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!!!

We had a bad landlord. Never fixed anything properly, put wall tiles on the bathroom floor so they cracked when we stood on them, put illegal lights in the bathroom, had built a crap extension that was freezing and went mouldy no matter what we tried.
Our sink basin came away from the stand, we had young children and he wouldn't fix it. Got health inspector in at the end so he fixed the sink and mould, then kicked us out two months later. Didn't care, hated that house.

I was in a rented house when I had my son. The landlord used to come knocking on the door on an almost daily basis asking to buy my son. He only came if he knew my partner was away so I was always alone. Each time he increased his offer but each time I refused he increased the rent, our initial rent was £70 per week, within 6 months it was £330 and his offers were in the region of 5k! he'd stand there arms outstretched holding one handle of his carpet bag with the money stuffed in it.

Thankfully we soon moved and bought our own house but I can still picture him clear as day in the doorway

My son is 30 now and I still joke to him that I should have taken the money :-)

Tenant acquired 2 kittens (2nd floor flat - DPs former home) who destroyed furniture and were not litter trained. Nightmare to clean up when she left - cat faeces everywhere and deposit didn’t cover cost of ruined chairs/flooring etc. It’s a shame as I have no problem with pets but people like her ruin it for others.

We had to move due to circumstances and couldn't get our property to sell so decided to rent it out. Spent a lot of money getting a new boiler put into the property and having a professional come in to paint the whole house in boring white and had the real wood floors varnished and the monbloc driveway cleaned, sanded and sealed. We hired an agent to manage the property and do repairs.

Got tenants in very quickly, married couple no children. We asked for no smoking inside the property, were content for them to hand pictures etc but no decorating without content.

First day they moved in they called the agent to complain the windows were different from our neighbours and asked if we would replace them. We of course said no. They complained the gutters and down pipes were a different colour to others on the street and demanded we replace. We said no.

Right from the off the rent was constantly late, eventually they missed payments and the agent started getting complaints from neighbours regarding the garden and driveway being like jungles.

We asked the agent to inspect the property and they did. Only to find that they had started to paint some walls charcoal and black. There were holes in walls. They had a cat that we knew nothings about which shit all over the house and ripped the brand new hall carpet. They had started ripping up the wood flooring and whatever wall was left white had been stained yellow from the smoking in the property. The spare bedroom was clearly used as cat bedroom and stank.

We asked them to put it back to how it was and they refused, but brought their rent up to date so we couldn't evict on rent arrears. They got our phone number and started leaving threatening voicemails and began asking neighbours for our address to pay us a visit. We ended up offering to pay them to leave. They refused but stopped paying the rent again and eventually did a midnight move.

I cried when I finally got into the property with the state it was in. We spent thousands putting it back to a reasonable state. Over the many hours I spent cleaning it there were numerous debt collectors who came to the door looking for them. After some investigation it appears that they did this often but their previous landlord admitted he wanted rid so didn't bring it up in the checks but also said that the agent didn't ask about that type thing just if they paid rent etc not what kind of tenants they were

We had just had our second baby - think days not weeks - when we got notice to leave. Annoying but fine. LL kept hassling to come round and take photos and got fed up when we said no because of the newborn and trying to pack while finding somewhere to move to.

We arranged to hand over keys and do the final check of the house a couple of days after we moved out at which point she showed up and just started screaming at us about how the house was filthy (it wasn't) and how she was going to take all our deposit to fix the non existent mess followed up by how we were terrible parents - while she was screaming at us in front of our children. We ended up leaving, taking our keys with us and ringing the estate agents we'd gone through to tell them we'd drop the keys at their office. Thankfully we'd taken tons of photos before we left and after going through the tenancy deposit scheme got all our our deposit back but it was unnecessarily stressful even without the newborn baby!

I'd really be careful about sharing stories - I would bet money that this will end up in the Daily Mail...

As a student I rented a room in a shared house. I broke my bed, it was a crappy single thing made out of chipboard. Obviously I expected to pay for it out of my £400 deposit upon leaving. Couldn't believe it when she sent me the bill for a new double bed frame and mattress! Bastard!

We were renting when we had DD2. I was breast feeding and my boobs were so hot and painful. So before I fed DD in the morning I would go downstairs and make a cup of tea. With my tits out.

I stopped doing that when I found our landlord sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee ....he had come to do some work.

He didn't understand why I was so angry.

This was nearly 30yrs ago...

My mums tenants in her old flat turned it into a brothel. Red lights in all the windows, candles in everywhere, revolving door of men and women coming and going. The estate agents were too scared to do anything about it, so she spied on them one night got all the evidence and told them to get out the next morning or she’d go to the police.

So every time you see posters on MN whingeing about how all LLs are grasping selfish cunts profiting on the back of poor tenants, please remember that some LLs try their best and get ripped off by tenants.

But you didn't try your best. You're admitting that. You did something silly you shouldn't have done, and now you're blaming other people for it.

It wasn't my landlord but I'll never forget the HMO I went to a few years back - there was about 15 rooms in a 3 story townhouse, some of which were so tiny that the door would hit the bed when you opened it. They were so small I'm sure they weren't legal.

The LL lived downstairs in the house and had 4 dogs which he used to let have full run of the house and just pee and poop wherever they wanted. Every time I went there the hallway carpets were covered in dog poo and the whole place stank 🤢

I was a young single mum looking for somewhere cheap to rent. A friend of a friend told me that her brother had a two bedroom flat above his shop that he only used for storage and was looking to rent it out. She arranged for me to meet him to see if it would suit me. Flat was small but owner said that if I let him continue to use the smaller bedroom for storage he would only charge me half of what the normal rent would be. Plenty of room in the larger bedroom for me and my baby so I agreed to this arrangement.

The catch was that he would have the keys to the flat and would be letting himself in to collect stuff from storage as and when he he needed to. It wasn't ideal but he seemed trustworthy and I was desperate. A couple of times a week I would hear the door open and he would collect his stuff and leave again. He didn't enter the rest of the flat. This went on for a year or so.

One night very late I was in bed and heard the door open and someone going into the other room. I must have fallen asleep again and when I woke up in the morning I got up to use the bathroom and met a strange man in the hall. I almost died of fright. He managed to explain to me that he was related to the owner and had split up with his wife, owner had given him the keys and told him he could stay there as long as he needed to. When I called the owner to ask what the fuck he was playing at moving a stranger in with no warning, he told me I had no say in the matter as I was only paying half the rent.

I moved out the same day, thankfully a friend took us in. I managed to get all my stuff out the same week. Owner had the cheek to say I owed him 30 days notice.

Nothing by the standards of any of the TV programmes, but our first landlord was a pain. Always wanted the rent in cash, bodged jobs if anything needed repairing, spent nothing on maintenance if he could avoid it. When DS was 1 he announced he was selling the house and we needed to move out (we found out later this was because HMRC had caught up with him fiddling his company books and he needed to sell the house to clear his tax debts ). By the time we moved out relationship with him was completely destroyed - he tried to keep our deposit, we threatened to take him to court. He insisted on doing an inspection with some random bloke he claimed was from environmental health (god knows why) and mentioned the wallpaper that had peeled off the wall in what was going to be the nursery (because the plaster was crumbling), I went in on the morning of the inspection and used a combination of pritt stick and blu-tack to put the paper back up

@JackieWeaverRules, WTF?

You cannot compare your situation to landlords dealing sensibly with tenants. It is like someone saying 'well, I opened a shop and someone robbed it, so I said, please feel free. Now I know all customers are robbers.'

You are asking people to feel sorry for you because you took some very silly decisions. It's not fair to have a go at tenants because of that.

The first flat I rented (after Uni) was filled with old people's furniture. Like the owner had just died, and their children had decided to rent it out rather than de-clutter. Think mismatched armchairs (floral and brown), curtains filthy, kitchen so small there was no room for a fridge, so that was in the hall. The double bed turned out too be two odd single beds pushed together, with one missing leg, propped up instead by a plant pot. Seriously.

But it was cheap, and all I could afford, so stayed there a year! I know it was shit, but it was mine, and not shared.

My tenant murdered his 5 month old infant in the property.

I don't think it could get any worse.

We rented through a supposedly reputable agency. Lovely house, £2K/month, high end. Perfect tenants, made friends with the neighbours, landlord couldn’t have asked for more. Agency were crap! Sent people round to carry out inspections when we weren’t there, didn’t fix things that broke, you get the picture. It gives me great pleasure that having given us notice to move out in March last year, Covid hit and the house has been empty for a year pending sale. Serves the landlord and their rubbish agent right.

That's awful.

@itstrue

My tenant murdered his 5 month old infant in the property.

I don't think it could get any worse.

This breaks my heart

@TheCanyon

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

I didn't understand any of that. What did sugar daddies and cooked geese have to do with your landlord? What does her nationality have to do with anything? So many questions

My current landlady has had a man in the garden for about...6 months now building an "outhouse" at the bottom of our garden. What outhouse has VELUX WINDOWS

In my first flat which was an old house split into two, I was on my day off minding my own business and my boyfriend who I lived with was at work.

I heard a key in the lock and got up because he wasn't due home yet and my LL and her husband had let themselves in! They gave us all notice and put the flats on the market a couple of months later so I think they had come at a time when they thought no one was home to give the place a look over before they gave us all notice and sold up.

In our next property, my boyfriend and I were there for a couple of years but ultimately broke up. He stayed in the flat for another 6 months but when he moved out he couldn't get the day off to do the handover with the LL.

My parents had given us the deposit which we should have gotten back since everything was in as good condition as when we'd moved in, so I offered to do the final check for him and took our mutual friend as company.

The LL started saying we'd damaged this, that and the other, it needed painting, a professional clean etc so my friend started quietly taking pictures on his phone - well! The LL got very angry and in his face, he was clearly not happy that the friend would have proof he was talking nonsense! We were as polite as anything but said if he wanted to keep the deposit we would be fighting to get it back and we were entitled to our own evidence to prove we hadn't broken the kitchen units etc.

We did get the deposit back funnily enough, but LL wasn't happy about it.

First place exH and I rented the LL was notoriously nosey, would spy on the tenants and had been caught in peoples flats before if they left the door unlocked. This was in a rural village, LL owned a converted house and lived across the road.

I remember one day she came knocking on my door to ask me why someone my husband and I knew was going inside with the guy in the other flat. She refused to believe me that they actually knew each other and were friends too for some bizarre reason!

It's a little village woman, mostly everyone around the same age as us knew each other in some way or another and it wasn't some nefarious plot going on, it was probably a cup of tea!

Couldn't believe she'd actually come to ask me what they were doing together, like I would know anyway

Current LL is lovely but recently upstairs had a plumbing issue so they asked if I would mind if the plumber came into mine to check it hadn't affected my pipes. I said yes that was fine.

Plumber turns up with a guy who I figure is his assistant maybe? Neither are wearing masks so I asked if they had any, plumber did and put his on, assistant doesn't but has a scarf.
Plumber starts work, assistant just stands chatting. Both their mask and scarf keep falling down

Then the LL turs up (wearing a well fitting mask) and comes to check with plumber how things are so there are now 3 of them all in my not very large kitchen while I'm watching them from the living room.

LL and assistant guy leave together and I poke my head into kitchen to ask how it's going. Plumber mentions that assistant guy is actually LL's cousin and nothing to do with him, had clearly just come for a nosey round during a visit or something

Lockdown fun

Most flats/houses I've rented as an adult have had an issue with rising damp or mould of some sort, this place is thankfully free of both!