Another 'landlord claiming unfairly from my deposit' thread

23rdspiral

RGreenthumb wrote: »

Can I make a claim without knowing what the landlord wants to charge for and how much? Sorry if this is a silly question.

Yes file for your deposit to be returned... your claim right now is simply that it is taking an unreasonable amount of time to return your deposit.

Soleil_lune

And people wonder why landlords get a bad reputation. I don't think I have ever spoken to - or met - anyone who was in private let, who thought their landlord was amazing, and who never had any problems with the landlord whilst living there, and who left with no problems and got their full deposit back with no recourse at all.

There's always *something* isn't there? 'Oh it's a bit dirty' 'you left rubbish in the loft and I had to pay someone to take it away,' 'The garden was unkempt,' blah blah blah.

Honestly, the bulls**t that my old landlady came up with was laughable, especially when we left the place in a MUCH better state than we found it! Her attempt to get half of our £600 deposit failed dismally. We asked her to provide invoices and receipts for the money she claimed she spent on a gardener, the person she paid to remove rubbish from our house, and the skip she used to clear the stuff we left in the garden and shed.

When she said she hadn't got invoices, we asked her what the company was that she used for the gardening and rubbish removal, and she 'couldn't remember,' as it was just someone out of a card in the shop. And I said there was only 6 skip companies within a 30 mile radius and so I would ring around them all and see which one it was that she used for the skip.

As she never came up with ANYthing, I raised a dispute with the DPS, and said I wanted proof of the £300 she had had to spend to clean the house up and remove 'all our rubbish.' (We left NOTHING.)

About a week after we were informed that we would get the full deposit back.

Lying cow.

Hope you get your deposit back OP. Don't let the landlady win. Many of them try this on; making stuff up to rip off the tenants to put a few hundred quid in their pockets.

RGreenthumb

We've just filed the dispute so thanks for the advice and fingers crossed. I don't know what annoys me most really - the sheer number of phone calls I've had to make to chase it up, the fact that we left the property on a much better state than we found it in (I mean come on, I had to clean up PUBIC HAIRS!!!) or that the LL has "compiled evidence" two months after we moved out!

cynicalgit_2

Soleil_lune wrote: »

And people wonder why landlords get a bad reputation. I don't think I have ever spoken to - or met - anyone who was in private let, who thought their landlord was amazing, and who never had any problems with the landlord whilst living there, and who left with no problems and got their full deposit back with no recourse at all.

There's always *something* isn't there? 'Oh it's a bit dirty' 'you left rubbish in the loft and I had to pay someone to take it away,' 'The garden was unkempt,' blah blah blah.

Honestly, the bulls**t that my old landlady came up with was laughable, especially when we left the place in a MUCH better state than we found it! Her attempt to get half of our £600 deposit failed dismally. We asked her to provide invoices and receipts for the money she claimed she spent on a gardener, the person she paid to remove rubbish from our house, and the skip she used to clear the stuff we left in the garden and shed.

When she said she hadn't got invoices, we asked her what the company was that she used for the gardening and rubbish removal, and she 'couldn't remember,' as it was just someone out of a card in the shop. And I said there was only 6 skip companies within a 30 mile radius and so I would ring around them all and see which one it was that she used for the skip.

As she never came up with ANYthing, I raised a dispute with the DPS, and said I wanted proof of the £300 she had had to spend to clean the house up and remove 'all our rubbish.' (We left NOTHING.)

About a week after we were informed that we would get the full deposit back.

Lying cow.

Hope you get your deposit back OP. Don't let the landlady win. Many of them try this on; making stuff up to rip off the tenants to put a few hundred quid in their pockets.

Had a similar experience.
Some Landlords just see the Tenants deposits as an on going property improvement scam.
They're always nice to you when they're getting the rent each month, but once you give notice they stab you in the back.

dodger1

Soleil_lune wrote: »

And people wonder why landlords get a bad reputation. I don't think I have ever spoken to - or met - anyone who was in private let, who thought their landlord was amazing, and who never had any problems with the landlord whilst living there, and who left with no problems and got their full deposit back with no recourse at all.

Well out of five people who rent (me, ex wife, two daughters and brother) only one has ever had a problem and that was only when daughter was a uni student. All other problems have been dealt with professionally and promptly, of course there are bad LLs just as there are bad tenants but don't think there aren't good ones, there are.

Angelicdevil

Soleil_lune wrote: »

And people wonder why landlords get a bad reputation. I don't think I have ever spoken to - or met - anyone who was in private let, who thought their landlord was amazing, and who never had any problems with the landlord whilst living there, and who left with no problems and got their full deposit back with no recourse at all.

There's always *something* isn't there? 'Oh it's a bit dirty' 'you left rubbish in the loft and I had to pay someone to take it away,' 'The garden was unkempt,' blah blah blah.

Honestly, the bulls**t that my old landlady came up with was laughable, especially when we left the place in a MUCH better state than we found it! Her attempt to get half of our £600 deposit failed dismally. We asked her to provide invoices and receipts for the money she claimed she spent on a gardener, the person she paid to remove rubbish from our house, and the skip she used to clear the stuff we left in the garden and shed.

When she said she hadn't got invoices, we asked her what the company was that she used for the gardening and rubbish removal, and she 'couldn't remember,' as it was just someone out of a card in the shop. And I said there was only 6 skip companies within a 30 mile radius and so I would ring around them all and see which one it was that she used for the skip.

As she never came up with ANYthing, I raised a dispute with the DPS, and said I wanted proof of the £300 she had had to spend to clean the house up and remove 'all our rubbish.' (We left NOTHING.)

About a week after we were informed that we would get the full deposit back.

Lying cow.

Hope you get your deposit back OP. Don't let the landlady win. Many of them try this on; making stuff up to rip off the tenants to put a few hundred quid in their pockets.

When I rented (several properties) I never had a problem with any of my LLs or indeed, getting all of my deposit back each time.

As with anything in life, there is good and bad.

Tenants can protect themselves from the bad LLs (with respect to deposits) these days by ensuring they have evidence of the state they left the property in and if there's an inventory, going through it with a fine toothed comb at the beginning of their tenancy and addressing any discrepancies.

joshw86

Soleil_lune wrote: »

And people wonder why landlords get a bad reputation. I don't think I have ever spoken to - or met - anyone who was in private let, who thought their landlord was amazing, and who never had any problems with the landlord whilst living there, and who left with no problems and got their full deposit back with no recourse at all.

With the exception of my current landlord, my past experience has been with people who are chancers at best and downright rotters at worst.

The bulk of my bad experiences with landlords has been similar to a lot of other posters in this thread: at the end of the tenancy, the landlord chances their arm and presents a fanciful list of items and their associated costs to be deducted from the deposit, only to climb down without a fight when presented with comprehensive evidence showing them to be full of it.

My worst ever experience was in a tenancy where we had paid no deposit and where no inventory had been made. We rented it unfurnished, and we were the first tenants in after a complete refurbish. Five years down the line when we moved area and wanted to bring our contract to an end, we contacted the landlord multiple times well in advance of the deadline requesting an inspection of the property, but our requests fell on deaf ears. Knowing that the landlord was a bit of a neat freak, we spent days cleaning the bare property in the crossover period with our next rental. I'm talking a fine-toothed comb level of cleaning here: tile grout scrubbed; paint scuffs touched up; holes from picture hangings made good, kitchen deep cleaned. On the very last day of the tenancy having still not head back from the landlord, we took our final meter readings, locked up the property and popped the keys in an envelope through the landlord's door. Eight weeks or so later we started receiving hysterical text messages from the landlord about what terrible people we were: we had flown by night expecting the landlord to cover our final bills; we had left the place filthy; we hadn't reported a leaking gutter (except we had). These texts carried on for weeks leaving my partner distraught, and an agent started chasing us up for money we didn't have for cleaning and repair jobs that genuinely didn't need doing. Thankfully that all fizzled out in the end, and I suspect the agent realised how nuts this particular landlord was and that the property we have vacated was eminently rentable without any financial outlay.

Just so I don't leave anybody with a bad taste in their mouth and a sense of abject hopelessness, I will say that our current landlord is utterly incredible. He allows us to keep pets, to decorate to our tatse (including, in some cases, changing fixtures and fittings), he always responds to problems within a matter of hours, and he even provided us with a budget for landscaping the nest of weeds that was the front garden. Hooray for good landlords, they do exist!

dodger1

joshw86 wrote: »

With the exception of my current landlord, my past experience has been with people who are chancers at best and downright rotters at worst.

The bulk of my bad experiences with landlords has been similar to a lot of other posters in this thread: at the end of the tenancy, the landlord chances their arm and presents a fanciful list of items and their associated costs to be deducted from the deposit, only to climb down without a fight when presented with comprehensive evidence showing them to be full of it. Hooray for good landlords, they do exist!

The problem with forums is of course most people come on to have a whinge. It's all very one sided because the vast majority of happy tenants who have good landlords simply don't bother to come on and start a praising thread. Glad you have found a good one

RGreenthumb

I have also had some good landlords, but this one is definitely leaving a sour taste in my mouth!

The latest from the person at the letting agents is that they can no longer disclose any information about the issue. All they can say is that the LL wishes to withhold some of our deposit, but they can't tell me how muc or what for. What a joke!

Here's hoping the TDS come through for us.

joshw86

dodger1 wrote: »

The problem with forums is of course most people come on to have a whinge.

I appreciate that, but in my personal experience as a renter the landlords I have had have all displayed at least some of the traits mentioned in this thread with only a single exception.

Many of my friends and family are also inveterate renters, and the balance of their experiences definitely supports the idea that shady characters are more common than good eggs. That isn't to say that all the renters I know have had truly terrible experiences with renters - they haven't - but comfortably over half of tenancies amongst my acquaintances end with some manner of unfair deposit deduction. Very comfortably.

This isn't exactly surprising given the shameful state of the housing and rental markets in this country. In a market where it's possible nay encouraged for people to profiteer off a very basic need of others (I accept that this isn't the case for all landlords, but anyone with a "portfolio" of properties can go to an extra special corner of hell in my very humble opinion), that there is such a prevalence of two-bit, grasping Rossiters of landlords is entirely to be expected.