We spent two and a half years at the property from hell. Whenever we would talk directly to the landlord about something he needed to do, we would feign inability to understand the English language. His English was perfectly fine when he was telling us what to do. After two and a half years, we have had enough and we moved out. Now, after moving out of the house, we are told that we have to fork out $300 for cleaning because the agent claims we left it in a filthy state. I should say not. The house is a damn site cleaner that’s for sure - it's also had repairs done properly, probably for the first time since the place was built. She has furnished us with a copy of an invoice for cleaning, grand total of $289.
The agent would always appear to be amiable and on our side with many things, being sympathetic to our situation, and saying things like – ‘I understand what you are going through’. None of this ever helped. The agent told me at one point – ‘I can't believe you're still here’. I was also told she was going to get rid of the property because she did not want to deal with the landlord anymore. When I handed in the notice to vacate, I asked her if she was going to cease looking after the property. She informed me that she was going to continue to look after the house because the family had five other properties with the agency. When we expressed our disgust at the way we had been treated, we were accused of verbal abuse and personal attacks. This did not happen. We have been upset and frustrated at the lack of care we have received by both landlord and agent, but to tell us that we are pigs is not exactly the right way to go about conducting business.Here are a few of the things that went wrong with the house:
- 1. The house was dirty when we moved in. The usual stuff - dirty windows, window sills, greasy oven in the kitchen. Cleaning was done up to eye level, the shelves above eye level were dirty. The laundry had dirty windows and sills, and the curtain in the shower was torn. The curtains in the rumpus room were dirty and rotting from sun exposure.
- 2. Upstairs, the windows do not fit the window frames. The frames are shrinking from the rain and sun - they leak. One window actually fell out of the frame and hit my child on the head and shoulder leaving bruising. Fly screens are ripped and torn. After two years these were fixed, sort of. The landlord actually used old screening that was rotting before it went into the frames.
3. There were a range of health and safety issues. The rangehood fell off the wall in the first week and split my co-lessee's head open. Light fittings fell out of the ceiling. Smoke alarms did not work - it took two years to get ones that worked. The front door did not lock properly because the door was crooked and the lock was faulty. The locks on the rumpus room door were also faulty. The bathroom exhaust fan backs onto a solid wall. The owner told me there was nothing wrong with it - despite the fact that I've scrubbed mould off the bathroom walls so many times I've lost count.
4. Insects come into the house through the gaps in the staircase. The downstairs carpet was littered with dead insects, and leaves – a variety the entomology department at the Australian Museum would be proud of. The sliding doors didn't work, partly because they were faulty, but also because they were encrusted with dead insects, loose leaves and dirt. The corners of the sliding doors were encrusted with spider nests.
5. The gutters were full of leaves and overflowed the week we moved in, running down the walls and into the house, soaking the floors. The roof leaks, there are stains inside on the ceilings.
6. You can see through the gaps in the floor into the carport underneath the house. Underneath the house in the carport, you can see where he has packed the floorboards with bits of cardboard in an attempt to level the floor. It didn't work. The overflow drain in the bathroom fell through the floor - this gave us a fabulous view of the carport. That is all there is between the carport roof and the bathroom floor - one thin piece of tiled fibro. The floor is exposed.
7. The laundry and storage room flood whenever it rains heavily. After two years of complaining about the flooding laundry, the landlord came to repair it himself. His idea of fixing it was to dig a foot wide/deep trough around the house and cover it with cut up pieces of roller door. It remained that way for some time before he came back and covered it with wire and bricks. When he dug up the trench and exposed the plumbing we didn't know whether to laugh or cry - he had previously repaired the plumbing with plastic shopping bags and gaffer tape. I kid you not. The carpets in the storage area were rotting (after several flood events), as was the rubber tiling under the carpet. When we removed this because it stank we were questioned by the owner and the agent.
8. The sewerage backs up and spills over at the rear of the property (that was eventually fixed). The runnel was dug up along the driveway to divert water away from the house. It now stops dead in front of the neighbour’s front door. Due to this, each time it rains, it undermines the neighbour’s retaining wall which is now collapsing.
9. There was a sink in the corner of the main bedroom. The plumbing was faulty. One time, the hot water pipes burst. The water ran down the walls through to the electrical work downstairs creating a live pool of water at the bottom of the staircase. The switches on the wall were sparking. Thankfully my children did not discover this. When we placed an urgent call to the agent, we were not sent a plumber. The landlord came around and said he would fix it. When the panel came off the wall, it showed previous repair work. The two copper pipes were different sizes and they were held together with a rubber band. I rang the agent and literally had to beg for a plumber. The only reason the plumber was called was because I threatened legal action. The owner stood there and argued with the plumber. He was not going to let him repair the fault. I told him we would sue him so he let the plumber repair the plumbing. Mysteriously, that plumber was no longer working for that agent after this event. My co-lessee then repaired the electrical work (he is a licenced electrician) - who knows what kind of state it would have been in if he tried to do it himself. There is evidence all over the house of his so-called repair work in that department.
10. The toilet upstairs leaked for over 12 months before they repaired it. It moved every time you sat on it and the stench from the entire neighbourhood would emanate from it because the air pipe was placed before, and not after, the waste area. The downstairs toilet still leaks.
11. The walls were supposedly painted before we moved in. He had painted the walls with a thin coat of ceiling white. It was so thin that you could see the old dirty marks through the paint, when I attempted to scrub the walls when I left, I was removing paint - that was just with spray and wipe and a cloth.
12. TV reception is just terrible - in two and a half years it was never repaired. Instead we were told our television was at fault.
13. The owners stored a whole heap of rubbish in the backyard - including washing machines, pool pumps, bathroom sinks, building rubble of all sorts of description. When we requested that it to be removed, we were assured it would be - most of it was still there when we left. Some of it had been placed at the front of the house with our rubbish. When we rang council to tell them that the landlord had been adding rubbish to our pile, we were told that the agent had rebooked the collection for a date two weeks after our initial request. The agent then wanted to know why we had not booked rubbish removal. The landlords live behind us and down two doors. Because their house is on a ridge and their property extends down past ours, he would walk from his house down into our yard and throw extra rubbish on the pile.
We were never furnished with a condition report, even after constantly requesting one for the first six months. We were told by the agent when we moved in that she hoped we were people that just repaired things, rather than ringing up every five minutes to get a light bulb changed. This should have been our first warning. The second warning was the fact that a condition report was never done. Instead, she is claiming her 280 photos of the house are her condition report. The first inspection that was done on the premises was a full two years after we moved in. At that inspection I gave a detailed list of things that had gone wrong, things that we fixed ourselves because nobody ever got back to us and a list of things we wanted repaired (again).
The agent has accused us of not informing them about the rangehood or the window. We were taken to task because we put working locks on the rumpus room door and the storage area, despite informing the agent by telephone that we were doing so due to the fact that our personal items were not secure and my insurance would be null and void if we were burgled. We left so many messages at the agent's office - unreturned emails, unreturned phone calls (both on mobile and on landline). So many requests were ignored. We informed the agent in writing we wanted to be at the final inspection, it was completed without our knowledge or presence.
By far, the most frustrating and upsetting thing about this whole experience is the things we had documenting with dates of phone calls and things going wrong or things we repaired ourselves have been destroyed. The laptop crashed with all of our emails and our detailed records and the printouts that were stored in a box downstairs were turned to pulp because the damn storage room was flooded out. I hope that there is some way this house can never be leased to another naive and unsuspecting person again. The landlords are a disgrace, the agents are not much better.Tenants often tell me they are accused of verbal abuse when they request repairs. Everyone has the right to safe working conditions. But I think it is often used as a strategy to delegitimise tenants and their experiences. Tenants have a right to be angry if landlords and agents are blatantly breaking tenancy laws. Should tenants request repairs like this? - 'Please sir, I want more'.
We have learned a lesson here. Keep your records and documents safe. Back them up thrice if necessary. Don't risk losing evidence, because that's the only thing you have to fall back on.
Postscript. The real estate agent, Sarah Tanti has been in touch with Bad Landlord Australia claiming that the tenants left the house without cleaning the premises.
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