Issue with tenant after lease ended

Hi everyone,

Looking for some feedback on whether or not I should have handled anything differently when the tenants lease ended. I hadn’t given it much thought until today when the tenants father berated me at my 4yr olds swimming lesson in front of everyone.

For context, we leased out a granny flat for 2 years while planning a major renovation on the house so knew the tenants (young family)/their parents. They requested some maintenance done during the lease which we attended to except for replacing the dishwasher on the advice of the property manager. It was still working, just not great.

So they vacated end of Jan and the PM did the exit report. There was quite a bit of damage (holes in the walls, fly screens with holes, timber floor with gouges because nothing was used under furniture, cleaning, new blinds torn among other things). I told the PM to only get quotes for the floors, repairing the walls and cleaning which came back higher than the bond and the tenants (according to the PM) agreed to forfeit the bond.

Today the tenants father accused me of not treating them fairly and that we are essentially horrible people. Would you have done anything differently?
Obviously I will never be leasing to tenants who know who I am again!!

 

Lesson learnt ...

 

Dont rent to people you know personally.

 

Did you charge them for things that were actually fair wear and tear?

 

If you have photos I would enlarge them and be prepared for him next week.

 

Yes lesson definitely learnt!

I don’t think so. I don’t consider holes in the walls fair wear and tear. The timber floor is some wear and tear, some damage which was passed on to them accordingly.

 

Welcome to the world of " He said - she said"..........

The story the former tenant told their father is likely vastly different to what they told their father

I like @qak suggestion

Be prepared and hand out printed pic's to the surrounding people (Not directly to the father), this will quickly shut him up and probably give him the reality check about his kids that he needs

 

If he tries that again, I'd let him know that it's actually abuse & you are prepared to go to the police, and file an AVO.

Just a tip. Not sure if it's relevant or not BUT we used to have a second home on our block, and all the neighbours knew it belonged to us, so we couldn't escape the tenants learning who the LL was. Anyway, the one thing that I regularly did was to let them know that EVERYTHING is done via the PM. I found that most people, unless they have property themselves, don't really understand the relationship between LL & Agent. So I would often tell them that I had 'signed my rights away, and anything related to the property would be handled by the PM'. This simple thing gave a buffer between myself & the tenant, and if there was anything that the tenant disagreed with, they'd deal with the PM.

 

I'd be a very rich man if I could just accuse people of being horrid and I got stuff for free!
Wouldn't mind a refund on my car or mobile phone

 

Sounds like a fair outcome to me, based on info presented so far.

The issue with renting to people you know and / or renting to people directly is that it's really difficult to avoid the emotional attachment. You care what they think, which leads to suboptimal business decisions.

 

Sounds like you did the right thing and were well within your rights to!

All you can do is probably to fantasize about taking the exit photos to the next swimming lesson and putting them on display, it might make you feel better. Nothing quite like being slandered for following due process by someone who did the wrong thing and trashed their house