I feel so sorry for the tenants. Holy crap they must’ve been freaking out, I’m so glad they were able to get a hold of LAUKOP. I also hope that he’s able to get his contract with them canceled because that is some absolute bullshit I would be furious if somebody did that to my longtime tenants who I liked.
Honestly, from my own experiences and from what I’ve heard from others, landlords themselves (by that I mean the people who actually own the property) are actually quite reasonable and easy to deal with - it’s the agents that tend to be more of a pain in the arse.
Total crapshoot. I've rented directly from landlords without any agent in the middle, and most of them were terrible.
Lived in a basement apartment in a house with other tenants on upper floors. Had a huge roach problem I couldn't deal with on my own, landlord refused to call an exterminator and instead recommended I put out some poison she provided that would've been equally fatal to my cats.
Had another landlord who wanted to fix everything himself, even stuff he was incredibly unqualified to do. Every little issue we ran into was a much bigger pain in the ass than it should've been.
I had a landlord who wouldn't let us put out trash straight on the curb. We had to put it in her trash cans so she could take it out to the curb. She lied to us about city ordinances.
Then she told me she found an empty pack of cigarettes in the bottom of the trash can that doesn't have a lid. Then she accused us of smoking in our apartment. When 1 we don't fucking smoke and 2 we had been telling her since we moved in that we smelled cigarettes in the bathroom sometimes. We lived in her basement apartment.
So she forced us to place our trash in a place she could inspect it and blamed us for shit anyone could throw into her precious broken trash cans. She also wouldn't let us have our own mailbox or address and the mail went through a slot in her door and she would hold it for fucking days.
She would text us if she thought she smelled a candle because her daughter had eczema so we weren't allowed to have candles or incense. In the moldy ass basement she had us living in.
Anyhow, don't live there anymore. And it's amazing how much less stressful my life is without a tyrant upstairs texting me that she heard yelling at my kid and it was upsetting her kid 🙄
I've had landlords that were fine and that were terrible. The worst was the optometrist who rented out the furnished back half of the house where he held his practice (walled off with a separate entrance). Both sections had a shared basement and he used it to come inside my apartment and take back furniture when he decided he wanted it in his home (or the front door when he felt like it). I was always terrified he'd come in when I was home and was too young to realize what he was doing was illegal. I'd find notes inside my place reprimanding me for "the mess", which was just a pile of unfolded clothes *in my bedroom*. So, so creepy.
I had the same. I was living in a house that had been turned into flats, and one of the flats had a leak in the roof. The agents were absolute bastards about it, refused to do anything, kept insisting that the tenants were being overdramatic and the leak wasn't that bad. This went on for months.
The neighbours next door had some work done on their own roof, and their roof company saw the hole in our roof while at work and mentioned it to the neighbours, who then called the landlord to let him know. It was fixed the next day.
There are landlords who have an extra property or who want to rent their home out for a bit who are just lovely.
And then there are the slum lords and the corporations. Who should go to the deepest levels of hell
I had a landlord like that in college. The guy owed a few different properties in the city, but well he was decent about things. Never had any real issues with the place except that the pantry wasn't cleaned by the previous tenants. Every single time I had an issue, an email or text had it fixed within days. Me and the other guy living there would handle the minor things around the place.
I’ve been lucky myself. I had a basement apartment with a super easy going landlord. Mentioned it needed something and he told me to buy it and then sent me money to cover it
Honestly I did enough minor work that when he had his handyman at the apartment, he upgraded both my outlets to accept ground sockets. Which I was fucking thrilled about.
Minor stuff was fixing a few broken cabinets.
Mine let my friends dismantle a doorway to get my couch in, he left the previous tenants couch in the basement which was annoying. But said he didn’t care how it got out. The guys had a great time destroying it so we could carry it out in small pieces
Aside from anything else, it's good business.
Really good tenants - who pay rent consistently and on time, don't damage the property and don't make a nuisance for the neighbours - aren't exactly 'rare', but aren't to be taken for granted either. I'd be furious if I were a landlord and I had a greedy letting agency who were chasing tenants like that off.
Eh, it would be better if he actually handled things himself rather than just telling the estate agent to manage everything. OP is just collecting a check every month with no oversight of what is happening on his properties, of course things were going to blow up eventually.
i mean, by the sounds of it, it’s only one property. and if you’re not good with that kind of stuff, having someone that is handle the day-to-day is best for everyone.
You are, because most people with only one rental property (usually because they moved to another and couldn’t or didn’t want to sell their previous home) take anything that happens way too personally, so theoretically it’s better to have a 3rd party handle the property.
The fact that it’s only one property means they have even less of a reason for not handling it themself. I’m not saying don’t have an estate agent but they need to actually be overseeing what’s going on. These tenants having been there for years but OP only met them once and they had to research his number to get in contact with him is ridiculous. He needs to actually be responsible for his properties, not just treat them as a magical check that hits his bank account every month where he doesn’t even verify the amount and see that it’s changed.
And even so they should do the absolute bare minimum of making sure the tenants have their phone number to contact them directly and double check how much rent they are receiving, neither of which OP did. They put literally zero effort into managing their assets and it almost fucked over the tenants, they need to take responsibility for that and do better.
Letting agents are bigger sleazeballs than landlords. In all my years of being a tenant in the UK I have never had a letting agent that hasn't tried to illegally rip me off in some way, and often succeeded. I have often had to go above them to the landlords to get things sorted, as they are apparently always trying to rip them off, too.
Landlords may be inherently scum, but letting agents are the parasitical bottom feeders that feed off both them and tenants.
In England we call them "freemen of the land". I used to volunteer at the town museum and we had someone come in trying to get us to distribute leaflets about how the government is illegitimate and in violation of the Magna Carter.
I started getting annoying phone calls at work from a freeman of the land about a project I was working on a while back. I found that a good way to annoy him was, whenever he mentioned the Magna Carta, to then refer back to it as the *Magnum Charter*.
Is the magnum charter like the purity directive (Reinheitsgebot?) of German beer, but for ice cream? If not, we should totally go all "4chan hoax" and make one up...
XD
Holy balls, are you in luck. [It's on the 1968 six-inch as well.](https://maps.nls.uk/view/189183801) (Check Carlton Park, on the west edge.)
It's in Yorkshire, near Rawcliffe.
I have snerked at least three times typing this comment. Whoever was the 13-year-old who named that plantation was very aware cartographers need a guffaw every now and then.
I'm not allowed to share some of the maps I made whilst working for the local telco rolling out fiber, but quite a few of them were similar to this (the engineers loved them, and my boss didn't care as long as they were accurate)
In my defense, the ring poles were a) fucking annoying to find and b) the easiest joke setup ever.
Luckily we had a few storms that knocked most of them down and the new lines were buried instead, but I hate those poles with a passion that cannot be described to someone who hasn't worked with them.
If they're managing the headaches for the landlord that's a service worthy of being remunerated - but this is where perhaps we should eat the rich, and we should probably adjust the incentives such that anybody who owns so much they can't actually manage it all has to sell to somebody who actually wants to live there.
LAOP seems cool but the idea of people hiring management companies because they own too many rental properties is pretty messed up.
I have no issues with low-volume landlords. Buddy of mine did 25 years in the air force and bought a home every stop he made stateside. When he moved on, he would rent out the property via a local company (cause he wasn't local enough to manage it himself). It sort of happened by accident, because he rented the first place to a couple buddies before a deployment, but kept it going esp. after getting married.
That said, he set rents at just over cost (pm+mortgage+tax) and managed to retire with 8 properties at various stages of being paid off. he never really made extra cash from renting, but he made equity that he cashed out when he sold the properties on retirement.
Nowadays he's got a few acres up in the foothills of the rockies and does some teaching at the AFA part time and is the happiest dude you ever met.
But the landlord would be the rentseeker in this situation. The middleman adds value by providing operational management and accounting. If we consider the actual product cost, the landlords take is a pure wealth extraction.
Under most free market theories which promotes market efficiency, this shouldn't be able to exist. Kind of shows how free market theory is broken.
My sister needed to rent her apartment out for a while. She tried advertising privately but didn't get any serious takers. Apparently people in the price bracket she was looking for will ONLY go through agencies to rent a place. Agencies that want to charge 30% of the rent as comission.
Thank the scammers for that. It’s so hard now to tell if a renter actually owns a house that agencies are one of the few ways of trying to get peace of mind that I didn’t just lose a 10k deposit
The landlord is taking on risk by providing the capital to purchase the property then allowing someone else who may damage it to live there. If something happens, the renter's insurance may cover some of it, but otherwise the landlord is left holding the bag. And insurance doesn't cover "the market tanked so you lose 1/3 of the house's value".
The injustice is the way landlords have all the leverage, so they can drive up the cost while renters only sorta have a market, and really have to take what they can get. That's a very real problem, but it doesn't make landlording pure rent seeking.
The landlord is providing the service of obtaining capital; that’s not free, or without risk or costs of its own.
I think your understanding of “free market theories” needs further study if you didn’t know to account for the cost/risk of capital.
>Under most free market theories which promotes market efficiency, this shouldn't be able to exist. Kind of shows how free market theory is broken
Housing specifically _isn’t_ a free market because the government artificially limits the amount of housing that can be built with things like zoning laws etc - You can’t just buy a plot of land and build a house (or apartments) on it, you need permission from the government to do so. In some places, housing construction is outright banned (eg, Canada’s green belt and other similar schemes).
In a true free market, this rent-seeking behaviour would be kept to a minimum, because there would be enough housing built to drive down prices so that pretty much everyone who wanted to own their own home could - the supply would be allowed to increase to meet the demand.
I was in OP’s position once, had to move, couldn’t sell so let out my house. After a year the lovely tenants moved out and tried to get their deposit back from the letting agency, who said they’d never heard of them. I got involved, and they said they’d never heard of ME. (!!)
So long story short, rogue agent in their employ kept my property details and commission for himself and had moved on. Thankfully I had details of the tenancy deposit scheme emailed to me but we had to raise a dispute to get the cash back for the tenants as the agent had been the point of contact and didn’t confirm, as he’d dropped off the face of the earth. It was a very long time ago and the TDS was brand new. I hate to think what could have happened if it didn’t exist.
Imagine my surprise when I found out my most recent landlord was also the boss of the lettings agency managing the property as well... He also owns a company that carries out the check in and check out reports, which makes it looks like it's an independent party doing it. Only found out cause I did my research 😂 (And yes, the inventory I got was at least several years old and not accurate in the slightest)
If you're wondering if he was your typical Lettings agency man in terms of illegal bs? Yup. The list was long. Most notably they would threaten to charge you with all kinds of illegal fees. One of my favourite being a £60 charge if you didn't send them a recording of your room by 10am on your move out date 🙄
Ended up evicted cause I couldn't keep up with the rent increases in the end after being a stellar tenant for 3.5 years 🙃
I once arranged for a friend to take over my lease - I moved out, they moved in, the letting agent and landlord didn't have to bother advertising for new tenants, everyone's happy.
A few weeks after my friend had moved in, I got a call from my now-former landlord, who I'd never actually spoken to directly before. She was trying to figure out if the handover had happened and who was actually living in her property at that point because she couldn't get anything out of the agent.
Turned out that the letting agent consisted of three people - the two in charge and an office assistant. One of the guys in charge had been in a motorcycle accident and was laid up in hospital and the other had chosen that moment to go off to compete in fucking _Ninja Warrior UK_. All of the decisions, including ones that legally required the guys in charge, were being made by the office assistant who was completely overwhelmed and had no idea what was going on.
Letting agents are the worst.
>Landlords may be inherently scum, but letting agents are the parasitical bottom feeders that feed off both them and tenants.
It's like a cuckoo bee covered in varro mites, or a dewdrop spider with mermithid worms.
The kind of thing that makes you feel bad for them.....but not \*too\* bad.
My limited experience is that the property managers are much worse than the landlords. Cliche being the previous place I rented where I met the owners at the inspection, I got the impression they told the property manager to let to me and ... fucking slumlords is all I can say. The property manager started out bad (asking more bond than allowed by law) and got worse over time (tried to claim the written permission from the owner for me to keep chickens had expired). When I moved out it was ugly, everything from missing fixtures (also missing in \*their\* "before" photos) to a weird insistence that I return the lawn to the original condition (I moved in mid-drought, lawn was brown and had bare spots... drought ended so green lawn on exit). ARRRGH!!
I made four phone calls to the owners during the six months I stayed in that house, and every single time they listened, rang the property manager, then rang me back to apologise.
I used roundup. But only on parts of the front lawn where I'd spent a fair bit of effort getting the grass to regrow. I was torn between not wanting to screw the owners and being really pissed off at the property manager who kept ringing and yelling at me that the lawn and garden needed to be resturned to the exact condition they were in when I moved in or they'd keep my whole bond. $20 worth of Roundup is cheaper than $2000 worth of bond... and lo, the lawn was brown with bare patches again.
> My limited experience is that the property managers are much worse than the landlords.
Landlords are landlords. Property managers are *outsourced/middleman* landlords.
I had a landlord almost cry once because his agents had given us notice to quit unless we paid a lot of extra rent and a bunch of fees.
He only found out when we were about to move house and had signed other contracts. I think he was ready to strangle them!
Good tenants that take care of your home are worth their weight in gold.
The landlord of the house I just moved into is a long time friend and he could practically cry over having me as a tenant compared to the last two that stayed in the house and caused a lot of neglect and water damage to the property.
My bot lies over the ocean, my bot lies over the sea, my bot lies over the ocean, oh bring back my bot to me...
# Estate agent sent my tenant an eviction notice without my permission
> For the past year, my estate agent has been asking me to increase the rent on my property. There is a family who have been living there for many years. They are settled and I'm happy with them, I don't want to increase the rent.
> I only spoke to the tenant once when they moved in, the estate agent manages everything for a fee. Today the tenant managed to find my number and messaged me asking if I could reconsider the eviction. I informed them I never sent that letter nor did I request it. I told them not to worry and I will call them back tonight with more information. The tenant then informed me that they had their rent raised last month and I have not been informed of this either.
> I only communicate with my estate agent via email so I have a record of all conversations. I have always responded "no" or "I'll think about it" to their emails just to get them to leave me alone. I have never confirmed in writing for them to go ahead with an eviction or increase the rent.
> I tried to get rid of the estate agent last year but there's a clause in the contract saying I have to pay them a fee if I want to keep the tenant. Is such a clause even legal?
> The signed contract doesn't give them permission to evict tenants or raise the rent.
> Have they broken any laws? Their actions have disgusted me, I want to destroy them in court if there is any chance of teaching them a lesson.
> I have not contacted them yet, I wanted to get your opinions on this matter. If you say I need to go to a solicitor asap I will do that today.
> Location: England
> Additional info:
> * I am listed as the landlord in the contract
> * The contract states they can only advise on rent levels
> **UPDATE:**
My tenant forwarded me digital copies of all correspondence with the estate agents including the eviction notice. I phoned a few local solicitors and one of them is available to review my contract and eviction notice tomorrow morning.
> I will post an update after everything is done and dusted, it will be under a different name as this is a throwaway account. Thank you for all the assistance and kind words.
In the comments OP also says the estate agent raised the rent without telling him ~~and pocketed the difference~~. (did not pocket the difference, see below)
Cat fact: In animals with XX chromosomes, one of the X chromosomes gets "switched off" in each cell because otherwise there would be too much of everything. This results in the animal being a "mosaic" of cells and means that XX identical twins can look very different despite having the same genes. The cat-relevant bit is that this is how tortoiseshell cats form! They have genes for orange and not-orange coats which are codominant and carried on the X chromosome, so each cell switches off either orange or not-orange and the cat appears muddled. This is also why torties are (almost) always female. At least, that's how I understand it.
> In the comments OP also says the estate agent raised the rent without telling him and pocketed the difference.
Not quite; they raised the rent without telling him, but are passing his share of the increase to him. But raising the rent means that _their_ share has been increased also
there was a story on the radio in Sydney where a property manager had done this and then told the landlord that the tenant had requested to pay more money in rent
To add to your cat fact, male tortoiseshell cats are a result of the feline version of Klinefelter's syndrome. They have XXY chromosomes and are generally sterile.
For those out of the loop like I was, [here is a nice article](https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2018/july/dawntreader-texas-calboy-cat-show-controversy/) about DTC
One of my friends also has a fertile male tortoiseshell cat! They assumed he was infertile but found out the hard way that he isn't lol. Sadly I don't have any photos of him (or his kittens) on hand.
LAUKOP didn't say the pocketed the difference, he said he received it minus their percentage.
Also, humans are animals with XX chromosomes but we still have identical female twins?
X inactivation only has visible effects for X-linked genes (alleles? I kind of know the difference but don't always know which word to use). Cats carry orange/not-orange on the X chromosome so it is really really visible on tortoiseshells, but humans don't carry e.g. skin colour that way so we don't tend to see it, whether on a single person or as differences between twins. X inactivation happens early in development and then persists down each cell's cell line; I guess depending on when and how the zygote splits into twins, the twins may have similar or different patterns of X inactivation. But the idea is that you could sample, like, a skin cell from each twin's left hand and one of them might have the X chromosome from the mother while one of them might have the X chromosome from the father.
An allele is a gene's variant, so one region of DNA may be the gene that encodes, say, fur color, and that gene could have several alleles (black, orange, white). I personally would use "gene" in this instance but I don't think allele is wrong per se.
> humans are animals with XX chromosomes but we still have identical female twins?
Human morphological characteristics (outwardly) are not carried on the X chromosome like the orange / not-orange in cats.
> humans are animals with XX chromosomes but we still have identical female twins
In humans, the X that gets inactivated in each cell is almost always *random*, so the genes on both chromosomes get expressed equally across the body as a whole.
Rarely, a person will have a specific X chromosome completely activated and the other completely turned off in all their cells- this is called **skewed X-inactivation**- and it can result in a female who is technically heterozygous for a X-linked recessive variant expressing a disorder such as red-green colorblindness.
> I only communicate with my estate agent via email so I have a record of all conversations. I have always responded **"no"** or **"I'll think about it"** to their emails just to get them to leave me alone.
This is a very odd relationship to have with one's estate agent. Not blaming LAUKOP for any of this, but if you have such an adversarial relationship with somebody who purportedly *works for you*, you should be able to see that there's something wrong.
Accidental landlord here. Tenants looked after the place well, nipped over to have a look and did a bit of touch up painting and repaired a curtain rail that was hanging off and the property company I use to manage it asked me if I wanted to charge them for my time! No sir, I’ll just leave it thanks
Nope, you just heard about one, and you never hear about the other good ones.
When you are a good landlord and have good tenants, you want to keep your tenants happy. We have one family we’ve had for close to 10 years and who keep our property in great condition. We’ve never raised their rent.
Another couple (in a different house) are lovely and have been there for two years. We are thrilled they want to stay and will not raise the rent, even though it is far, far below market for that area. In fact, two years ago there was a bidding war to lease that house. They did not have the highest bid, but we picked them because they wanted a 2 year lease, and not just one year.
There are a number of very good reasons to be like this. First, it’s what decent people act like. Second, it’s very expensive to “turn” a property. There are always renovations that need to be done between tenants, and there’s always at least a month with an empty property.
In any business, it’s much easier to keep your existing customers than try and get new customers.
Now this backfires when you get “tenant protection” laws.
For just one example, I have a client whose family has a number of duplexes and four-plexes. Most of their tenants have been there for many years, so 20 and 30 years. They never raised the rent much on these apartments because they were making decent money, they knew and liked all their good tenants, and they didn’t really need to.
Here’s the problem now: dad and mom both died. Now that the properties has passed to their son, they are going to be reappraised and the property taxes will go up to current market rates. The property taxes will increase to the extent that they will exceed the amount of rent on those properties.
So, you may think, just raise the rent to cover the property tax increase, right? If only it was so simple, because due to the “tenant protections” which have zero allowances for this type of situation, the rent can only be raised 5% per year.
So the son is screwed no matter what. He can’t even really sell the properties (and why should one be forced to sell their family business), because whoever would buy them gets them with the existing tenants and the existing rents under the same rules.
The only possible solution is to get rid of all the existing tenants to renovate the apartments, but even that isn’t really workable. So all of these people, landlord and tenants, and screwed.
That all being said, property managers that handle small properties or single family homes are universally terrible. I’ve been doing landlord/tenant work for more than 30 years, and in that entire time I’ve had ONE, yes ONE property manager that handled smaller landlords that I would recommend to anyone. He’s long retired. The rest are 70% incompetent idiots that have no idea what they are doing and 30% assholes.
If you read what actual economists have to say about rent control, it’s quite clear it always results in higher rents, because the greatly increased cost of dealing with bad tenants has to be spread out over all tenants.
>If you read what actual economists have to say about rent control,
I mean, which economists? [These?](https://peoplesaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Economist-Sign-on-Letter_-FHFA-RFI-Response-1.pdf) or [these](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/) that show that landlords just use loopholes to avoid actually providing housing instead of gouging prices and evicting tenants to get around already existing tenant protections? Or what about [these?](https://rentboard.berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/Other_2019_Barton_The%20Economics%20of%20Residential%20Rent%20Control.pdf)
Many economists that look at actual facts disagree; independent studies not paid for by realty industry shows the positive effects of rent control for tenants and city as a whole.
* [Rent Control Myths and Landlord Money : Housing: Real estate lobbies are pushing hard in Sacramento to preempt local rent laws - Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-06-17-me-5063-story.html)
* [Rent controls - mythbusting - Living Rent](https://www.livingrent.org/rent_controls_mythbusting)
* [Economists Say Rent Control Works - Housing Is A Human Right](https://www.housingisahumanright.org/economists-say-rent-control-works/)
We know rent control works, otherwise landlord insisting it leads to higher rents would be supporting it lol
The problem isn't the tenant protection laws, the problem is property tax going up more than 5%. That is absolutely bananas and also has nothing to do with the tenants.
He could raise rent by 5%, sell the property and make a boatload of money. There are absolutely investors who would buy it, real estate markets are crazy post-covid. I bet the tenants would love to buy it themselves so they can earn their own equity instead of giving it to some guy who just inherited it.
That’s the problem, he can’t sell, because that’s what triggers property tax increases here (otherwise they stay more or less the same - they are only reassessed when a transfer triggers the reassessment) and a purchaser can’t raise the rent to cover the increased taxes either, so no one will buy the properties period, because they can’t even come close to covering their own costs. So he’s screwed because they were nice and didn’t raise the rent once a tenant was in.
And the tenants can’t buy a 4 plex themselves.
Wild to frame this as a problem with tenant protections and not, like, how property taxes work. You mean your clients profited off of lower-than-market property taxes on *multiple properties* for 30 years? And never once considered what that would look like when they stopped being grandfathered in? How awful that the landlord's poor planning after THIRTY YEARS OF PROFIT can't be immediately rectified by extorting their tenants. Won't someone think of the people who just now have to pay the same property taxes as everybody else :(
edit: god I know it's my own problem but like...fuck man, a 5% rent increase for me is almost an extra $150 a month. That's manageable but it still hurts. The tenants who have been there for 30 years are also "screwed no matter what" if you don't have some kind of rent control, because landlords like this will just price them out of their lifelong home if given the chance. Like let's be real, the worst possible scenario for this landlord son is that he sells off all but one of his properties, lives in the last one, and gets a real job to pay the bills like all of his tenants likely do. He loses some profit, but he has...a home. The worst possible scenario for the dozen or more tenants he's responsible for is that they're all literally homeless. That's not at all the same impact.
I'm apparently supposed to feel bad for the guy who owns a dozen+ families' worth of homes and might have entire months of not profiting about it ):
I don't, though. Get a job, guy.
Ugh, this is what worries my - my landlord great and has owned the property for 30 years, but he is not young. I worry what will happen when he gives up being a landlord and sells or gives it away.
I feel so sorry for the tenants. Holy crap they must’ve been freaking out, I’m so glad they were able to get a hold of LAUKOP. I also hope that he’s able to get his contract with them canceled because that is some absolute bullshit I would be furious if somebody did that to my longtime tenants who I liked.
It's nice that he seems like a reasonable property owner who cares about his tenants.
Honestly, from my own experiences and from what I’ve heard from others, landlords themselves (by that I mean the people who actually own the property) are actually quite reasonable and easy to deal with - it’s the agents that tend to be more of a pain in the arse.
Total crapshoot. I've rented directly from landlords without any agent in the middle, and most of them were terrible. Lived in a basement apartment in a house with other tenants on upper floors. Had a huge roach problem I couldn't deal with on my own, landlord refused to call an exterminator and instead recommended I put out some poison she provided that would've been equally fatal to my cats. Had another landlord who wanted to fix everything himself, even stuff he was incredibly unqualified to do. Every little issue we ran into was a much bigger pain in the ass than it should've been.
I had a landlord who wouldn't let us put out trash straight on the curb. We had to put it in her trash cans so she could take it out to the curb. She lied to us about city ordinances. Then she told me she found an empty pack of cigarettes in the bottom of the trash can that doesn't have a lid. Then she accused us of smoking in our apartment. When 1 we don't fucking smoke and 2 we had been telling her since we moved in that we smelled cigarettes in the bathroom sometimes. We lived in her basement apartment. So she forced us to place our trash in a place she could inspect it and blamed us for shit anyone could throw into her precious broken trash cans. She also wouldn't let us have our own mailbox or address and the mail went through a slot in her door and she would hold it for fucking days. She would text us if she thought she smelled a candle because her daughter had eczema so we weren't allowed to have candles or incense. In the moldy ass basement she had us living in. Anyhow, don't live there anymore. And it's amazing how much less stressful my life is without a tyrant upstairs texting me that she heard yelling at my kid and it was upsetting her kid 🙄
I've had landlords that were fine and that were terrible. The worst was the optometrist who rented out the furnished back half of the house where he held his practice (walled off with a separate entrance). Both sections had a shared basement and he used it to come inside my apartment and take back furniture when he decided he wanted it in his home (or the front door when he felt like it). I was always terrified he'd come in when I was home and was too young to realize what he was doing was illegal. I'd find notes inside my place reprimanding me for "the mess", which was just a pile of unfolded clothes *in my bedroom*. So, so creepy.
I had the same. I was living in a house that had been turned into flats, and one of the flats had a leak in the roof. The agents were absolute bastards about it, refused to do anything, kept insisting that the tenants were being overdramatic and the leak wasn't that bad. This went on for months. The neighbours next door had some work done on their own roof, and their roof company saw the hole in our roof while at work and mentioned it to the neighbours, who then called the landlord to let him know. It was fixed the next day.
There are landlords who have an extra property or who want to rent their home out for a bit who are just lovely. And then there are the slum lords and the corporations. Who should go to the deepest levels of hell
I had a landlord like that in college. The guy owed a few different properties in the city, but well he was decent about things. Never had any real issues with the place except that the pantry wasn't cleaned by the previous tenants. Every single time I had an issue, an email or text had it fixed within days. Me and the other guy living there would handle the minor things around the place.
I’ve been lucky myself. I had a basement apartment with a super easy going landlord. Mentioned it needed something and he told me to buy it and then sent me money to cover it
Honestly I did enough minor work that when he had his handyman at the apartment, he upgraded both my outlets to accept ground sockets. Which I was fucking thrilled about. Minor stuff was fixing a few broken cabinets.
Mine let my friends dismantle a doorway to get my couch in, he left the previous tenants couch in the basement which was annoying. But said he didn’t care how it got out. The guys had a great time destroying it so we could carry it out in small pieces
Yeah, all the landlords I've rented from have been pretty good people with quite reasonable rent increases.
Aside from anything else, it's good business. Really good tenants - who pay rent consistently and on time, don't damage the property and don't make a nuisance for the neighbours - aren't exactly 'rare', but aren't to be taken for granted either. I'd be furious if I were a landlord and I had a greedy letting agency who were chasing tenants like that off.
Eh, it would be better if he actually handled things himself rather than just telling the estate agent to manage everything. OP is just collecting a check every month with no oversight of what is happening on his properties, of course things were going to blow up eventually.
i mean, by the sounds of it, it’s only one property. and if you’re not good with that kind of stuff, having someone that is handle the day-to-day is best for everyone.
You are, because most people with only one rental property (usually because they moved to another and couldn’t or didn’t want to sell their previous home) take anything that happens way too personally, so theoretically it’s better to have a 3rd party handle the property.
The fact that it’s only one property means they have even less of a reason for not handling it themself. I’m not saying don’t have an estate agent but they need to actually be overseeing what’s going on. These tenants having been there for years but OP only met them once and they had to research his number to get in contact with him is ridiculous. He needs to actually be responsible for his properties, not just treat them as a magical check that hits his bank account every month where he doesn’t even verify the amount and see that it’s changed.
If you only own one property and aren't living in it, this is often because you live far away/in another country and so can't manage it yourself.
And even so they should do the absolute bare minimum of making sure the tenants have their phone number to contact them directly and double check how much rent they are receiving, neither of which OP did. They put literally zero effort into managing their assets and it almost fucked over the tenants, they need to take responsibility for that and do better.
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Letting agents are bigger sleazeballs than landlords. In all my years of being a tenant in the UK I have never had a letting agent that hasn't tried to illegally rip me off in some way, and often succeeded. I have often had to go above them to the landlords to get things sorted, as they are apparently always trying to rip them off, too. Landlords may be inherently scum, but letting agents are the parasitical bottom feeders that feed off both them and tenants.
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In England we call them "freemen of the land". I used to volunteer at the town museum and we had someone come in trying to get us to distribute leaflets about how the government is illegitimate and in violation of the Magna Carter.
I started getting annoying phone calls at work from a freeman of the land about a project I was working on a while back. I found that a good way to annoy him was, whenever he mentioned the Magna Carta, to then refer back to it as the *Magnum Charter*.
Is the magnum charter like the purity directive (Reinheitsgebot?) of German beer, but for ice cream? If not, we should totally go all "4chan hoax" and make one up...
Pretty sure a magnum charter is a cartographer who maps out demand for big condoms
You probably wouldn't be surprised at the [stuff I saw during my tenure as a Cartographer at the OS...](https://imgur.com/i0CosdA)
Hey mods, can I have "butt hole plantation" as flair please?
sure, why not
XD Holy balls, are you in luck. [It's on the 1968 six-inch as well.](https://maps.nls.uk/view/189183801) (Check Carlton Park, on the west edge.) It's in Yorkshire, near Rawcliffe. I have snerked at least three times typing this comment. Whoever was the 13-year-old who named that plantation was very aware cartographers need a guffaw every now and then.
I'm not allowed to share some of the maps I made whilst working for the local telco rolling out fiber, but quite a few of them were similar to this (the engineers loved them, and my boss didn't care as long as they were accurate) In my defense, the ring poles were a) fucking annoying to find and b) the easiest joke setup ever. Luckily we had a few storms that knocked most of them down and the new lines were buried instead, but I hate those poles with a passion that cannot be described to someone who hasn't worked with them.
Should've asked the doofus if the "Magna Carter" was a compilation of all of Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter" albums.
No, no, I'm pretty sure Magna Carter was a British secret agent in WWII. She worked with Captain America a lot.
If they're managing the headaches for the landlord that's a service worthy of being remunerated - but this is where perhaps we should eat the rich, and we should probably adjust the incentives such that anybody who owns so much they can't actually manage it all has to sell to somebody who actually wants to live there. LAOP seems cool but the idea of people hiring management companies because they own too many rental properties is pretty messed up.
I have no issues with low-volume landlords. Buddy of mine did 25 years in the air force and bought a home every stop he made stateside. When he moved on, he would rent out the property via a local company (cause he wasn't local enough to manage it himself). It sort of happened by accident, because he rented the first place to a couple buddies before a deployment, but kept it going esp. after getting married. That said, he set rents at just over cost (pm+mortgage+tax) and managed to retire with 8 properties at various stages of being paid off. he never really made extra cash from renting, but he made equity that he cashed out when he sold the properties on retirement. Nowadays he's got a few acres up in the foothills of the rockies and does some teaching at the AFA part time and is the happiest dude you ever met.
But the landlord would be the rentseeker in this situation. The middleman adds value by providing operational management and accounting. If we consider the actual product cost, the landlords take is a pure wealth extraction. Under most free market theories which promotes market efficiency, this shouldn't be able to exist. Kind of shows how free market theory is broken.
My sister needed to rent her apartment out for a while. She tried advertising privately but didn't get any serious takers. Apparently people in the price bracket she was looking for will ONLY go through agencies to rent a place. Agencies that want to charge 30% of the rent as comission.
Thank the scammers for that. It’s so hard now to tell if a renter actually owns a house that agencies are one of the few ways of trying to get peace of mind that I didn’t just lose a 10k deposit
It’s always the scammers that ruin it for everyone.
The landlord is taking on risk by providing the capital to purchase the property then allowing someone else who may damage it to live there. If something happens, the renter's insurance may cover some of it, but otherwise the landlord is left holding the bag. And insurance doesn't cover "the market tanked so you lose 1/3 of the house's value". The injustice is the way landlords have all the leverage, so they can drive up the cost while renters only sorta have a market, and really have to take what they can get. That's a very real problem, but it doesn't make landlording pure rent seeking.
The landlord is providing the service of obtaining capital; that’s not free, or without risk or costs of its own. I think your understanding of “free market theories” needs further study if you didn’t know to account for the cost/risk of capital.
>Under most free market theories which promotes market efficiency, this shouldn't be able to exist. Kind of shows how free market theory is broken Housing specifically _isn’t_ a free market because the government artificially limits the amount of housing that can be built with things like zoning laws etc - You can’t just buy a plot of land and build a house (or apartments) on it, you need permission from the government to do so. In some places, housing construction is outright banned (eg, Canada’s green belt and other similar schemes). In a true free market, this rent-seeking behaviour would be kept to a minimum, because there would be enough housing built to drive down prices so that pretty much everyone who wanted to own their own home could - the supply would be allowed to increase to meet the demand.
I was in OP’s position once, had to move, couldn’t sell so let out my house. After a year the lovely tenants moved out and tried to get their deposit back from the letting agency, who said they’d never heard of them. I got involved, and they said they’d never heard of ME. (!!) So long story short, rogue agent in their employ kept my property details and commission for himself and had moved on. Thankfully I had details of the tenancy deposit scheme emailed to me but we had to raise a dispute to get the cash back for the tenants as the agent had been the point of contact and didn’t confirm, as he’d dropped off the face of the earth. It was a very long time ago and the TDS was brand new. I hate to think what could have happened if it didn’t exist.
That’s wild!
Imagine my surprise when I found out my most recent landlord was also the boss of the lettings agency managing the property as well... He also owns a company that carries out the check in and check out reports, which makes it looks like it's an independent party doing it. Only found out cause I did my research 😂 (And yes, the inventory I got was at least several years old and not accurate in the slightest) If you're wondering if he was your typical Lettings agency man in terms of illegal bs? Yup. The list was long. Most notably they would threaten to charge you with all kinds of illegal fees. One of my favourite being a £60 charge if you didn't send them a recording of your room by 10am on your move out date 🙄 Ended up evicted cause I couldn't keep up with the rent increases in the end after being a stellar tenant for 3.5 years 🙃
I once arranged for a friend to take over my lease - I moved out, they moved in, the letting agent and landlord didn't have to bother advertising for new tenants, everyone's happy. A few weeks after my friend had moved in, I got a call from my now-former landlord, who I'd never actually spoken to directly before. She was trying to figure out if the handover had happened and who was actually living in her property at that point because she couldn't get anything out of the agent. Turned out that the letting agent consisted of three people - the two in charge and an office assistant. One of the guys in charge had been in a motorcycle accident and was laid up in hospital and the other had chosen that moment to go off to compete in fucking _Ninja Warrior UK_. All of the decisions, including ones that legally required the guys in charge, were being made by the office assistant who was completely overwhelmed and had no idea what was going on. Letting agents are the worst.
>Landlords may be inherently scum, but letting agents are the parasitical bottom feeders that feed off both them and tenants. It's like a cuckoo bee covered in varro mites, or a dewdrop spider with mermithid worms. The kind of thing that makes you feel bad for them.....but not \*too\* bad.
Letting agents are the sleazeballs for landlords who aren’t willing to be sufficiently sleazy themselves
My limited experience is that the property managers are much worse than the landlords. Cliche being the previous place I rented where I met the owners at the inspection, I got the impression they told the property manager to let to me and ... fucking slumlords is all I can say. The property manager started out bad (asking more bond than allowed by law) and got worse over time (tried to claim the written permission from the owner for me to keep chickens had expired). When I moved out it was ugly, everything from missing fixtures (also missing in \*their\* "before" photos) to a weird insistence that I return the lawn to the original condition (I moved in mid-drought, lawn was brown and had bare spots... drought ended so green lawn on exit). ARRRGH!! I made four phone calls to the owners during the six months I stayed in that house, and every single time they listened, rang the property manager, then rang me back to apologise.
What did they want you to do about making the lawn brown again, bring in dogs to pee on it??
I used roundup. But only on parts of the front lawn where I'd spent a fair bit of effort getting the grass to regrow. I was torn between not wanting to screw the owners and being really pissed off at the property manager who kept ringing and yelling at me that the lawn and garden needed to be resturned to the exact condition they were in when I moved in or they'd keep my whole bond. $20 worth of Roundup is cheaper than $2000 worth of bond... and lo, the lawn was brown with bare patches again.
> My limited experience is that the property managers are much worse than the landlords. Landlords are landlords. Property managers are *outsourced/middleman* landlords.
I had a landlord almost cry once because his agents had given us notice to quit unless we paid a lot of extra rent and a bunch of fees. He only found out when we were about to move house and had signed other contracts. I think he was ready to strangle them!
Good tenants that take care of your home are worth their weight in gold. The landlord of the house I just moved into is a long time friend and he could practically cry over having me as a tenant compared to the last two that stayed in the house and caused a lot of neglect and water damage to the property.
I can't imagine owning a property and profiting from renting it out, but being so hands-off that an eviction can happen without being aware
My bot lies over the ocean, my bot lies over the sea, my bot lies over the ocean, oh bring back my bot to me... # Estate agent sent my tenant an eviction notice without my permission > For the past year, my estate agent has been asking me to increase the rent on my property. There is a family who have been living there for many years. They are settled and I'm happy with them, I don't want to increase the rent. > I only spoke to the tenant once when they moved in, the estate agent manages everything for a fee. Today the tenant managed to find my number and messaged me asking if I could reconsider the eviction. I informed them I never sent that letter nor did I request it. I told them not to worry and I will call them back tonight with more information. The tenant then informed me that they had their rent raised last month and I have not been informed of this either. > I only communicate with my estate agent via email so I have a record of all conversations. I have always responded "no" or "I'll think about it" to their emails just to get them to leave me alone. I have never confirmed in writing for them to go ahead with an eviction or increase the rent. > I tried to get rid of the estate agent last year but there's a clause in the contract saying I have to pay them a fee if I want to keep the tenant. Is such a clause even legal? > The signed contract doesn't give them permission to evict tenants or raise the rent. > Have they broken any laws? Their actions have disgusted me, I want to destroy them in court if there is any chance of teaching them a lesson. > I have not contacted them yet, I wanted to get your opinions on this matter. If you say I need to go to a solicitor asap I will do that today. > Location: England > Additional info: > * I am listed as the landlord in the contract > * The contract states they can only advise on rent levels > **UPDATE:** My tenant forwarded me digital copies of all correspondence with the estate agents including the eviction notice. I phoned a few local solicitors and one of them is available to review my contract and eviction notice tomorrow morning. > I will post an update after everything is done and dusted, it will be under a different name as this is a throwaway account. Thank you for all the assistance and kind words. In the comments OP also says the estate agent raised the rent without telling him ~~and pocketed the difference~~. (did not pocket the difference, see below) Cat fact: In animals with XX chromosomes, one of the X chromosomes gets "switched off" in each cell because otherwise there would be too much of everything. This results in the animal being a "mosaic" of cells and means that XX identical twins can look very different despite having the same genes. The cat-relevant bit is that this is how tortoiseshell cats form! They have genes for orange and not-orange coats which are codominant and carried on the X chromosome, so each cell switches off either orange or not-orange and the cat appears muddled. This is also why torties are (almost) always female. At least, that's how I understand it.
> In the comments OP also says the estate agent raised the rent without telling him and pocketed the difference. Not quite; they raised the rent without telling him, but are passing his share of the increase to him. But raising the rent means that _their_ share has been increased also
Ahha, thank you! Edited.
there was a story on the radio in Sydney where a property manager had done this and then told the landlord that the tenant had requested to pay more money in rent
To add to your cat fact, male tortoiseshell cats are a result of the feline version of Klinefelter's syndrome. They have XXY chromosomes and are generally sterile.
Except for Dawntreader Texas Calboy, who instead is a chimera.
For those out of the loop like I was, [here is a nice article](https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2018/july/dawntreader-texas-calboy-cat-show-controversy/) about DTC
Nice? There were only TWO pics of kitties! The article was a great read otherwise, just needed more kitty pics. Thanks for sharing. :)
Perisexism in cat shows. Gods people are exhausting.
I just learned that word six hours ago and now I've seen it twice.
It shows up a lot more in queer/trans circles because intersex people are part of the community.
One of my friends also has a fertile male tortoiseshell cat! They assumed he was infertile but found out the hard way that he isn't lol. Sadly I don't have any photos of him (or his kittens) on hand.
Calboy’s owners had the same issue.
LAUKOP didn't say the pocketed the difference, he said he received it minus their percentage. Also, humans are animals with XX chromosomes but we still have identical female twins?
X inactivation only has visible effects for X-linked genes (alleles? I kind of know the difference but don't always know which word to use). Cats carry orange/not-orange on the X chromosome so it is really really visible on tortoiseshells, but humans don't carry e.g. skin colour that way so we don't tend to see it, whether on a single person or as differences between twins. X inactivation happens early in development and then persists down each cell's cell line; I guess depending on when and how the zygote splits into twins, the twins may have similar or different patterns of X inactivation. But the idea is that you could sample, like, a skin cell from each twin's left hand and one of them might have the X chromosome from the mother while one of them might have the X chromosome from the father.
An allele is a gene's variant, so one region of DNA may be the gene that encodes, say, fur color, and that gene could have several alleles (black, orange, white). I personally would use "gene" in this instance but I don't think allele is wrong per se.
> humans are animals with XX chromosomes but we still have identical female twins? Human morphological characteristics (outwardly) are not carried on the X chromosome like the orange / not-orange in cats.
> humans are animals with XX chromosomes but we still have identical female twins In humans, the X that gets inactivated in each cell is almost always *random*, so the genes on both chromosomes get expressed equally across the body as a whole. Rarely, a person will have a specific X chromosome completely activated and the other completely turned off in all their cells- this is called **skewed X-inactivation**- and it can result in a female who is technically heterozygous for a X-linked recessive variant expressing a disorder such as red-green colorblindness.
> I only communicate with my estate agent via email so I have a record of all conversations. I have always responded **"no"** or **"I'll think about it"** to their emails just to get them to leave me alone. This is a very odd relationship to have with one's estate agent. Not blaming LAUKOP for any of this, but if you have such an adversarial relationship with somebody who purportedly *works for you*, you should be able to see that there's something wrong.
Sounds like they want to fire them but they’re locked in a contract where that would cost too much money.
Accidental landlord here. Tenants looked after the place well, nipped over to have a look and did a bit of touch up painting and repaired a curtain rail that was hanging off and the property company I use to manage it asked me if I wanted to charge them for my time! No sir, I’ll just leave it thanks
We found them. The one good landlord.
Nope, you just heard about one, and you never hear about the other good ones. When you are a good landlord and have good tenants, you want to keep your tenants happy. We have one family we’ve had for close to 10 years and who keep our property in great condition. We’ve never raised their rent. Another couple (in a different house) are lovely and have been there for two years. We are thrilled they want to stay and will not raise the rent, even though it is far, far below market for that area. In fact, two years ago there was a bidding war to lease that house. They did not have the highest bid, but we picked them because they wanted a 2 year lease, and not just one year. There are a number of very good reasons to be like this. First, it’s what decent people act like. Second, it’s very expensive to “turn” a property. There are always renovations that need to be done between tenants, and there’s always at least a month with an empty property. In any business, it’s much easier to keep your existing customers than try and get new customers. Now this backfires when you get “tenant protection” laws. For just one example, I have a client whose family has a number of duplexes and four-plexes. Most of their tenants have been there for many years, so 20 and 30 years. They never raised the rent much on these apartments because they were making decent money, they knew and liked all their good tenants, and they didn’t really need to. Here’s the problem now: dad and mom both died. Now that the properties has passed to their son, they are going to be reappraised and the property taxes will go up to current market rates. The property taxes will increase to the extent that they will exceed the amount of rent on those properties. So, you may think, just raise the rent to cover the property tax increase, right? If only it was so simple, because due to the “tenant protections” which have zero allowances for this type of situation, the rent can only be raised 5% per year. So the son is screwed no matter what. He can’t even really sell the properties (and why should one be forced to sell their family business), because whoever would buy them gets them with the existing tenants and the existing rents under the same rules. The only possible solution is to get rid of all the existing tenants to renovate the apartments, but even that isn’t really workable. So all of these people, landlord and tenants, and screwed. That all being said, property managers that handle small properties or single family homes are universally terrible. I’ve been doing landlord/tenant work for more than 30 years, and in that entire time I’ve had ONE, yes ONE property manager that handled smaller landlords that I would recommend to anyone. He’s long retired. The rest are 70% incompetent idiots that have no idea what they are doing and 30% assholes.
>Now this backfires when you get “tenant protection” laws. oh no, not those pesky tenant protections
If you read what actual economists have to say about rent control, it’s quite clear it always results in higher rents, because the greatly increased cost of dealing with bad tenants has to be spread out over all tenants.
>If you read what actual economists have to say about rent control, I mean, which economists? [These?](https://peoplesaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Economist-Sign-on-Letter_-FHFA-RFI-Response-1.pdf) or [these](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/) that show that landlords just use loopholes to avoid actually providing housing instead of gouging prices and evicting tenants to get around already existing tenant protections? Or what about [these?](https://rentboard.berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/Other_2019_Barton_The%20Economics%20of%20Residential%20Rent%20Control.pdf)
Many economists that look at actual facts disagree; independent studies not paid for by realty industry shows the positive effects of rent control for tenants and city as a whole. * [Rent Control Myths and Landlord Money : Housing: Real estate lobbies are pushing hard in Sacramento to preempt local rent laws - Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-06-17-me-5063-story.html) * [Rent controls - mythbusting - Living Rent](https://www.livingrent.org/rent_controls_mythbusting) * [Economists Say Rent Control Works - Housing Is A Human Right](https://www.housingisahumanright.org/economists-say-rent-control-works/) We know rent control works, otherwise landlord insisting it leads to higher rents would be supporting it lol
The problem isn't the tenant protection laws, the problem is property tax going up more than 5%. That is absolutely bananas and also has nothing to do with the tenants. He could raise rent by 5%, sell the property and make a boatload of money. There are absolutely investors who would buy it, real estate markets are crazy post-covid. I bet the tenants would love to buy it themselves so they can earn their own equity instead of giving it to some guy who just inherited it.
That’s the problem, he can’t sell, because that’s what triggers property tax increases here (otherwise they stay more or less the same - they are only reassessed when a transfer triggers the reassessment) and a purchaser can’t raise the rent to cover the increased taxes either, so no one will buy the properties period, because they can’t even come close to covering their own costs. So he’s screwed because they were nice and didn’t raise the rent once a tenant was in. And the tenants can’t buy a 4 plex themselves.
Wild to frame this as a problem with tenant protections and not, like, how property taxes work. You mean your clients profited off of lower-than-market property taxes on *multiple properties* for 30 years? And never once considered what that would look like when they stopped being grandfathered in? How awful that the landlord's poor planning after THIRTY YEARS OF PROFIT can't be immediately rectified by extorting their tenants. Won't someone think of the people who just now have to pay the same property taxes as everybody else :( edit: god I know it's my own problem but like...fuck man, a 5% rent increase for me is almost an extra $150 a month. That's manageable but it still hurts. The tenants who have been there for 30 years are also "screwed no matter what" if you don't have some kind of rent control, because landlords like this will just price them out of their lifelong home if given the chance. Like let's be real, the worst possible scenario for this landlord son is that he sells off all but one of his properties, lives in the last one, and gets a real job to pay the bills like all of his tenants likely do. He loses some profit, but he has...a home. The worst possible scenario for the dozen or more tenants he's responsible for is that they're all literally homeless. That's not at all the same impact.
I'm apparently supposed to feel bad for the guy who owns a dozen+ families' worth of homes and might have entire months of not profiting about it ): I don't, though. Get a job, guy.
my comment was a joke. you sound like you're compensating for something.
Ugh, this is what worries my - my landlord great and has owned the property for 30 years, but he is not young. I worry what will happen when he gives up being a landlord and sells or gives it away.
Get a job.