I fucking hate letting agents and crappy landlords who take the piss

[ouda]

Just want to get that off my chest.

Total agreement here!

Feel free to share your stories of arsy landlords/rude and incompetent letting agents below.

Still too cross to share my story.

Ours was awful. He demanded we allow viewings at a moments notice (I was enjoying two weeks off work at the time and didn’t particularly want randoms traipsing through my home) so I gave very specific dates and times when viewings would be ok. He was FURIOUS. He rang my DP and said he didn’t appreciate my tone and since we’d given notice he could come any time he wanted but he wouldn’t engage with me anymore because I ‘needed taking in hand’.

Another time we said he could come in to fix the shower while we were at work and he sent us an angry email saying I shouldn’t leave the washing up overnight and I (not we!!) should put the hoover round. And did I want a lost of local cleaners since I couldn’t find the time to do it myself?

When we left he tried to charge us £478 off our deposit. £79 of that was for a drawer on the ancient fifty year old shit fridge that had been taken away by the council the day after we moved out.

When I handed my notice in, letting agent asked for permission to do viewings. I said yes, after 11th of month (paid up to 30th but moving out early). Landlord phoned 10 mins later to ask why I was being so difficult and refusing all viewings until 30th. Letting agent had completely lied. Landlord was very good about it and agreed to my terms in the end.
It took over 6 months to re-let anyway.

I hate them. I think I actually need therapy about how much I hate them. From the landlord who rifled through student girls' knicker drawers when we weren't there. To the literal millionaire biddy I rented off in my twenties who tried to steal my deposit through sheer greed.
To the one a family member rents from who left a bathroom cabinet filled with cotton buds with earwax and hair stuck to them.
And to every asshole landlord (which is all of them) in Dublin (my city, rental crisis, nightmare) who is charging 900 euro minimum for their fucking garden shed, or a tiny grotty bedsit with a single bed beside the cooker, and can get that money too because currently people have no choice.
My friend who had a fucking wasp nest on top of a kitchen unit and the landlord gave her fly spray.
The place I viewed years ago that had a loo in the main room with a shower curtain around it and a showehead attached to the kitchen sink. (Expected to shower over the loo).
I'm househunting at the moment. It's not going well. Could rant further.

And i hate crappy tenants who take the piss.....i know most are good. i'm thinking of the tenant who owes us 9k in unpaid rent, damage to the property and legal fees we had to pay to evict her.

spent over 2k sorting the property out, but i'll never be as nice as before she moved in.

I feel for you...

Let it out.

I'll spill the beans on a mad ex-landlady (not the one I'm currently fuming about) who literally went through our outside bins and told us off for putting food waste in...er...the bin designed for food waste. She then complained we hadn't cleaned the inside of the bins (not the ones in the house, the big council-owned wheelie bins outside, which were unsurprisingly full of stuff as we were moving out) when we left.

It's hard to pick her piece de resistance, from failing to give us a gas safety check for about 4 years, to sending round an unqualified mate to poke at the boiler when we complained we smelt gas, to lying about it after we moved out and getting a crooked gasman to retrospectively write 4 (fake) gas safety certificates for those years because she was worried she was going to be prosecuted!

Same mad landlady also rang us up when we were literally in the process of moving out, to discuss carpet cleaning. When I said I couldn't talk as I literally had the removal men there, she said 'No you don't, I've just driven past your house.' When I offered to put the extremely present and real removal men on the phone to prove that yes, they really were there, she declined.

Absolutely barking.

Same lovely lady lived in a multi-million pound house. We once had reason to go round there, can't recall why, when our house was down to one floor only for about two weeks, due to a flood from a leaking pipe under the floorboards, which soaked the kitchen and utility while we were on holiday. As a result, the contents of the kitchen and utility had to be put in the lounge for two weeks while they were being redecorated. So we had no access to a lounge, cooker, fridge etc for two weeks. She complained about us taking up her time at this particular point when all 5 of us were marooned upstairs with no kitchen or lounge access at all, BECAUSE SHE WAS BUSY GETTING READY FOR A BIG DINNER PARTY. The lack of empathy or responsibility was quite breathtaking.

We enjoyed taking every penny of our deposit back off her when we moved out (she had of course claimed the lot - unaware that the law had recently changed so that she couldn't just now grab it without proof, and the TDS were having none of it).

Special place for people like you, Jan. I've not forgotten.

Last place we rented, the agents advertised it for let again before we’d given notice! I had casually mentioned that we’d found a place to move to so would be giving notice when we had the dates... and they put it on the website the next day.

We had people looking through the windows and knocking on the door (which is how I found out it was advertised). So much for “quiet enjoyment” of the property. The intruders has got through a locked gate with delivery people also!

They took the advert down. Bit too late for that really. Agents sites are mirrored all over the inter. We were plagued until we moved.

My comment about 'I feel for you' was aimed at fellow tenants, by the way.

dreamingofsun - feel free to start your own thread.

I'd love to say that I care about your bad experiences with tenants, but I'll be honest and say that I don't. You at least have access to very expensive references (paid for by the tenants) to vet your prospective tenants. Tenants, on the other hand, have no way of knowing if their prospective landlord is a criminal, psychopath, pervert, nutter or just lazy, rude and greedy.

The laws in this country are ridiculously biased against tenants. The current government actually filibustered to prevent a law getting through that would have ensured that all rental accommodation is fit for human habitation! That's how insane the situation is.

We rented.
It was sold as a rental 6 months later.
Local bigwig came round to tell us he was new ll, no worries etc, carry on with all your decorating etc. Congrats on new ds etc.
When the sale went through we were given 10 weeks to get out.
He was renting it out as a holiday let.
Fucking twat.

Wonder what his 'locals' would think if they really knew him.

ouda - i beg to differ that things are biased towards LL's and bad for tenants. The reference we received for our tenant was good, alas they spilt up and we were left with the non working tenant who then trashed the place (despite having good references that checked out)

It took 7 months to evict the tenant (despite the fact they were out of contract, paid no rent and were trashing the place). Can you explain to me how that is fair for LL and unfair for tenant? And we got her out pretty quickly....some courts and bailiffs take longer

I'm a tenant. Doubt will ever be a homeowner. My last landlord before this one met me in the street and told me he wanted us to move out for 2 months to do up the bathroom. He drove from Belgium to pick up a wooden stepladder he'd left in our storage room. He also had a carrier bag of half used loo rolls in the storage room. My daughter's bedroom ceiling fell in. We continued having to pay full rent for the 5 months dp had to sleep on the sofa while dd slept in my bed with me. He was, and is, a cunt.

My cousin is a landlord. Had some scuzzy scammers living in his house for over 2 years with not one month full rent paid. When he did finally get a s21 served on them, they rang to say if he promised to stop pursuing the missing rent, they would go quietly.

For every scamming cunt of a landlord, sadly, there's a scamming cunt of a tenant. T'is the way of the world.

dreamingofsun - feel free to start your own thread. Or stop being a landlord if you hate it - tenants don't have a choice in whether or not to be homeless, however.

I'm not going to engage with any more of your comments on this thread. Landlords have a loud enough voice already - this thread is for tenants to talk about their experiences. You could even read the title and figure that out.

We had a landlord that OWNED a damp proofing company but wouldn't send someone to sort out the damp by our front door until we told them it was at the height of the light switch and the floorboards had collapsed.

A couple of days later the phone rang while I was in the shower. As I stepped out some random employee of the landlord let himself in and strolled in whilst I was stood in shock in my towel. Turns out they had left a message 5 minutes earlier while I was in the shower to let me know he was coming. He didn't even knock first!

We had a similar issue of really having to kick up a fuss when the boiler started making an odd sound and we were feeling dizzy and sick. We had to have all the windows wide open til it cleared then the boiler off in the middle of winter and it took ages for any sort of reaction.

I hate renting.

And BookMe, no, I don't think that's true, actually. The landlords hold the power in the relationship, so one is not just as bad as the other.

I'm not feeling any remote sympathy with landlords at the moment so again if you want to pursue the poor ickle landlord theme or claim 'there are good men on both sides' (hmm, where have I heard that before?), you're very welcome to start a thread to do so.

@dreamingofsun The point is that you're trying to derail a thread. It's as bad as the "What about the men?" responses when women talk about sexism and harassment. You know how infuriating that is. Start your own thread.

This is MN love. You don't get to tell people not to post on your threads.

Tenants are way more protected by law than landlords. Scammers in your property for years and you have to go to the courts to get them out. Where's the super protection for landlords there?

You seem to have had very bad luck with landlords. I've been renting for 35 years and had approximately 15 different ones. Only one tosser.

Maybe it's the same adage as the one about the people getting the govt they deserve...

Ah right, so it's the tenants' fault above that their landlords went through their underwear/failed to do gas safety checks/sent workmen round with no notice etc etc etc.

Good of you to landlordsplain that to us lowly tenants.

I actually seem to have a normal, perfectly pleasant landlord currently, but does that let off the greedy mad shits I've had as landlords before?

No bloody way.

I am a model tenant. Yet every landlord except one has attempted to steal the deposit. (There is no protection scheme in Ireland).
The millionaire biddy place had a socket that melted plugs. The 'electrician' who she employed eventually was a dirty git who did nothing except shit in my toilet and leave it there. (I get that latter is not her fault, but the overheating socket bothered me greatly, that place would have burned down very easily).
Today I looked at a spec for a possible place and the landlord has forbidden 'overnight guests'. Like it's not a boarding school or even lodgings, it's your private home. I complained to the site. Unbelievable.
As the op said, a landlord can demand references from me. Proof of employment too, possibly even a bank statement.
I don't get a reference from their previous tenants. I don't know that they're not going to be like, say the landlord who came rattling at the door at 10pm over a random cigarette butt he saw in the garden. The landlord who had his hands in my underwear drawer. I don't have a guarantee that they don't think that a deposit isn't just a bonus payment to them. I don't get any assurance that a landlady doesn't give a shit if I burn to death in my bed because she's too miserly to pay a proper electrician for the likes of a lowly tenant.
RIP Mary, you penny-pinching old bitch.

I also don't get free cleaning products and compensated for my free time when I have to do the inevitable first day deep clean. Bet your life that a previous tenant would have had a cleaner's fee deducted off their deposit though.

My student era landlord decided to let a load of builders who spoke no English so couldn't tell us what was going on into our flat with no warning... they proceeded to knock down a wall and build a new bathroom into our living room....

He also started letting out what were essentially large cupboards out to two Chinese men in their 40s without telling us... loved walking into my kitchen to that surprise (they were actually lovely but the shock was scary - thought they were burglars).

Then he tried to take £400 off of my deposit for cleaning... when there were new letters in already and building dust everywhere!

I need this thread today.

I'm moving tomorrow, and thought I'd got a good ll for a change, but they've just added a load of ridiculous clauses to the lease at the last minute, and it's too late to do anything about it.

I get shitty landlords as I'm a lone parent and get housing benefi t.

Fuckers.

A friend of mine had a landlady who didn't understand that you're not supposed to just enter without warning (unless emergency). Plenty of them don't follow that rule tbh. Anyway he came home from work and found her sitting in his kitchen with a cup of tea and eating his toast. Mental.

“The point is that you're trying to derail a thread. It's as bad as the "What about the men?" responses when women talk about sexism and harassment. You know how infuriating that is. Start your own thread.”

I disagree she’s trying to derail anything. Rather, pointing out the OP the grossly stereotyping. You don’t get to tell people where they can post and in what way they need to contribute to a thread.

ouda - actually it was the fault of the last tenant that the gas safety check didnt get done because she wouldnt let us in. Despite writing several times trying to arrange it she just ignored us. But they she ignored every other communication we attempted.