Rentals - What constitutes Wear & Tear

[Dulce Beltran]

Tenant moved out. Walls need touch ups and two bathroom cabinets are de-laminating (excess water dripping and not cleaning). The baseboards have knicks on all of them. One has a piece of it taken out. Is the water damage and baseboards considered wear and tear?

[Dan H.]

We base our wear n tear significantly on length of occupancy but if a bathroom vanity or cabinet was in good shape when they moved in, then the occupancy should be over 10 years to consider that normal wear n tear.

if a tenant leaves in less than a year we expect the unit to be in move-in condition and are somewhat hard a**es.  We charge the tenant for everything.

If a tenant is in the unit for more than a year we expect to need to do some touch up paint but the difficult assessment is when is it more than expected (more than normal wear n tear). 

If the tenant is in 5 years, we hope to not need to re-paint the interior but if we do need to repaint the interior we typically do not charge the tenant.

Our units get converted away from carpet at the first recent rehab but we have a couple units with carpet.  If the carpet lasts less than 10 years we usually charge the tenant partial replacement costs.  We had a tenant destroy a carpet in one year once.  We explained to the tenant that we believed the carpet was destroyed but if they believed they could get it clean they were welcome to try to clean it.  The tenant apparently agreed with our assessment (they did not try to get it cleaned) and paid for a new carpet.

We have had a tenant claim cook top scratches were present at move in but we had the move-in checklist and pictures showing she was incorrect.  So she paid for the replacement part (the entire top) and installation.  She was a neat freak and scratched it cleaning it to excess.  We let her out of her lease early by mutual consent.

In summary, the longer a tenant occupies a unit, the more forgiving we are about damage (even not normal wear n tear items).

We believe we are reasonable in our interpretation of wear n tear and so far we have had no significant tenant push back.  We cover out a** with move-in and move-out checklists that the tenant signs.  We also try to take photos but photos will not get everything such as paint on the cement patio (unless you photo every foot of the RE eventually there will be damage to something that does not have a photo) that takes a few hours to clean/power wash off.  Never the less, when you have the photo proving the damage was not there at move-in it just adds to the strength of the Move-in checklist.

Good luck