Tenant doesn't report problems...

Jolanta_Nowak

... with the result that they become worse.

Is there any way of holding a tenant to account for, e.g. an unreported pipe leak which has eventually cost much more to rectify than it would have done if reported promptly?

I don't consider it fair to tenants to be continually 'inspecting'. I regard that as intrusive and it doesn't allow them to feel 'at home'. On the other hand, having been through two cases like this in recent times, I'm wondering whether I ought to shrug off such considerations.

Debt_Free_Chick

What does the tenancy agreement say?

Charlton_King

My guess is it's all down to word against word. Translation: no chance!

There's this theory that everything's on the landlord's side but this is just one instance of many where the poor old landlord just has to grit his/her teeth.

With many tenants taking the 'it doesn't belong to me so why should I bother?' view, this is becoming ever more of a problem.

morg_monster

Have these tenants had a lot of problems? I'm only asking because maybe they are worried about telling you something new has gone wrong... although you sound like a nice LL so maybe not.

This winter we have had to call our letting agency a bunch of times for completely different things (leaking toilet, broken ceiling light, curtain pole fell off wall), it takes an age to sort out each one as the LA is pretty slow and is a complete hassle for us, and I know that our lovely LL (living in Portugal atm) gets a real headache from it all too. Now the microwave has gone kaput and I'm just not sure I want to bug him about that too, might just buy ourselves a new one (which we'll be needing soon as buying our own place) and let him personally know before we leave...

But then that isn't exactly the same as a burst pipe and I guess probably he would want to know about the microwave anyway...

I would approach the tenants and just tell them that because they didn't tell you about it for a while it has cost you a lot more to fix, so please can they tell you as soon as they know or suspect anything is wrong, don't worry about the inconvenience at all. Phrasing it that way seems less confrontational even though you are understandably annoyed.
(I assume there's no way they couldn't have known about the leaky pipe?)

Debt_Free_Chick

Charlton_King wrote: »

My guess is it's all down to word against word. Translation: no chance!

There's this theory that everything's on the landlord's side but this is just one instance of many where the poor old landlord just has to grit his/her teeth.

With many tenants taking the 'it doesn't belong to me so why should I bother?' view, this is becoming ever more of a problem.

Pray the LL issued an inventory at the beginning of the tenancy and has photos to back it up.