When Rental Gets Mental

I am a landlady, renting out multiple rooms in different shared apartments to students, young professionals, and/or tourists. For the last few months, I’ve had a tenant that just doesn’t understand the concept of people living together. Maybe he lived under a rock for the first few decades of his life?

Cleaning up the kitchen, oven, or stove after cooking? Why bother? Someone else will surely deal with the mess and do it for me. Flooding the bathroom after each use, and leaving different coloured stains on (and around) the toilet? Some other tenant (or the landlady) will be there to clean that up!

But the “highlight” is when he is finally supposed to move out. He asks multiple times about his deposit. I assure him that he will get it in cash when he turns in his keys and everything is in the same condition as he got it when he moved in. I even send a list of what he needs to do before moving out, e.g. “wash bed linens,” “clean fridge,” “remove all personal property,” and so on.

I arrive a few minutes early. He is shuffling around, but there is so much stuff still around, the fridge is dirty and full of his food, lots of his things (bike, boxes, food, bathroom items) are still all over the apartment, and I think, “This is just impossible to do in fifteen minutes.”

Five minutes before the arranged time, he says:

Tenant: “Okay, you can check the room now.”

Me: “I am not here to check the room. I am here to check everything, take your keys, and return the deposit, when you leave the apartment.”

Tenant: “But you never said that! I need another four hours for that!”

He knows I have no more time today.

Me: “I can’t check the room if all your stuff is still here, and I won’t return any deposit if you don’t return the keys.”

Technically, he has until tomorrow, until the month is over; it was his decision to return the keys today.

This went on for several minutes, and he did not understand why I just wouldn’t check the room, return the deposit, and then leave him with the keys and all his things in my apartment, as if that was the most normal thing to expect.

I gave up after several minutes of explaining the same thing over and over, and then I turned around and walked out.

I told him to put the keys in the postbox when he had cleared out, and I would check everything then and would return the deposit via bank transfer. Let’s see what happens next.