My husband [26M] and I [23F] rented the bottom floor of a pretty large home right outside Denver for four months. We never had issues with the landlord while we were there; he lived right upstairs, and his only complaint was that the sliding door sometimes shut too hard (cold conditions occasionally made it hard to close). We negotiated our rent down a few hundred bucks before moving in, and our security deposit was one month's rent of $1500. Think a 900 sq ft studio.
Anyway, we go to leave and spend quite a few hours deep cleaning: dusting, vacuuming, sweeping, etc. A few weeks later, after we ask him when we would be receiving our security deposit, he comes back and quotes us at owing him $904 for the cleaning and maintenance of the apartment. Among the charges were:
$480 for 12 hours of cleaning
$225 for carpet cleaning ($150 for basic, extra $75 for two ski "rust" marks on the carpet. He actually worded this in his email as "paint shoe marks on marks, ski marks on wall & carpet on walls")
$89 refrigerator handle repair
$75 sliding door repair
$35 towel bar handle repair
We have sent numerous emails to him, first outlining that we didn't think it took twelve hours to clean one floor of a house and that we felt overcharged/charged for things that were basic maintenance of a rental property. After several weeks (we moved out in mid-March), we have finally received all of the invoices, only after sending duplicate emails and threatening small claims court. We are certain he is taking advantage of us, but not sure how to go about it. A huge regret: We didn't take pictures before we left, because we had never had issues with our landlord and always had pleasant conversations with him and his wife.
Our issues we have are:
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It should not have taken 12 hours to clean the basement of a house. It should not cost $480 to clean the basement of a house.
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The invoice he provided looks super sketchy: http://ift.tt/1XaD1SC. The name, address, etc. of the JP George character matches up, but he has never answered a phone call or email from us.
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The cleaning invoice also lists additional time to move-in date when 1) he had already extended us the offer of staying there until June, and only rents out in the winter, so there shouldn't have been other tenants in line, and 2) in what world do cleaning companies note move-in status on their receipts? Is that normal?
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The sliding door and towel bar should be a wear-and-tear expense of owning a rental property. It is a 20 year-old house, with the sliding door sticking and becoming harder (not impossible by any means) to close, and the drywall giving out where the towel bars were.
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The refrigerator handle did break under our use. However, the receipt he gave us quoted him buying a $96 stainless steel fridge handle, where the one we used was black plastic. (He also recently asked us to pay him the $7 difference between the quoted $89 and actual $96 price.) His receipt also was titled "ref handle #2 for bsmnt" which makes us think that he replaced both with something better than plastic, just because he wanted to.
Anyway, this whole situation has drug out for months. Maybe we are in the wrong about something, but everything points to us getting ripped off by this guy. He owns a small real estate company, so I'm sure he's done this to people in the past and gotten away with it. We're not going to roll over and let him get away with taking our money, if we are indeed being ripped off.
I have asked him for an electronic copy of the cleaning invoice, thinking that if I could pull the metadata from it, I could call him out if he was the original author and not this JG Home Services guy. Of course, he hasn't responded to that. Our huge obstacle is the fact that we didn't feel the need to take pictures. I know, we were very, very dumb in that regard.
Where do we go from here?
Submitted May 31, 2016 at 01:32PM by MoMeCoHi http://ift.tt/1VrTxvK personalfinance
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