Your relationship with your landlord (if, like me, you are unfortunate enough to have one): Good or bad?

Also here, not only is it not kosher for landlords/agents to turn up unnanounced, its ILLEGAL. They HAVE to give 24 hours notice, and CANNOT let themselves in when they like/change the locks and evict you without notice/do an inspection any more than twice a year/etc

We are lucky to have pretty good tenants rights laws here.

- the washer/dryer we were assured we could use when viewing the flat (and which we took account of in allowing for a slightly higher rent than we originally intended to pay) become TOTALLY UNUSABLE, NEVER USABLE, WHO ON EARTH EVER TOLD YOU YOU COULD USE IT once we'd moved in. Apparently the building's plumbing was too old to handle the wash cycle.

- there was a brothel on the third floor. No lie. There were always strange men in the stairwell, and its customers sometimes pressed our intercom button by mistake. On New Year's Day we were asked if we were open. I was personally accosted in the street by a man with some vendetta against someone in the brothel, demanding I let him into the building so he could settle it. On quietly mentioning this to the landlady, she warned me I was risking libel proceedings and asked what the hell I wanted her to do about it.

- we were advised by our university housing help service to make a list of all changes she made to the flat during our stay (new sink, new curtains, new tiling around the tub etc.), so that we couldn't be blamed for the terrible workmanship of her dodgy workmen. She refused to accept the list, and refused to sign when we sent it by registered letter.

(I'm sure she's a lovely woman, but by god, I think I dislike her more than anyone else I havn't met before)

Her son is now the landlord, and it's so much nicer.

Rotten bitch.

Luna's, er, punchline to the story is genius in its evil glee.

At 10:30 on a Saturday morning I got a knock at the door. The agent was a fairly nice guy in a suit, the owner looked like a tradesman of some kind, and was pretty laid back. The first thing the owner said when he looked in my room (the front room of the house was) "Fuck! These guys are much cleaner than those other guys!" Walking through the house, he expressed several times how good our "setup" was, and that "you guys can have the lease as long as you want." He even offered us a new oven!

In conclusion, we have good landlord-equivalents.

I have only ever ONCE in the UK got my security deposit back from a landlord. I had a generally good relationship (perhaps too good when the landlord got drunk on Xmas and kept hugging me and telling me he thought of me as a daughter. Uh, that's nice, but please stop touching me) with them. But that was because they had made the flat functionally unlivable for several weeks due to rennovations, I turned up with my lawyer boyfriend and made noises that I would sue for the several weeks rent back if he didn't return my full deposit with no fuss. (Only good thing the fuckwit ex ever did for me.)

If you want horror stories, I could talk about the Dirt Queen, but I'd only start to twitch and feel homicidal. Suzy, we never did call Hackney County Council on her, did we? Except I heard from Daren after he moved out, that she was either unable to rent the rooms or else decided "to have a break from renting" - either way, that house was unfit for human habitation, let alone renting so that it was inhabited by FOUR ADULTS in a tiny 3 bedroom ex council flat. Crikey. If you go on holiday for a week, and come back to find that an army of your neighbours have let themselves into your flat and CLEANED THE PLACE UP BY FORCE to stop rats and cockroaches from invading the whole building, did it dawn on you that you might have a problem?

Then there was the guy who ran a boarding house in Islington. I really liked the house, and liked the guy. But then he sold the house - no problem, he said, he would take all his favourite tenants (including me) with him, and even pay for professional movers for all of us. Yay, landlord! A week before we were do to move, the sale fell through and we were all screwed. (Which is how I ended up in the lair of the dirt queen.) He did eventually give me my deposit back, but only after I managed to track him down, finding him living in a van in Shoreditch.

God, even just thinking about this makes me depressed.

I wish Catty were still posting here, so she could tell you about the managing agent who was so stupid they "forgot" to charge them rent for, like, three months. They gave Catty the wrong account number or something, so the direct debits just weren't going through. OK, they caught it about three months later, but still. Duh duh dumb.

My current landlord is a wonderful eccentric who inisists that you sit down with her and drink green tea while she chats about any and everything. I quite enjoy it even though I come close to missing my train whenever I go to see her.

When I was college our landlord came round at weekends to dig the garden!

(I should note, Adam, that your little emoticon smile makes even your cris de coeur lighthearted. ;-))

good, until i got really crabby and was a little manic after working a 14-hour day and called her at 10 PM to complain about the following:

about eight weeks ago my landlords removed the doorbell system in the building. they said it was because it wasn't working anyway, except that it _was_ working for all but one or two tenants (of six) and they didn't bother to ask the rest of us. they sort of half-assedly apologized and said they would replace the system "in a few weeks." so, eight weeks later, they tell me "they're looking into options."

is it wrong to think that a doorbell is a bare-minimum convenience for apartment living? i don't know when packages are delivered (so i end up having to drive out several miles to the UPS and FedEx warehouses every other week), friends with cell phones have to through pebbles at my window so i know they're there.... it's a pain in the ass. but the landlords don't seem to have much urgency in replacing the system. there's nothing specific about doorbells in the lease, of course.

basically -- WTF.

that is a reasonable thing to be crabby bout.

last night we blew a fuse. this has happened before so we went down to what we have always believed to be the fuse box and changed it. we had a heater going in the living room, and in the kitchen i had turned the microwave on. when i then turned the toaster on, the power went out again. we changed the fuse - which didn't look like it had broken - but still no power. called the landlord who told us we'd blown a fuse and to change it... in the fuse box in the closet. except there is no fuse box in the closet. we told him what we'd already done, but he just kept saying 'no no no that's not your fuse box, yours is in the closet'. finally he just got mad, said he was coming over and hung up. he gets here, barges into the closet and starts rummaging round for the fuse box. which isn't there. he wanders round for a bit, looking for the missing fuse box, all the while my husband is telling him 'dude we've blown a fuse before and changed it at this big box downstairs that has our apartment number written on it' but LL just keeps talking over him and returning to the closet to try and find the missing fuse box.

eventually they go downstairs. in the meantime we've discovered that one thing still seems to have power in our house: the light in the foyer.

FINALLY the LL explains that what we thought was the fuse box is actually a kind of mains box or something, but that we should have our own little fuse box for the apartment. eventually he locates it (about 3 feet from the main fuse box). the wiring in our house is a thousand years old and we don't have circuit breakers.

how the fuck does a landlord with multiple properties not keep track of something as crucial as fucking fuse box??

the remaining mystery is how the fuse has blown before in the main box, and not in our individual box.

where's kingfish? pretty sure he could explain this.

Yeah, that's bullshit. I lived in a place with no doorbell system and ended up getting a little magnetic radio one. Worked a treat and was quite cheap.

My last landlord was brilliant because he was so incompetent/relaxed. The inventory amounted to "a flat, with some stuff. Few chairs, some crockery, and that." got my deposit back the day I moved out. XP

My situation is basically perfect. No contact whatsoever unless I want something fixed, which happens promptly whenever requested, and happens rarely because most everything is in good working order.

Wait, what's the question? Why the order of fuses blown is different? Might be b/c the wiring is old, b/c the two different circuits have different capacities, or b/c the two different fuses are rated differently.

Also: my relationship w/ my landlord is quite good. I've been here for over 5 years now, and he's been my roommate on & off. I've helped him find people to fit the open rooms in the house(and for the house his wife owns), deposit rent directly into his business bank account, and he occasionally lets me pay rent a week or more late. In fact, i just helped his wife move his step-daughter across town yesterday. Oh yeah, and I helped him market and later move out of his ill-advised shop a few years back.

The only reason I will move from this house is that this is the only house i've lived in since relocating to the west coast, and I want to try another part of the city(closer to the beer theater I frequent).

And also not living uphill from everything else would be a nice change of pace.

i don't even know my landlord. there's just some douche property manger i always deal with. this guy only has two gears - something gets done fast - or it's months of excuses and bs and headaches. i gave him a $50 deposit for some fancy front door key in the spring and he still hasn't put the actual locks in. i'm probably just going to subtract the $50 from my next rent payment. also right now i'm getting the runaround with having the ceiling in my bathroom fixed. is leaking/falling apart, has squirrels living above it and has been this way for months. meanwhile the lock on my apt front door stops working and it's fixed that afternoon (new deadbolt!). i want to hate this man a full 100% BUT HIS INCONSISTENCY PREVENTS THIS.

my last landlord was cool, a little gruff but he hadn't raised my rent in 5 years since i got there. had an ongoing tension last year cos he thought we put baby wipes down the toilet because we were the only ones with a baby (exactly one year ago the toilets/showers backed up into the apartment and another one due to this) and right when we were about to move he finally got evidence someone else was doing it. anyway, no hard feelings there and now we're in a bigger apartment which has had like 4 different management companies/receiverships in the 5 months we've been here and this last one that came in tried to pretend that their new ownership voided our previous lease like uh no my cursory reading of the law tells me the lease stands as is and the manager's all like 'oh, well i'll sign it then sry about the misunderstanding' so i guess i'm back in shady stickler assholeland oh well. i hate management companies.

Thought this would be bumped by Rev :/

my last landlord coerced the super into testifying in court that i was a "gangster."

true story

lol

gang vivant

the story of that building basically played out like king lear meets the people's court

i <3 absurd trouble.

I lived in a place with no doorbell system and ended up getting a little magnetic radio one. Worked a treat and was quite cheap.

the problem is that if i installed one of those, everyone looking for someone in one of the other five apartments in the building would be buzzing me. i asked my landlord if he knew of one of those radio bells that might have multiple bells for a multi-apartment building, and once again, he's "looking into it."

they are really nice people but this is some straight up B.S. how would they feel without a doorbell?

a week or two to figure out how to install a new system is fine, even three weeks. but eight? with no clear date on the horizon? ugh.

yeah, a doorbell is necessary. the doorbells at my place don't actually work, but we rent the majority of a house (apart from a studio on the back) so we can hear knocks on the doors at least.

my landlords are also not great at fixing things quickly, especially because they don't live locally. when there are problems we do some back and forth emailing and phone calling and they get their uncle or something to come look at things and try to fix them, which usually doesn't work but sets us back from calling an actual plumber or electrician for a few weeks. the heat didn't work in the back studio apartment for about two months, and the tenant refused to pay her rent, and it just got fixed for real LAST WEEK. that is messed up. we are trying to learn to manage the landlords by calling them a lot and making threats to get things fixed ourselves and just take the cost out of the next month's rent though.

don't know when packages are delivered (so i end up having to drive out several miles to the UPS and FedEx warehouses every other week)

(a) track one package, leave a note on your mailbox on day that fedex/ups is coming to call your #.

, friends with cell phones have to through pebbles at my window so i know they're there....

it's 2010, are your friends Amish?

I'm in a super-unfortunate sitch wherein I live with the 50-year-old son of my landlord (who, being unemployed and most likely unemployable, would probably live in his mother's basement if she didn't own a completely different building within which he could reside). Luckily, she's mostly completely absent, but on the rare occasion when her son has absented himself from the premises, she's made herself somewhat at home, trotting around the place with her boyfriend and leaving notes ('Do the dishes every day.', 'Take out the trash every day.') with abandon. I have copies, though, of the Illinois municipal code to wave in her face next time she feels like a drop by so that I can let her know that, no, it's actually not legal and okay for her to just parade around inside of a property she owns with no notice just because she owns said property.

I've never had a landlord that I didn't think deserved many swift punches to the breadbasket.

i don't have a doorbell either. i'm actually responsible for disconnecting the thing myself tho - since mine was the only one remotely near the door, i would be the go-to buzzer for every freak who wanted someone in the building.

when i count - i've had two landlords i would consider good (one i'm still friends with!), two decent, one bad and one inexcusable abomination.

amateurist: yeah, I had to whap a huge "Apt 2: STET" sign on the doorbell

my landlady is great. she is actually the property manager, i guess. the building is owned by someone else. but she lives in the bldg and is super on top of things and incredibly sweet. i barely ever see her at all, but we exchanged a shitload of emails before i moved since i was coordinating from new york. now i basically just slip rent under her door once a month and she slips a receipt under mine a few days later. this month, she wrote "happy holidays, theresa!" on it :)

my last landlords were terrible, horrible people who took over a year to re-caulk our bathroom (the caulk was literally falling off and disintegrating) and who refused to cooperate in verifying my residence when i was applying for this apt. i think a previous tenant took them to some kind of court tv show over something once, but i am not sure what the issue was. anyway, the tenant won and crazy landlady cried on tv! haha. didn't stop them from being awful, though.

My husband loves to boast about how he's never paid rent.

50% of my job is supervising/negotiating with landlords, they're in large part disgusting savages. The other 50% is handling tenants, they're in large part disgusting savages.

I'm pretty much on-the-ball wrt tenancy legislation, prevailing rent rates, landlord's legal duties etc- which would be useful if my landlord wasn't my dad, living 3000 miles away, leaving all bills/maintenance/issues to me and only paying the mortgage along the most casual of timetables.

that karenandellen blog is amazing. to think, my property management was cranky about chipping in for a hotel bill the night my bathroom flooded. i could have asked them to pay for a vcr!

OMG I cant believe those letters are real!

holy crap, my landlord just sent me an email that is just a torrent of abusive language and insults. this is after she called me on the phone the evening before thanksgiving for the single purpose of chastising and insulting me for some imagined grievance that i still do not understand. (i tried asking her what she wanted, but she only kept insulting me; finally i told her i was hanging up, and hung up.) some background: she is very likely an alcoholic, so i have every reason to suspect that drink is a factor in her behavior.

given that i don't stand to gain anything from engaging with her, i certainly won't reply. but i'm dreading encountering her again. and dreading checking my inbox lest i receive another screed.

i wish it wasn't so difficult to move.

my landlords btw are the worst kind. they are convinced they are our 'friends,' and not only expect to be treated as such and afforded all kinds of indulgences (including not having to abide by the lease in re. when to enter apartment), but communicate with us with a familiarity (which as noted above sometimes includes insults and verbal abuse) that we never had any intention of extending to them. and when we ask for repairs -- and god forbid, when we ask for a second time after they haven't been done -- they react, not as professionals attending to a task, but as aggrieved intimates, wondering when you are going to stop nagging.

when we had to remind them to abide by the lease and give 24 hours notice before entering, they reacted not unlike spurned lovers, responding not only with lengthy expressions of profound disappointment ("if it has to be this way..." "i wish it hadn't come to this...") but also a bunch of passive-aggressive, i-know-you-are-but-what-am-i rhetoric ("you, too, will have to follow the letter of the law...")

oy vey!

landlords are scum

Eesh amateurist. That sucks.

I was groomsman at our landlord's/lady's wedding this summer. Theyve rather fallen into the trade but its been a serious benefit to us ito what we're paying- same as we were in our one bed flat last year for a three storey house now. Does lead to us rather gingerly approaching issues of repair etc but who'm I kidding that's an Irish thing tbh.

My two aren't scum as it happens but whatre you gonna do huh

amateurist, that's a f'ing pain. Current landlady is fantastic, rent is comparatively low, she is willing to put money into reasonable running repairs and new items where necessary, and as a consequence I'm terrified that come January she's going to say 'Actually I'm going to sell' as she could make a *packet* on the place.

Previous landlady was nuts. She once went to the police because my upstairs neighbour, a 47-year-old man, had not come back by 8:30 on a Friday

*knock at my door*
'Tom. Nicholas, he is not back.' (She was Greek, hence the slightly hobbled English grammar).
'Ok.'
'He is *always* back after work.'
'Maybe he's gone out, after all it is a F...'
'He is a *good* *boy*, he would not do this.'
'Well Helen I think you should probably wait a m...'
'I go... to the police!' (This said with extraordinary melodrama)
'Helen, I really don't think...'
'No! I know something has happened!'
'Have you tried texting him?'
'Tom! I cannot use this... thing' (flourishes phone at me)
'Let me send him a message'

I then spend about twenty minutes trying to remember how to text on her Nokia, I really can't remember why I couldn't use my own phone.

hi nick it's
fizzles from
downstairs here.
helen was
wondering where
you are. she's a
bit worried.
i said i'm sure
you're fine but
perhaps you
could drop
her a line &
let her know
you are ok.

I persuaded Helen to give it a couple of hours, and then I was sitting in my easy chair at about 11, reading and drinking a glass of something or other, and a f'ing NOTE is slipped under my door, like something out of Arthur Conan Doyle - I've still got it in fact - saying 'Tom, Nicholas is not back. I go to the police. Helen'

Next morning on the way into work, must have been back when I was doing shifts in fact. I picked up and it was Nicholas: 'Hi Tom it's Nick. What's going on, I'm in *Paris*'.

I also had to go to her hotel room around the corner once (she lived in France but visited periodically), I can't for the life of me remember why, and she complained about the Indonesians who ran it. And I periodically had to field people at the front door dunning her for money.

Prior to *that* place it was Racist South African Jill and Texan Bill. Jill was actually the worst person in the world. She ignored conventions like not entering the property without permission etc because it was her place you see? I remember vividly standing in the kitchen while she picked up my teapot with serious distaste - like many normal teapots owned by normal people it had some light brown tea stains on its exterior and she said - my landlady remember - 'you must really use some elbow *greeze*'

She also once said she'd spoken to someone at the estate agent's who was ever so nice but when she got there he turned out to be *BLICK!*

As so often, the question is not merely one of the grotesquely offensive racism, but why on earth they think you will be receptive to this nauseating crap in the first place. I did have the presence of mind to say as rudely as possible 'What on earth has that got to do with anything?' to which she responded with a great display of irritating meaningfulness 'Well, you know.'

these sound a lot worse than mine - posted this on the ia thread t'other day.

i mostly get on fine with mine but he has real form for berating females - he can be aggressive with me also but i've learned long ago just to create an illusion of him "winning" so that he fucks off for the next nine months.

however i recently told him there's some mould in our newly redecorated bathroom - the roof is a little yellow - there's a long history of this in there. i mentioned that the shower had some mould in it which i removed with industrial mould remover and he then started asking about the cleaner, when she comes in, how good a job she does etc, then asked when she is coming in next as he wants to "have a word".

he kept pressing on this until i eventually had to just say that i paid her and he could raise any issue he had with me - he is like a "normal" family man type with plenty of money, or that's how he'd be seen in the world, but i find this actually reprehensible, the level of effort he's putting in to try and have some time alone with the woman who cleans my house, so he can shout at her presumably or make her feel like shit.

it is incredibly hard not to just unload on him and tell him what a piece of shit he is - treat him with his own medicine, but since i want to keep living there it's not an option.

in the end he came around and was relaxed and friendly about everything, which always happens. wields the power one minute and the next it's as if you're old pals.

Awful. He does endless construction and has driven everyone in my building (who were here before he bought it) out except me and a bodybuilder next door. I hate him.

I gave my last friendly-and-affable-cum-turn-the-screws landlord both barrels when we moved out and I must say it was quite satisfying to thoroughly demolish the unwarranted ideas he had of his own benevolence and integrity

it is honestly archetypal landlord behaviour, like straight out of a period drama

I think it's the landlord's natural state

"protecting their investment" which has people in it

I'm used to dealing with faceless letting agents so this guy was a breath of fresh air in terms of having a personification of the specific disgust I eventually realised not a nightmare landlord situation by any stretch of the imagination but the mismatch between his actions/inactions and his preening idea of himself were too much

You said it mate.

THankfully see them very infrequently but now having trouble over a washing machine.
They have 2 offices one in this town which I didn't have the phone number for and one in Limerick which is about 100 miles away. It seems that my main contact with them has changed jobs so is no longer handling things. She told me to email a maintenance email address which I did tho get an automatic response that had the Limerick number on. I rang that a couple of days later and they sent somebody out to check on things. He said he'd get back to the office and I'd hear from them within a few days. I missed a phone call about 3 days later that I assumed was in response to him calling out. Looks instead as though it had to do with the email which was now a week and a bit old. I called them back later the afternoon of the phonecall and thought they were going to get back to me at the beginning of thsi week which they didn't do.
So I rang them again and got a phonecall yesterday from somebody who was going to come and take a look, I told him that somebody had already been around a week and a half ago & said it was the heating element. So he left it and I'm wondering if I should have had him come around to repeat something that had already been done. He did say he would send somebody out to see me though, but I haven't heard anything today.
JUst seems like there si a total lack of communication on their part.

I only know there is a local office because I've stumbled on it when going down to a cafe in town. All their headed paper refers to the other office.
I'm just hoping that there is going to be a washing machine at some point. I have washing accumulating. Have had to do a couple of service washes already. There are no longer do it yourself launderettes in town and the laundry places are actually in town or the closest one is about 3/4 of a mile away. Drag.

Otherwise just hoping that things are going to go smoothly since this place is currently on sale. Though th etenants are supposedly not effected.
JUst hope I keep having hands off people but that also seems to mean what repairs get done are done really slowly.

Actually hoping that whoever takes this place over can change the rubbish set up. These ones have set up a communal rubbish point that tends to be a major mess and doesn't have any provision for food waste going to compost rather than groundfill which I'm not very happy about.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/17/bill-de-blasio-slept-here