Who Do I Claim From Please Help

olavbear

Hi All I hope you can help

I live in rented accomodation , and since the start of dec06
I notice that one of my bedroom walls was damp , ie. when it rains water runs down the inside of the wall ,my bedroom is so cold it uninhabitable, and ive been sleeping in my livong room.

I reported this to my agency and nothing was done, just after Xmas i looked in my wardrobe ( they are built in and next to the damp wall , and carpeted ) the floor was completley soaked from the bottom up so somthing must have overflowed under the house as the water WHEN IT RAINS is coming through the floor , anyway , since my parents had gone away for december , they had lent me their flat screen tele , i have a tele of my own , so i store my tele in the cubboard as i had no where else to store it

Its now been damadged due to the water , i have house insurance , but who do i claim from as its the landlords fault my goods were damaged , i had already repported it to the agency , and well before new year , and the situation was only inspected on the 4th JAN07

Who is responsible for the damage to my tele me or the agency , and who do i claim from , my house insurance or theres ?



HOPE YOU CAN HELP

THANKS IN ADVANCE

Astaroth

You have a number of options available. The easiest is to simply claim from your own home insurance and allow them to handle any counter claim that they see fit against landlord etc. If they successfully claimed against them then it would not count as a claim against your policy. My word of caution about taking this route is that people who work in home insurance tend not to be as good at making recoveries than say motor insurance claims people simply because it is much rarer that their is another liable party.

The other route is to try to claim directly from the landlord themselves, if they have proper "buy to let" insurance this will cover third party liability for damages caused to the tenants property for which they are liable.

My concern with the claim however would be the fact you had a known problem and yet kept the screen on the floor despite this... I am playing devils advocate so dont shoot the messenger but I can certainly see that they would argue that you had to accept some if not all responsibility for the damage.

The second point would also be that they would certainly assertain the cause of the problem. I am not a building expert by any stretch of the imagination but find it fairly surprising that it rains outside and it starts coming in all down the walls.... certainly if it was coming through a window or such then fair enough but for it to come through the bricks is surprising. I would certainly be worried that, esp as the room is cold, that the issue isnt a condensation issue. Whilst there is some argument that there may be insufficient ventilation and this is a contributory factor to the condensation the tenant is almost always held the majority responsible (I have known a few problems make various types of claims for condensation and none have been 100% successful)

It is also worth noting that as a third party claimant you are not entitled to "new for old" but would only get its second hand value (assuming it isnt repairable)

olavbear

The mantanace person that came out said it was a leak in the roof this is why the wall is getting wet ,,as with the wardrobe when i moved into the property a year ago , there were some prob withe pipes under the house , under the wardrobe and it had been fixed, the wardrobe as quite far from the wall and i only discoverd the tv was damaged after the damage had been done , when i stored it there , the floor was completley dry , is that still my fault ?

Astaroth

As I say, I am playing devils advocate... there is the classic catch 22 situation where either you say you knew about it "ages ago" and therefore they say there is contributory negligence for having stored it there in the first place or you say that you hadn't noticed the problem before/ only a couple of says before and therefore they can deny liability on the grounds the landlord could not have reasonably known of the issue/ reasonably didn't have sufficient time to repair.

It could be the landlord puts his hands up and says fair cop and offers to buy you a brand new one.... just dont want to paint too rosy a picture as these things are rarely that straight forward

clear_blu

Posted by mistake......

mattymoo

Astoroth has already given a very good answer but just one further point.

If you claim against you own insurance you are entitled to new for old cover - assuming you have a new for old policy (over 95% are these days). This means you would get a brand new equivalent TV.

If you claim against the landlord you can only claim for the value of the TV damaged. If this is an old CRT TV you could be looking at a figure below £100 - not even enough to buy a portable.

EDIT - just noticed Astoroth had in fact covered this in his first post but I'll leave it here just to reinforce the message