Landlord Horror Stories
Batten down hatches — the tenant from hell is heading your way. That is unless you’re careful.
Tuesday, July 19th 2005, 12:26PM
By Diana ClementReproduced from the May 2005 NZ Property Magazine.
Pity the poor landlord in Dunedin who had students wrap a house in toilet paper and then set fire to it. That’s a tale unlikely to happen again in a hurry. But the police are uncovering several P-labs a month in New Zealand homes — most in rented properties. Should that happen to you, you’ll be faced with bills for commercial decontamination of the property. Open the pages of the daily newspapers and there’s no lack of horror stories about tenants wrecking properties. Absconders, who stop paying rent, or never pay rent are a common story.
When New Zealand Property Magazine went searching for horror stories, almost every landlord we spoke to knew of one.
Scotney Williams, a lawyer at Tenancy Practice Service, who makes a living from helping beleaguered landlords and tenants dealt with one case where a Porsche-driving tenant arrived on a Friday, viewed the property and signed on the dotted line for the tenancy there and then.
“He paid with a cheque and the landlord was too embarrassed to ask for cash because the tenant was driving a Porsche and really looked the part,” Williams said. “He took possession and re-advertised the premises. Pretending to be the landlord he signed up 18 tenants for possession the following Friday.”
Each prospective tenant parted with a bond and rent in cash. Come Friday there was some congestion as all 18 tenants tried to work out who was actually entitled to the tenancy. “None was of course, because none was the proper tenant, just sub- tenants to a ‘tenant’ who had the day before left for England with all their money, many thousands of dollars.”
In another case a tenant was asked to provide cash as the payment for bond, rent and agents fee. The couple’s first cheque bounced, but the agent accepted a second cheque and gave them possession. Unsurprisingly the second cheque was also made of rubber. When a bailiff went around to enforce a Tenancy Tribunal order to set the tenancy aside, he was met by three police cars. The husband had been arrested and charged with 14 counts of fraud.
The moral to that tale, says Williams is “never take cheques, no matter how plausible the story might be. Only cash”.
In another case Williams dealt with a landlord who found neat little oblong holes cut at floor level in a number of walls in his three-bedroom house. “The holes were six inches wide and about 1 inch high,” Williams says, “and very neatly done.”
“They did not line up and were a real mystery until some days later a friend of the landlord showed up to collect some personal effects left behind. The mystery was solved when it was discovered the tenant was model train enthusiast.” The lesson to be learned, said Williams, is to inspect monthly. “You cannot necessarily limit what tenants can do but you can limit their enjoyment of it.”
lona and Nigel Wilson, who run RentWorks Property in Canterbury, were thrown when an apparently ideal tenant absconded at Christmas. The pair had been keeping a close eye on the property and even when a rent payment failed to appear the garden was being tended with loving care.
“It is not unknown for tenants to pick up and buzz off at Christmas. In this case the rent wasn’t paid one week,” says lona. “Every time we went around to leave the 10-day notice, there was no-one home, but the garden was looking beautiful.”
After visiting several days in a row, the pair finally let themselves in to find the tenant had gone. It was then that they found out that an elderly neighbour had been keeping the garden spic and span and the lawns mowed, not the tenant. The gentleman, it transpired, had been working up to midnight some nights at his unpaid gardening job.
These days the property has new tenants and the Wilson’s now pay the neighbour to do the gardens — on the proviso that he stops work at dusk.
lona Wilson says she cant understand landlords who don’t do inspections. She herself isn’t averse to turning up with binoculars. She says landlords who can’t handle confrontation should get themselves a property manager.
The reality is that many tenants are either young or penniless or otherwise they’d own their own homes. Many just don’t have the financial skills or resources to keep up payments. Christchurch-based Val Scott fell foul of a tenant who suffered all of these afflictions. The tenancy agreement was signed by a young “childless” couple. The pair soon split, and a toddler miraculously appeared from nowhere. Neighbours pointed out to Scott that the partner still appeared to be living there, despite a new tenancy agreement being signed by the woman alone. By this time the woman was being supported by WINZ. But she soon fell behind in payments and was seen by the neighbours receiving a hired fridge and washing machine one morning and selling them on the same night to get cash.
Auckland-based property investor Andrew King, well known for his role in the Auckland Property Investors’ Association, got the shock of his property investing life when tenants threatened him with smashing up a property.
It was early in King’s property investing career and it was “before Baycorp” — so he’d been unable to sight a credit record on the well- dressed prospective tenants he met at a property in Arch Hill, Auckland.
“It was a slow rental market and they were a couple of guys who were well presented,” King says. During the first week of the tenancy King popped around a couple of times on the pretext of doing odd jobs on the property and all seemed tidy and in order.
But week two dawned and the pair failed to pay rent and had the mother of all parties, according to neighbours. When King confronted the pair about the unpaid rent, one responded: “Yep. We’re not going to pay.”
“I threatened him with the Tenancy Tribunal and he replied: ‘that might annoy us’.” The tenant went on to tell King: “Don’t give us any trouble and when we decide to leave we won’t damage the place.”
King eventually won a Tenancy Tribunal hearing and the pair were evicted. When he caught up with one of them at an uncle’s house, King realised he wasn’t going to get anywhere in recovering the outstanding rent.
P-labs are a growing problem for landlords. At one stage police were busting nearly one lab a week — many of which were in rented properties. Typically the police call in the council, which slaps a notice on the property ordering decontamination before the property can be let again. The costs of this can be as low as a few thousand dollars, but typically are around the $10,000 mark. Williams says one landlord had to pay nearly $25,000 for decontamination after a P-Lab was discovered in the upmarket Auckland Central Metropolis apartments.
Williams points out that the regularity with which P-Labs are being discovered means landlords should check their insurance policies very carefully. He is currently assisting one Auckland landlord whose insurance company has applied the excess on a policy four times because it says that the damage from the P-Lab on her Panmure property was caused by four separate events.
| « NZPIF Conference 2005 | Quotable Value's website » |
Special Offers
Commenting is closed
|
|
Printable version |
|
Email to a friend |
