired.
As well as spending thousands of his own money on the garden and decorating over the years, he's regularly repaired farm vehicles for the owner at no cost.

I suggest you strip all the copper and fittings out of the house and weigh them in. Bank on losing the whole deposit and make your goal getting the value back in sales.

Or get an advert up and get a load of squatters in before you leave.
 
toffee_pie said:
This is why i am saving up for a house.... :blink:
Click to expand...
This is the main reason for buying rather than renting.

After 3 years of renting, you can look at the deposit in 2 ways: either forget it (because it represents 3% of the total rent paid over 36 months) ; or see it as a landlord wanting their pound of flesh.

In 2006 I rented out my house when I went to work abroad for a year. What I didn't know beforehand, and which all agencies told me, is that despite my house being a new build when I bought it in 2003, and even though I had lived in it for 3 years, my house had to be completely redecorated and cleaned before I could rent it out. If that is not done, then the benchmark for the tenant is too "grey". When I moved back into the house a year later, it was almost as good as the way that it had been left bythe decorators/cleaners.

The point is that the landlord has to get the house back into pristine condition in order to re-rent it.

The issue that you are facing, is that there are significant differences between the check-in report and the check-out report. I know that the agencies are not the same, but even if they were, and even if it was the same person, you cannot expect the person doing the check-out to remember anything when they did the check-in.

My advice to anyone renting is :
1. make sure that the check-in thoroughly meets the condition
2. when you clean up, do it against the check-in
3. make sure that you are then when the check-out is performed, and dispute anything at the time !!!

Other than that I can't really see why the landlord wants £756. It does seem excessive, but, sometimes it is not possible to clean up to the level of detail in each room without re-decorating as well (as I found out to my cost before I rented out my own house).
 
Being a landlord of several properties myself i do take slight umbrage tarring us all with the same brush, that said im sure its all down to frustration on your part as judging by the pictures i would certainly kill to get my properties back in that condition. I think of myself as a good fair landlord and ive probably paid back 95% of all deposits and any that haven't been paid back have never been disputed.

I do agree that some decoration and mild repair work is to be expected and this is done after every tenant leaves as a matter of course at my expense. That all said i do not use a 3rd party to look after my properties, they are inspected by myself and gf and compared to photographs taken before they moved in, also they have a free role to decorate wherever they want as long as its to a standard keeping with the property. I would imagine when using a 3rd party to look after properties this is always going to happen as they will always want to pay nothing. Im not sure if English law is different to Scottish law but here the deposits are held by a separate body to protect tenants from unscrupulous landlords and if there is a dispute they decide who gets what.

Having been a landlord now for 10 years, i have learned the hard way and lost thousands due to dishonest tenants not paying, sub letting and leaving properties needing a complete refit, so there is always 2 sides to every story.

So on that note good luck and i hope you get your exhaust.
 
Does anyone else feel sorry for 'Mr xxx xxx xxx from Sevenoaks' for suffering all that damage to his flat?

Before buying our current home, we rented the previous home for 3 years... despite being as careful as possible our landlord still came up with a list of 'issues' for us to resolve. We ended up repainting the kitchen and replacing the living room carpet, while a few other smaller issues were amicably offset against the fact that the landlord had failed to effectively deal with a rat infestation outside the property. We parted on good terms and got our complete deposit returned.
 
freddofrog said:
This is the main reason for buying rather than renting.

After 3 years of renting, you can look at the deposit in 2 ways: either forget it (because it represents 3% of the total rent paid over 36 months) ; or see it as a landlord wanting their pound of flesh.

In 2006 I rented out my house when I went to work abroad for a year. What I didn't know beforehand, and which all agencies told me, is that despite my house being a new build when I bought it in 2003, and even though I had lived in it for 3 years, my house had to be completely redecorated and cleaned before I could rent it out. If that is not done, then the benchmark for the tenant is too "grey". When I moved back into the house a year later, it was almost as good as the way that it had been left bythe decorators/cleaners.

The point is that the landlord has to get the house back into pristine condition in order to re-rent it.

The issue that you are facing, is that there are significant differences between the check-in report and the check-out report. I know that the agencies are not the same, but even if they were, and even if it was the same person, you cannot expect the person doing the check-out to remember anything when they did the check-in.

My advice to anyone renting is :
1. make sure that the check-in thoroughly meets the condition
2. when you clean up, do it against the check-in
3. make sure that you are then when the check-out is performed, and dispute anything at the time !!!

Other than that I can't really see why the landlord wants £756. It does seem excessive, but, sometimes it is not possible to clean up to the level of detail in each room without re-decorating as well (as I found out to my cost before I rented out my own house).
Click to expand...
I can ***ure you the landlord is on a cloud somewhere if he thinks redecorating and cleaning is worth that much, i have photos taken when i left and aside from a scuff mark where my tv used to be its pretty much same as

loads of scuff marks pre existed, as did stains on cooker. With 3 years of tenancy i cant see how he expects any better.

sending off letter today, if i dont get my full refund i am taking him to the small claims.

besides as per my letter, most resonable landlords would consider some scuff marks and stains fair game especially for a 3 year tenancy, and how come he never felt the need to 'refurbish' the flat when i moved in? plenty marks and stains already were on walls.

If it was a ground floor flat i would drive my subaru in and do burnouts as i left.
 
My middle son is now living at my house, but before that he had been renting a terraced house for nearly 3 years. The deposit on that was 1.5 month's rent.

Fortunately, the house was unfurnished and had no carpets. When he came to move out, the acquired furniture either came to my house or went to the tip (Tourer came in very useful). When the house was empty, the cleaning began. Upstairs was ok, but downstairs was a mess, dents in the walls, curtain rails coming away, etc, etc. I managed to put filler in the dents and fix the curtain rails, but the "garden" was a mega problem. Although the "garden" was only about 5m x 5m most of which was a patio, in 3 years two bushes had overgrown the whole of the back. I was going to hire a wood-chipper but it was too big to get round the back, and so since it would have to be cut down and dragged through the house, we did it all manually putting it into the Tourer. It took nearly 2 days and about 10 trips to the tip to clear the garden, and when we'd finished the remaining woody parts of the bushes looked like a sculpture of something from trench warfare.

When the landlord came round to check, he barely looked at the "garden" but he said that the house would need redecorating. I said that it was fair wear and tear, but he said he'd had a quote for £500. I disputed that, saying that if anything, only one room would need re-decorating. In the end (with the hacked garden in the back of my mind) we agreed on £250. But then, a week afterwards, he contacted my son, fuming that some white-goods and junk were in an out-house, and the oven wasn't clean. We went back to look, and most of the stuff in the out-house had already been there when he moved in (I remember seeing it there). As a compromise, I suggested that we take the stuff down the tip in my car and the landlord get his missus to clean the oven. Just before we left for the final time, I asked him which company was going to re-decorate, and he said his brother-in-law. I sid "cash in hand ?" and he said "yes", so I said "you cannot take £250 off the deposit if you're paying a family member cash". He said "he'll notify HMRC" to which I said "I might give HMRC your details then", and drove off.

Basically I felt £250 was "quid pro quo" for the garden, otherwise I would never have agreed to anything, because money from a deposit has to go against an invoice, not DIY.
 
toffee_pie said:
I can ***ure you the landlord is on a cloud somewhere if he thinks redecorating and cleaning is worth that much, i have photos taken when i left and aside from a scuff mark where my tv used to be its pretty much same as

loads of scuff marks pre existed, as did stains on cooker. With 3 years of tenancy i cant see how he expects any better.

sending off letter today, if i dont get my full refund i am taking him to the small claims.

besides as per my letter, most resonable landlords would consider some scuff marks and stains fair game especially for a 3 year tenancy, and how come he never felt the need to 'refurbish' the flat when i moved in? plenty marks and stains already were on walls.

If it was a ground floor flat i would drive my subaru in and do burnouts as i left.
Click to expand...
The problem is that if you compare remarks on the check-in with remarks on the check-out, there is quite a discrepancy, so you need to request to an itemised quote. But yep, this is the issue with moving into a property that is not in pristine condition (as agents insisted mine had to be before I rented it out). A tenant has to fully document everything with their own pictures if they feel that the check-in falls short of the actual condition.

If you get nowhere, rather than use small-claims, contact ITV Judge Rinder (I kid you not).
 
Isn't this an issue to take up with the deposit holder? Under tenancy laws the deposit MUST be held by an approved third party who is obliged to consider both sides of the story in relation to this sort of dispute.

I remember feeling annoyed that we had to repaint the kitchen (mostly because of cooking marks from the hob) and replace the living room carpet (minor burns from bits shooting out of the log burner) as I felt these were 'fair wear and tear'. However the landlord (nicely) pointed out that the place had been freshly redecorated just before we moved in and had new carpets throughout, and we did sign a contract to agree that we would restore the property to the standard that we originally found it.

I understand how some tenants optimistically (and perhaps selfishly) believe that a bit of damage/wear and tear is acceptable, but having been through this with a demanding (but pleasant) landlord I can see it from both sides. No doubt there's quite a few rogue landlords who will see this admittedly grey area as a way to bump up their profits though!
 
Yep these days the deposit is held in one of several "deposit protection schemes" (unless one is dealing with a rogue landlord).

It will be up to the DPS to decide. Whichever way it goes, I doubt if small-claims will over-ride it, but ITV Judge Rinder might "entertain" it LOL
 
Here are inspection reports from Leaders in 2015 and 2016, Martin and Co took over duties later but they never had any inspection at all.

I rejected the landlords deluded claim for £895 and its back in dispute, going to call the scheme tomorrow to see can i post my evidence across.

This idiot landlord is dishonest and represents everything thats bad about landlords now, if i do have to go to the courts i am going throw all my legal fees, lost work hours at him and will also bring up the car parking space issue. Lets see how he feels about that.

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Arb2FnABJvO-uV2EmyVp14jc1BzN

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Arb2FnABJvO-uVxPJ2oowuSr9qq9

can see this going on a bit so looks like i will have my exhaust way before this is settled.
 
freddofrog said:
Yep these days the deposit is held in one of several "deposit protection schemes" (unless one is dealing with a rogue landlord).

It will be up to the DPS to decide. Whichever way it goes, I doubt if small-claims will over-ride it, but ITV Judge Rinder might "entertain" it LOL
Click to expand...
id love Judge Rinder...
 
Hahaha.

Sequin shirts for everyone!!
 
Jon_G said:
toffee_pie's story has made the newspapers...

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/delusional-man-thinks-hes-getting-his-tenancy-deposit-back-20160927114425
Click to expand...
ROFL
perfect10.gif


(I'll be back later with a "like" when my bløødy likes quota is no longer at max)
 
Update on this, £895 back in my bank. I left a tenner to the ****** landlord for a bulb which is being generous.

No idea what he was getting to, the TDS were good and sorted it out.
 
indeed, the funds are always with them (TDS) and not the landlord, if he/she wants all that money back the onus is on them to provide evidence, else it will go back to the tenant.
 
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