Renting certainly has its perks, but it comes with its fair share of drawbacks. For some, these drawbacks are their shady landlords. Content has been edited for clarity.
Why Would The MIL Do That?
“My fiance and I decided to move in together, so we started looking for places. For some reason, one day when he was working late, his mother had apparently ‘found the perfect place,’ and texted him. Because he was busy, he asked me to meet her at the place.
So I drove over, and the neighborhood was sketchy. I saw her car pulled up at a tiny little house where three of the tiny houses were so close only the driveway kept the distance. She came out with a sketchy dude, and they ushered me in. The house was dark, so I tried to turn the lights on. No power.
I suggested we come back to look at it during daylight, but the landlord said ‘No, no. I have a flashlight here.’
He brought in a small flashlight, and we could only see what he decided to point the light on. MIL said something to the effect of ‘not bad, huh?’
I just stayed quiet. If I said anything, it would have been running screaming. Finally, we finished looking after I told them I had to be up for work in 5 hours (yeah, that kinda dark.) I took the landlord’s number, never intending to use it, and left.
About 2 hours later, I got a call from my fiance, asking if the place really was so nice that we had to sign a lease before the end of the night. I asked him what the heck he was talking about because I would rather build a mud hut. Apparently, his mother had signed his name to a year lease after I left. In order to get out of it, we would have had to take the landlord AND his mother to court, proving fraudulent signatures and the landlord’s awareness of fraudulent signatures.
So, considering that he had an illegal lease, we went to the landlord first. The landlord just said he had paperwork that couldn’t be disputed. And because it was too dark to take photos when I was there, I had no photographic evidence. The only evidence we had was the ‘what is happening’ texts.
That landlord also let us know how sketchy he was when we were there. He announced the number of weapons he had ‘so don’t worry about anyone trying to break in.’
And he pointed to his pit dog saying the dog would handle anything we didn’t like. He had actively trained the dog to be aggressive to people it didn’t know.
Long story short, this creepy dude said he’d knock the lease to a six-month lease while his dog got used to us. We finally said screw it. Six months is just six months, not worth the heinous amount of court fees and killing the relationship with his mother.
In those six months, the landlord’s dog would regularly growl at me in our tiny yard, making my fiance’s dog freak out. The stove stopped working. One of the shower heads stopped working. And the floor began to feel unstable. We even caught the landlord’s uncle sneaking out of the crawl space with a jug of water once because he had been cut off.
The six months were finally up, we told him we were out of there, and found a little brownstone we liked. Not even another 6 months later we saw the old landlord on the news having been caught distributing and making crack and LIGHTING HIS GIRLFRIEND ON FIRE.”
Suspicious Behavior
“We had been renting an apartment for about 7 years and had a couple of rent increases but it was always just before or just after an upgrade so we didn’t mind. The rental agency was great and responsive UNTIL the owner of the building sold it to some crazy people who wanted to do their own management.
We had already put in notice that we were going to be moving out because we had just bought a new house, and the notice was given to the old rental company a few days before the old owner sold to the new owner of the building. Because we had been renting for so long we were just on a month-to-month arrangement. They wanted us to sign another lease. We were already paid through our departure date so that made no sense. The woman was obviously hell-bent on getting us out of there.
She came by every morning and walked around the apartments looking inside and then opening them, claiming ‘Oh I keep forgetting which ones are the empty ones.’
That was a complete lie as all of them were occupied. She had her child peeing on the walkway outside my apartment one morning and then tried to say the stench was bad and I wasn’t cleaning up after my pet. I thought maybe my neighbor’s dog had peed outside my apartment, but it was a puppy and very rambunctious so sometimes it just got excited. I didn’t have a pet, but we will get to how she (the landlord) was caught in her own lie.
I came home one evening to see her sneaking out my back door. I went around the side of the building where I knew she would come out and ask what she was doing or what she was looking for.
She said, ‘Oh, I was just on your back porch. I didn’t go inside.’
I told her I had just pulled up in the parking lot, why would she be telling me she didn’t go inside? I told her, ‘Let’s go look at the back door.’
It was ajar and I have those slide locks that I lock every single day before I go to work. The slide was undone.
About a week before we were moving out, we had a friend come and help us move some items. He and my husband were moving a dresser and my husband tripped down the last step and the dresser careened into the wall, knocking a huge hole. Our friend was a contractor so was planning to come by a couple of days later and fix the hole.
I got to work and about 5 minutes after I got there, she called me and said she would be deducting the cost to fix the hole from our deposit. There was no way she could have known unless she went into the apartment just after I left. I asked her how she even knew about the hole and she started stammering. She said she had evidence that I could not refute and emailed me a video. I was floored. Somehow she had a video from inside my apartment showing the hole. She shouldn’t have been there anyhow without notice to me, with no emergency, but I asked how she got the video and she admitted that she had gone inside. I was livid. So I hurried home and met her at my apartment.
It was then I showed her my previous lease and statutes from state landlord-tenant law that said what she had done was not permissible. She said that ‘where she came from’ it was usual to put security measures in properties.
I told her I ‘appreciated her concerns’ but there would be a problem if I found a camera in my house. She got so red in the face I thought she would burst. I told her she needed to leave immediately, and she said she was calling the police. I told her that was great because then they could search my house for her camera. They arrived about 15 minutes later.
I told them I suspected someone had been in my apartment without permission. She contended she was permitted to be there since she was the landlord. I told them she had planted a camera somewhere and was spying on us. They found the THREE cameras and took them in as evidence of a stalking complaint. They caught her coming into my house no less than 20 times in two weeks, and looking through my belongings. One caught her kicking my neighbor’s dog.
She ended up getting charges for harassment, stalking, and animal cruelty.
Her husband tried to keep up the heat by threatening us to keep the deposit. He tried to file eviction papers, but we were already moving. I decided just to go along with his little game. I went to court and showed our notice given to the previous rental company by certified mail, my closing documents for the purchase of our new home, videos of us moving into the new house, videos of every single moment of our moving out of the old place, photographs of every room and everything we cleaned (over 400 pictures that I took of every corner, baseboard, cabinet, corners of the back porch, et cetera) receipts for the drywall patch where our friend fixed it, receipts for the paint where we repaired any scuffs, the videos of his wife going into our house as part of the official police report. Not only did we NOT have to forfeit our deposit, we got treble damages and a restraining order against them. It was glorious.
They tried eviction proceedings against two other neighbors who prevailed as well due to video evidence captured of her sneaking around all the time (captured on the videos from my apartment AND from where she put them in other places around the property). Two more losses in court and they packed up their stuff on their little Beverly Hillbillies truck and got out of town.”
