Landlord Watch. The Conclusion
Tuesday, October 26th, 2004Whenever I start a watch, it seems to come immediately to an end. The first example of this was the Gardy Manwich Watch, and now the Landlord Watch had a shelf life of less than a day as well.
After my post on Monday, my landlord did indeed call me back. It seems the mention of my lawyer was enough to get him to return my call. I was under the impression that even that wouldn’t bring him around, but he is very careful about making sure he does the absolute minimum.
The first thing he told me when I answered was, “I thought you’d give up on this security deposit thing, but I guess not.” Then he laughed. I was silent.
He wasn’t very clear in his explanation, but his general argument boiled down to: instead of making the effort to calculate the interest, keep track of cleaning charges, and informing me of those charges, he figured it was going to be close enough to a wash that he would just refund my entire deposit. In fact, he said he thought I would be happy to get the whole thing back.
But when I started digging deeper, his story fell apart. First, he told me that the interest rate was 1%, so that the interest would only be about $30, if that. Second, he told me that he paid a handyman to clean the walls (even though he hadn’t cleaned them prior to our move-in), to carry some trash out from the garage (which was loaded up with a ton of junk when we moved in, and which was also clear of all of our belongings when I moved out), and to patch up some holes in the wall where we hung pictures. When I asked him about this cost, he said that it was definitely less than $50.
I told him I was going to call the state to determine the interest rate. I did find that the rate had been lowered to 1% for the last 10 months of our lease, so our interest compounded annually at 3% for the first year, then the second year grew at 3% for the first two months and 1% for the final 10 months. Since this worked out to $59.04 and since he paid the handyman less than $50, I called to get our difference back.
He then changed his story. When I told him that he specifically said he paid the handyman less than $50, he replied, “What I said was that I could have easily come up with enough charges to equal the amount of the cost of the handyman.”
“Well, what was the actual cost of the handyman?” I said.
“Well, I don’t know. I should have kept track I guess. I just thought you would be happy to get your entire security deposit back. But I charged them to haul stuff out of the garage….”
“But we didn’t leave anything in the garage.”
“Well, I paid him to patch up some holes….”
It went on like this for a little while, and I suppose I eventually could have received a few bucks back if I wanted to continue haggling with him (though at some point I may have had to produce an actual lawyer). But that wasn’t entirely the point. $60 is a lot of money, but I’m sure he did have some legitimate charges. For example, I know I forgot to clean the oven and I’m sure he did have to fill in some holes in the wall. I doubt those charges came to $60, but they were probably at least in the $30 range, and that difference wasn’t worth any more of my time. Besides, I had made my point.
So the best part of being unemployed, so far, is that I get to toy with my old landlord, who caused me tons of grief when I was living there. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the time we had a leaking pipe in the basement and he didn’t respond for several days.
One last point of information that might serve as a valuable reference for this story. I think it’s worth noting that on all of my move-outs with prior landlords I did receive my security deposit back plus interest minus actual charges, and that amount had always worked out to be more than the security deposit I gave to the landlord at the beginning of my lease.