When Following the Rules Backfires: 39 Tenants’ Brilliant Acts of Payback That Landlords Didn’t See Coming

This is a story that I was told conversationally at a camp. Guy telling me the story: N His brother: B Landlord: L So this guy (N) had a brother (B) who was renting a home. He was one of those long-term renters who stayed at the same location for 10+ years. B was moving out, and the landlord (L) was trying his best to get every penny out of B that he could. L looked around the house and tried to charge him for every little thing: stains on the wall, the cupboard that was broken before he moved in, etc. The biggest, most expensive offense was the carpet. The carpet was not pretty. Stains everywhere, a big hole where a cigarette was dropped, threads showing, etc. The carpet was clearly old when he moved in, but B wasn’t very prepared and didn’t think to take pictures before he moved in. N devised a plan to help his brother out. He knew the law pretty well, and went with B to sign the final paperwork. I don’t know why the landlord thought he could charge the renter beyond his deposit. Maybe they had an agreement that he left out of the story, or the laws were different when this happened? Regardless, he was going to have to pay for all of the brand-new carpet because of the one hole he caused. So the landlord smugly pulled out the paperwork to have B sign. N took one look at it, smirked, and told B to sign it. They got done with all of it, shook hands, and the landlord started bragging about how much he was going to make off of B. Then N dropped the bomb. The paper said that he had to reimburse the carpet “for what it was worth.” According to the law that he had a copy of in his pocket, carpets are worthless after 10 years of use, which his brother alone fit as a qualification. The landlord was flabbergasted. Apparently he ended up just using some leftover carpet that he had in storage to replace the square where the cigarette burn was located, instead of replacing the whole carpet. TL;DR – Landlord wanted tenant to replace the carpet for what it was worth. He did just that, because the carpet was worthless.

User , Brad Topar Report

Landlord makes living conditions s****y so he offers me an opportunity to move out. I convince two others to move out as well. He ghosts me when I ask for my deposit so I take him to court. I win $650 so he appeals the court’s decision. In the appeal, my award is tripled to $1800. He refuses to pay up so I get the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to go to his bank, freeze his account, and seize his money.

cyberchief , Tingey Injury Law Firm Report

A few years ago my best friend and I rented a tiny 2 bedroom flat together. This place was kind of terrible; my friend’s room had a hole cut into the wall so the last foot of the bed would fit (this became a ‘mantlepiece’ in the next room), the kitchen was the size of a child’s playhouse kitchen and the upstairs neighbours spent all ours of the day and night screaming at each other or having loud [intimacy]. BUT, we were mostly happy because we were over living with 6+ other people. We paid £75 a week each + bills for this place, which was pretty standard for a 2 bed flat in our area. Then 6 months into our 1yr contract the landlord sold the terraced house our flat (and 5 others) was a part of to a middle aged married couple who were first time landlords. They were the kind of people who thought they were smarter than everybody else and I got the impression they thought property management was going to be the easiest thing ever. We had no problem throughout the sale process, we were assured nothing would change, we didn’t interact much with the landlord before anyway. Then 2 weeks after the sale we got an email from the couple saying that we owed them £20 each more a week. Basically, in our contract it stated our rent was £75 each a week about 10 times, but there was one typo where it said our rent was £95 each, so they said they could legally charge us £95. We laughed at this, but when it became clear they were serious we reached out to the letting agent and got them to put in writing that it was a typo, our rent was always £75, and they even gave us the original advert for the flat with the correct rent on it. We thought this would be the end of it. We were wrong. The couple insisted on coming to our flat for an in person meeting. When they got there they said that they asked the old landlord about it and he was shocked that we’d not been paying enough for 6 months now and the rent was always £95. I didn’t buy this because they had nothing in writing, but I made the argument that OF COURSE he would say that because he wouldn’t want it to seem like he sold under false pretences, and if we’d been underpaying by a total of like £160 a month why had he never spoken to us about it?? They said that he was a busy guy with too many properties, then the husband spent ages condescendingly explaining mortgages to us. Then they declared that if we did not start paying them the higher rent, they would evict us and we had 24hrs to pay or 30days to get out and they left. Honestly I think they saw two 22yr old girls and thought they could scare us into paying more money. What they didn’t know is that my friend and I are very pleasant until you [urinate] us off and we become vindictive motherf*****s. We decided that night that if they wanted to evict us from this [p**p] hole we were gonna make them do it properly and if they were so pedantic about contracts and rules we were going to stop letting ANYTHING slide. The couple woke up the next morning with an email from our lawyer (my flatmates brother, a bored lawyer with time on his hands) requesting a formal eviction notice in writing and laying out a record of last night’s conversation. Thing was they didn’t actually have legal grounds to evict us because even if we went to court and a judge favoured their interpretation of the contract (we were advised this was unlikely) we still didn’t owe them more than a month’s rent, which would have been their only legal way of evicting us because we were otherwise great tenants. By 9:15am they were ringing us, but we ignored them and emailed that our lawyer had advised us to only communicate in writing. We then sent an email informing them that the fancy new front door they just installed could not be unlocked from the inside without a key, which violated fire safety laws and unfortunately if this wasn’t rectified ASAP we would have to report it. We then sent texts that showed them repeatedly entering our flat with less than 24hrs notice, and did they know that this was illegal? Maybe we should talk to the other tenants because if they’re doing this to everyone then this could be quite a problem… After about 3 days of this we received a very nice email saying that they don’t agree our rent was supposed to be £75 each a week, but they would graciously allow us to finish out our contract at that rate. By this point we’d found a flat triple the size for £80 each a week and wanted out of that hamster cage, so we offered to move if they signed mutual surrender forms. They eagarly agreed. The best part was that they stubbornly tried to rent that flat at the higher rate, despite us telling them it was a terrible idea, and the flat was empty for over a year. And because they had agreed to end our contract early they got stuck paying the council tax, not me!

toastisuseful , Pavel Danilyuk Report