Landlord Question and Answer Forum

Wanted to share my tenant experience. Tenants caused all kinds of damages to my property. Hope you can learn from this and incorporate more clauses in the lease 1) Tenants turned down the temperature when the December weather was yo yo (high and low) last year, forgot to turn back up the thermostat and went on Christmas vacation. Long story short, one of the interior pipes froze and the whole downstairs ceiling came down with the frozen pipe burst solely due to tenant’s negligence. Had to pay my insurance deductible and a number of other things to get the house back in shape. Now my HO6 premium went up and thanks to centralized/online recording, my primary house insurance went up by $200/year b/c they detected this loss incident under my SSN/Home Insurance policy. 2) Now here is the situation that impacted the showing of the house and getting prospective tenants/students for next year's rent in a timely fashion. One of the former tenants left some kind of thick paint like stuff (not poop or blood) in the master bedroom toilet and went on vacation at the end of the semester. Looked disgusting. After I found out about it, I couldn't show the house to prospective tenants until the tenant came back and cleaned the bathroom. In the meantime, lost quite a few prospective tenants/students who were initially interested for the next rental year, but backed out after seeing the bathroom. I tried to convince them that I will get the house/bathroom cleaned with a professional cleaner, but no luck. As a matter of fact, one of the parents asked me if the room is occupied by a female student or not. Then she said never imagined a girl would live with this kind of bathroom condition. 3) The entire downstairs was painted as part of the frozen pipe incident. Now I see that the kitchen wall has a few large deep scars showing the drywall base during my inspection. Tenants must have banged some kind of furniture against the kitchen wall to take off part of the sheet rock. It’s simply misusing/ mistreating the property. There are also a number of violation notices I got from the Association for leaving the garbage can/recycling can outside. Left some junk stuff behind the house. 4) Tenants kept asking me if I could terminate my lease earlier since they moved out (I guess they had to sign up another lease with the other landlord before this lease is over). So, in addition to this kind of harassment/inconvenience of not having tenants lined up for next year, I ended up losing 1/3 rent for the last month before I got new tenants. These irresponsible tenants were nothing but trouble. I’m still inspecting the house and assessing the total losses. Given all these, how do I handle the security deposit?

Tell them that they'll need a judge to order you to return what's left. KEEP RECEIPTS!

Posted by Matthew M, IL on Thursday, September 6, 2018