Tenant and Landlord team up to take down odious Property Management company, claiming almost $10k in penalties: 'My landlord was on my side during the court hearing'

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

May 17, 2024 10:00 AM EDT

While renting, it's generally up to your landlord to maintain the premises and repair anything that breaks. But if you've ever dealt with a landlord, you'll know that they're often reluctant to do so, regarding any such request with disdain and thinly veiled hostility and insinuation at the fact that you're somehow responsible for their 20-year-old dishwasher breaking a week after you moved in. So, over time, you get in the habit of just doing things yourself, even if they're not your responsibility, or just making do with things how they are in an effort to maintain minimal contact to draw minimal attention to your tenancy in a vain attempt to keep the landlord from increasing your rent (again.)

Of course, this isn't a great outcome for the property, which is why good landlords want to be notified of issues so that they don't become bigger ones, and they don't really want you undertaking your own work unless you muck something up… Unless they trust you to do things correctly, just as this landlord did before they appointed one of those terrible property management companies to manage the property for them, throwing a spanner in the works of what had been a great relationship.

Now, the arrangement was strange to begin with; it seems that this tenant had arranged to help the landlord upgrade the unit they were renting—which was really just a converted garage adjacent to the landlord's actual rental home. They upgraded the unit through the years on their own dime until the property management company took over. But when the property management repeatedly failed to follow through on maintenance, it set the stage for them to get that money back.