To ask for your bad landlord / terrible tenants stories?

[SylviaPlath1984]

So I was watching nightmare tenants slum landlords this afternoon and I was shocked at how awful both sides can be... then I thought I bet Mumsnet have some wild stories!!!

Nothing really awful but our landlady was so controlling! She couldn't see past the house being "her mother's" (she had moved in with them) and kept telling us how "mother didn't keep the wheelie bins at the front, I don't like unsightly bins at the front" and "mother used to weed the pavement outside, I would like you to continue that". "Mother" had had an unbelievable amount of pictures in the living room and all the hooks were still in the walls but we weren't allowed to take them out. We didn't have anywhere near enough pictures for them all! Eventually she decided to put the house up for sale and at that point she suddenly wanted to do the repair jobs we'd been asking about for years- but she hardly gave us any notice. She would phone on a Sunday evening and say she wanted to come on the Monday morning, it didn't matter that we were all out, she would just let herself in!! She also refused to get properly tradesmen in if things went wrong and always sent her husband or handy man to try to fix things first but they never could. Towards the end of us living there, she started coming to the door at 8pm for various reasons, and she pretty much spied on us until we answered the door. One time I was busy doing bathtime and bedtime for DD, and DH was doing something else and we didn't answer the door. Then our friends dropped their son off with us at 9.30pm because the wife had gone into labour and we were having the son - and she must have been watching from somewhere because she was at the door straight away after we'd answered it to them! We never felt relaxed in that house at all.

I once came home to find a new sink unit in my kitchen.

No notice, they'd just arranged for and let builders in whilst I was at work and didn't bother telling me.

I had a landlord take 8 months to fix a broken downstairs toilet because we told him “no rush” when we reported it.

8 months is well over “no rush” territory.

Years later I have a buy to let property, and one of our tenants loosened everything you could before moving out, not so it was noticeable for the check out, but so that things would fall off when you tried them. Things like tap washers, ceiling lights so wires were exposed, blind fittings, that sort of thing. I’m so glad I went in there between tenants as I’d have felt awful if the new tenant had found them all. I had a suspicion he was going to do something because he hadn’t left on good terms, hence me going for a thorough check

Bulgarian landlady had a bit of a weird scottish sugar daddy situation going on, when he moved into sheltered housing her goose was cooked for when she flew back over here. Instead she would turn up in my flat, literally walk in to her sleeping in my bed. I was there 3 years, one day she told me I had 3 days to move out, I did too, I was 20 and obviously didn't know better despite working in the homeless support sector

Took our landlord 7 months to fix the broken shower which was leaking into the kitchen. It got into the electrical installation and one morning I woke up to my housemate screaming in shock as she’d wanted to replace the light bulb in the kitchen (which we thought had just burnt out), to find it was full of water! She could’ve easily died on the spot.

After they fixed the shower, it took them another year to get an electrician to check the kitchen and re-do the ceiling. We ate and cooked with candles and lamps only for a year and a half, basically.

We were all at uni, broke and living on student finance and couldn’t do anything about it. I was also tutoring the LL’s children at that time and thinking back now, I wish I’d offered to give them free sessions if only he fixed the kitchen.

The tax man found out she was earning money from a buy to let so she was putting our rent up, and it must be my fault they found out - then we asked if we could decorate, she said yes, painted the whole two bed house? She then gave us notice to move.

Our landlord used to let himself in the house during the day, drink our wine and refill the bottles with water. It was a house share and we were pointing the blame at each other until we figured out what was going on.

Post divorce I took on an old farm house. Actually had to have a formal interview with the trust who owned it. About 6 months later it went up for sale. A technicality I was assured.
The new owner came round, assured me he was my new ll and my family were welcome to stay as long as we liked.. We were actually decorating when he came round...
6 months later I received notice to quit.

The ll was a bullshitting twat. Owned most of the town we lived in. A pillar of the community..
Think not.

My landlord refused to spend any money on the house at all-we had to get the council to force him
We had a leak in the shower that was running into the light fitting below-if you listen to him it was due to me being too fat-nothing to do with the waterfall in the wall
We had no lights in our lounge at all-I’d put a bulb in-it would blow within hours
He told me to light candles-sure with kids running about
A plug socket almost set alight-thankfully we where at home-he told me it was nothing and safe to use
Part of the ceiling fell down-almost into our food-his answer was to paint it
He blamed the mould on us breathing
The shower door fell off-a year later he still hadn’t fixed it
He used tipex to glue my front door lock on
He sealed windows shut

Loads more but we gave up and moved

@Rainbowandscarlett did we have the same landlord? 😂😂

LL lived 100 miles away. If we needed something doing she'd send down her cowboy handyman from there rather than use local tradesmen.

We had problems with the heating for years. Handyman came multiple times. One visit he flooded a bedroom and left the bathroom radiator dripping which we didn't notice until the carpet was sodden. The electrical shop below was not happy!

(Eventually she got someone reputable in. He sorted the fault within an hour.)

We had to have fire-retardent lining put on the front door, which thus needed a new lock. She arranged a locksmith who came and confirmed the cost to her on the phone before fitting the lock.

He came back after 30 mins. She'd rung him and refused to pay. So he'd returned to retrieve his lock and replace the old one. We were all highly bemused that the cost of 2 hours' labour was more than 1 hour and the lock. And she still needed a new lock fitted! 🤣

My tenant "abandoned" after the police caught him running a brothel. Fucking nightmare and I hate to think of the plight of the poor women.

Tenant hoarded stuff and pets, smoked weed indoors and broke the toilet (as in the bowl), owed months of rent and the place was infested with roaches. Even the curtains had to be thrown away, boak.

My first flat was dreadful but it was cheap, I was young and I was desperate for my own space. My landlady told me that she had lived in the house but moved in with her boyfriend so had converted the house into two flats. What she’d actually done is pushed a heavy bureau against the internal door that led to the upstairs flat. She told me that if anyone ever came round from the council then I wasn’t to let them in, but tell them she was out and take a message.

All of the utilities were in her name and supposed to be included in the rent but she’d regularly forget to top up, so I’d have to phone her and ask her if I could have some heating, which wasn’t great when there were holes in the glass panels of the sash windows (which could be opened from outside by just sliding them up) .

I’d regularly come home from work and find things were slightly out of place but I thought I’d imagined it until I found my post and a used glass on the side and realised that she’d been letting herself in whenever she fancied. When I eventually gave notice, she would arrange viewings with absolutely no notice. I remember one man taking one look at the tatty old furnishings (not mine) and the state of the place (clean and tidy but I didn’t have a lot to work with) and walking out. This was apparently my fault for not taking care of the daffodils or having cut the grass that day (it had been cut the previous week but I’d had to borrow my mum’s mower because hers was held together with string and sparked whenever I plugged it in).

I didn’t get my deposit back because she’d spent it and was relying on the deposit from the next tenant to repay mine. I was happy to walk away from it just to get out of the situation.

Short term let so we had agreed 6 months only - unknown to us at the start she turned away the 3rd party doing the check-in inventory - thankfully DH took photos of everything the day we moved in

At the end she tried to claim the entirety of the deposit - saying that we had to replace the sofa, Hoover, repaint the walls, fix broken kitchen cupboards that were broken when we got there, redo the clean with agency A (although we happened to actually use agency A..) etc etc

Think she saw us as a quick money pot

We ended up going to the tenancy deposit scheme adjudication thing and surprise surprise got it all back

And the most frustrating thing was that she was a barrister so tried to intimidate us in conversations and emails to the point that we actually got legal advice

And it also reminds me of the time at uni we ended up burning my wardrobe in the garden as it was infested with woodworm ... uni houses were grim

I've rented all my adult life. I've never been late paying the rent and I've always had glowing references. I've had some good landlords and I am aware some tenants are awful, but naturally my stories are about bad landlords!

• the LL of a HMO when I was 22, who said that 'a cleaner' would come once a week. It turned out it was his mother, who had dementia, and who would throw things away if she didn't like them. She insisted we never put shower gel etc. beside the bath, and refused to allow us to use all the shelves in the kitchen as some were reserved for her decorative china.

• The LL who insisted the antiquated boiler was worth repairing, and sent his retired friend around to 'fix' it. It regularly conked out, leaving the house without heating, when we had a newborn.

• Our current landlords, who are truly special. We moved in when the house had been empty for several months. It was extremely damp and cold with broken windows, all of which we'd been told would be fixed before we moved. As soon as we turned the heating on, the boiler broke. They didn't manage to get it fixed for a couple of weeks (the baby was 12 months old by this time, so not so vulnerable, but it was still bloody cold).

The pattern with this LL has been that tradespeople turn up with no notice, and no ID, saying they're here to fix such-and-such. They're usually truly shit at their jobs and clearly can't get work with anyone else. We've had someone who isn't a joiner come out to 'fix' the door, and his 'fix' was planing it down to the wood while it was pouring rain (so it swells shut and is more damaged than before). We've also had glass window panes replaced with perspex, and plaster falling off the walls only to be told 'just hoover it up, it's to be expected'.

We currently have rising damp that's leaving mould everywhere.

I think the thing I hate as a tenant is just being taken for a ride all the time. You have no leverage. You can say 'you are breaking the law,' but there's very little you can do about it unless you are willing to alienate your landlord and/or move very frequently. OTOH landlords can spin out repairs almost indefinitely. Good ones won't, but a bad landlord who knows the law can be awful, and there's really nothing much you can do to stop it.

Landlord owned the house until she got married, she was also our estate agent and her best friend lived next door. She’d visit her friend and knock to tell us stuff about the house which drove us mad.

When we bought a house the oil man sent £1000 worth of oil that my grandma bought as a house warming present to her house and when we called to say they were taking it back (less than an hour later) she had put a padlock on the gate. Eventually I had to take her to the small claims court.

@Rainbowandscarlett - sounds like the plumber who badly installed our bathroom. It was leaking into the kitchen because I had the temerity to wash my hair in the shower. Nothing to do with a loose joint or unsealed bath!

In the first flat I bought, I fixed everything I possibly could to the walls and ceiling with No More Nails. You name it, I stuck it - smoke alarm, blinds, light fixtures, curtain poles, mirrors, that stuff is magic. I lived in the flat for a few years and, through a combination of being light-handed and sheer luck, it all stayed glued in place.

I then moved away and started letting the place out. Unfortunately, my first tenant was neither as light handed nor as lucky as I was, because within the first week, literally everything had fallen off, some of it in the middle of the night, giving her a terrible fright. Which makes me the terrible landlord. In my defence, I did immediately arrange for a man with a drill to go round and put everything back up, this time with screws.

Oof, quite a few!

One landlord didn't tell us that the oven had a hole in the bottom where it was rusted through and it was covered with foil when we moved in so we didn't see it. We realised when it caught fire. Took him 6 months to replace it.

Same landlord gave us 2 month's notice to leave because he lost the property in his divorce settlement. When the boiler died 3 weeks later he told us he wasn't spending any more money on the place because it was his ex wife's problem now and made us sign a document detailing all the things his ex wife had claimed he was doing weren't true (refusing access to the property, etc etc) 😳 Also the boiler died in November so we had no heating or hot water in the winter with 2 kids under 2.

A different landlord didn't do any sort of inspection or inventory upon moving in but then when we left charged us for things that were already there (eg, repainting for a whole room with a small scratch on one wall, professional cleaning, new carpets etc) all for oddly specific amounts that miraculously totally the whole exact deposit on the house. Funnily enough refused to provide receipts to prove these amounts had been paid and to who. I actually went back to the property afterwards (it was empty) and none of said 'repairs' had been done at all. He also changed the locks without telling us 2 days after we left and then charged us for a piece of furniture that was still in the property to be removed (we'd told him we were coming back to get it).

I refused to release the deposit from the company that held it until we could come to an agreement and was told to wait until further notice. 6 months later I was fed up waiting and it turned out my LL had put in a solo claim, saying that we had disappeared and he couldn't contact us. He was supposed to notify us of his intention to do this to give us a chance to respond. He did. He sent the letter notifying us to HIS house - our old house, ie, the one we had just moved out of!! He had our actual new address but purposely sent the letter to the old house knowing we would never receive it and he would receive 100% of the money. I was furious but was heavily pregnant and depressed and had no idea how to fight him so I just had to leave it.

Oh, he also tried to claim hundreds of pounds in rent from the council AFTER we moved out because it took him a few weeks to find a new tenant and as we were on HB at the time he decided it was our/the council's responsibility to make up the shortfall. The council laughed at him, told him it doesn't work like that and told him to jog on 😂

I rented in a shared flat above a shop. Next door was a takeaway who kept a load of rubbish out the back. We had rats. There was a hole under the sink where they would come in. There was a gap through into my allocated food cupboard and the rats would go through. I couldn't store any food in there. Any packets would get nibbled through and even tins would end up with rat poo or stinky wee on them. They would scuttle out whilst you were in the kitchen and i even caought one halfway up the stairs once.

The landlord nailed a wooden board over the boiler controls so we couldn't turn the heating up, so it was always freezing. One bathroom was broken, so we only had one toilet and shower between 7.

He wouldn't give me my deposit back when I just gave up and moved on, not wanting to deal with it any more. He then called me up after the blue after 6 years to return it in full. Very weird.

Oh, gosh, also!

The time when I was in the shower and the plumber came in unannounced (having been given the key). The poor man was far more embarrassed than me, but when I rang the agent to complain, they had a right go at me because he'd left.

Likewise the time when I rented a room in a shared house and someone walked straight in to measure it up, while I was asleep in bed. That was how I found out the whole building had been condemned because of the rodent infestation, and our contract was being broken early with a public health order.

@ComtesseDeSpair

In the first flat I bought, I fixed everything I possibly could to the walls and ceiling with No More Nails. You name it, I stuck it - smoke alarm, blinds, light fixtures, curtain poles, mirrors, that stuff is magic. I lived in the flat for a few years and, through a combination of being light-handed and sheer luck, it all stayed glued in place.

I then moved away and started letting the place out. Unfortunately, my first tenant was neither as light handed nor as lucky as I was, because within the first week, literally everything had fallen off, some of it in the middle of the night, giving her a terrible fright. Which makes me the terrible landlord. In my defence, I did immediately arrange for a man with a drill to go round and put everything back up, this time with screws.

This is amazing, biggest laugh I've had all week! Thank you

@ComtesseDeSpair

In the first flat I bought, I fixed everything I possibly could to the walls and ceiling with No More Nails. You name it, I stuck it - smoke alarm, blinds, light fixtures, curtain poles, mirrors, that stuff is magic. I lived in the flat for a few years and, through a combination of being light-handed and sheer luck, it all stayed glued in place.

I then moved away and started letting the place out. Unfortunately, my first tenant was neither as light handed nor as lucky as I was, because within the first week, literally everything had fallen off, some of it in the middle of the night, giving her a terrible fright. Which makes me the terrible landlord. In my defence, I did immediately arrange for a man with a drill to go round and put everything back up, this time with screws.

Oh, my gosh! Did the tenant thing s/he was being haunted?!

That's hilarious. But absolutely does not make you a terrible landlord.