Collector of the rent: Keeper of the keys
They have keys to your apartment.
Landlords have considerable responsibility to take care of the maintenance and operation of the apartment they manage. When something in the apartment breaks it is their job to fix it and you pay them your rent, but sometimes these holders of the keys don’t use their power wisely.
Christina Smith, a junior majoring in print journalism, said when she was looking for an apartment that the landlord wasn’t a big factor into her decision on where to live, but when she met her landlord she realized that working with a landlord might be more than she planned on.
“My landlord last year was just creepy. He would use his keys to enter the apartment all of the time,” Smith said.
Smith said her landlord would enter the apartment whenever he wanted, sometimes without knocking, even when he was entering an all female apartment.
“One day I was in my apartment by myself and I had just gotten out of the shower when I heard someone in the apartment and then my bedroom door started to open,” Smith said. “I yelled that I had just gotten out of the shower and then I realized it was the landlord. It was upsetting that he didn’t stop to think someone may have been home.”
Smith isn’t the only person that has had a landlord scare. Lorene Nance, a sophomore majoring in English technical writing, said one morning she and her husband decided to sleep in when they heard a knock at the door. The door opened and then quickly closed.
“We thought that maintenance had just come in the apartment and we didn’t know what to do so, we lay in bed and pretended to be asleep for the next 15 minutes because we were too scared to get up and see if they were in the apartment. They weren’t, thank heavens, we had latched the door,” Nance said.
Nance said after that day that it kind of bothers her that someone else has a key to her apartment, even if it is the landlord.
“It is kind of unnerving that someone could just come and walk into your house when you are not there,” Nance said. “If they wanted to take something, you would never know where it went.”
When landlords do come into the apartments that they own, are they fixing what you called them to fix or are they just lurking around?
Whitney Thompson, a junior majoring in nursing, said her landlord comes over to her apartment often but never seems to be fixing the problem.
“He comes to our house a thousand times a week but he only fixes dumb things that don’t need to be fixed. He never fixes the things that we need him to,” Thompson said.
When Nance moved into her first apartment, she said she noticed something wrong in the front room: one of the window panes did not have glass in it. She said she and her roommates ignored the problem until one rainy day out of necessity they called maintenance.
“They came and put cardboard up in the window with duct tape. They said it would take six weeks to get a window. It took three months. It got cold and snowy before the window went in,” Nance said.
Another potential conflict between landlords and their renters is rent collections. Most renters pay rent on time every month to avoid a late fee, but sometimes when the rent is late the landlord comes to collect it from the renter, or even their roommates.
“If my roommates did not pay their rent on time, he would come talk to me about it,” Smith said. “He actually tried to get me to pay my roommate’s rent for her.”
Smith said when she wouldn’t pay her roommate’s rent he tried to get her roommate to give him her piano in place of her rent.
“He wanted her new $9,000 piano in place of her $500 rent payment. It was ridiculous,” Smith said.
So when the last month’s rent is paid and the landlord doesn’t have any reason to haunt the apartment anymore, there is only one thing left: moving out.
Curtis Newbold, a graduate student in English and literature, said his problems with his landlords really started when moving day came. The apartment was supposed to be empty by 5 p.m. Monday and then all of a sudden the landlord demanded the apartment to be vacated by 4 p.m. on Sunday, Newbold said.
“They told me and my roommates at noon on Sunday that we had to be out my 4 p.m., when we were all planning on moving out the next day. We had four hours to move,” Newbold said.
When Newbold told his landlords he had to work that night, they told him it didn’t matter, that he had to be out by 4 p.m., Newbold said. As Newbold and his roommates were moving they left a couch on the porch to be picked up later. While they left to get a truck the landlords promised the couch to the cleaning lady at the apartment, he said.
“The landlord told the cleaning lady she could have the couch and then my roommates came to pick up the couch at the same time the cleaning lady came to get it. It got really ugly,” Newbold said.
Smith said she didn’t have a problem moving out but by the time she got her deposit back, it had been chopped by almost $200.
“We cleaned the apartment so it was immaculate and we still only got $50 out of $250 back even though there was nothing broken in the apartment. My mom was so mad she wanted to go scream at the landlords,” Smith said.
If having a landlord makes you nervous, there is always a great solution: buying your own house. Until then, pull the covers up when you go to bed.
-debrajoy@cc.usu.edu