Renting from a landlord... met prior tenant :(

[Jeremy Lee]

Hey all,

So we are facing a big decision on whether to move into a rental or not. It's in an area we have been wanting to move, there are currently no other rentals that fit our criteria, now is a good time to move (as we intend to move out of the current place and sell it), and the place we are considering renting is nice and well-kept overall but it is slightly smaller than the current place so we have some minor concerns about squeezing everything in.

BUT the bigger concern is with the landlord. During our due diligence process, we actually knocked on the doors of a few neighbors and spoke with them. One happened to be the prior tenant who had lived at the unit we are considering renting. She really liked it and said the landlords were "nice" but that they were actually quite difficult to work with (I think there might be a slight barrier in communications/understanding what the landlords were saying as English is their second language). She then went on to start ranting and complaining about how they were unreasonable and essentially stingy/penny-pinchers... basically that they made her pay for the home warranty service calls on normal wear and tear types of issues (the washing machine didn't work well, the water heater started leaking and needed replacement, etc). She also complained that they took money out of her security deposit for a landscaper they just brought in to clean up broken pottery in the yard which she claims was there from the prior tenants. On top of that, she wanted to have her own landscaper come in to do general maintenance/cleanup (presumably for a lower cost) but they ignored her requests to that and had someone else do it.  

We met them yesterday (including their agent and our realtor/agent) and they were...interesting. Prior to this my realtor raised some of the concerns that we heard about from the prior tenant and the landlords seemed to get quite defensive (understandably so). Anyway, when we met with them nearly the first thing the landlord did was have me come over to look at all his documentation about the water heater and basically trying to justify why he was in the right and why the prior tenant had no business complaining about paying a $75 service fee for a leaking water heater (which it seems to me is normal wear and tear since most people aren't going to damage a water heater) and how he had to pay out of his own pocket to replace the thing outside of whatever the home warranty deductible was. It felt...petty. I almost wanted to tell him that I'm not there to play the judge (because it started feeling like that) but that I just wanted a fair and reasonable relationship when it comes to that stuff. I've read around and my understanding is that some landlords leverage home warranties but some think that in addition to offshoring the headaches of work requests, they can also offshore some of the costs (including being billed the service call charge regardless of whether it was wear and tear or tenant-induced damage). My understanding, from a *reasonable* landlord's perspective, is that landlords *should* just take care of and cover any non-damage/wear-and-tear issues that arise. If something was damaged, of course the tenant should be responsible, however. My point is, and I hope this would never happen, but I don't want to have to pay a $75 service fee every time something starts going wrong not due to damage (e.g. leaky pipe/faucet, leaking water line behind fridge, leak from washing machine, clogged dryer vent, leaking water heater, A/C condenser fan gave out, furnace stopped working because the control board went out, etc etc etc). I don't know what the condition is of *everything* in this unit or how much life is left - we could go in there and have all these things fail on us 5 months in, and then what? 

Anyway, both the husband and wife were slightly stand-offish but the husband more so than the wife. It was a little awkward and often hard to understand the points they were trying to make. But they seemed nice and *wanted* us to rent from them. My take, based on the discussion between their agent and my realtor, is that the prior tenant was troublesome (sounded like the feeling was mutual though) and that they are looking for a 'unicorn' of a tenant who won't give them any trouble (or even complain) and who will pay rent on time. Out of all the applicants, it seems we are top of the list (else they wouldn't have wanted us to come meet them and have a long discussion yesterday). My realtor perceives them as wanting to be as passive as possible. I have no problem when it comes to trying to be passive but I think there are certain things where no landlord (at least ones who choose not to use property management) can assume to be fully passive, particularly when it comes to the topic of repairs/maintenance. I'm just trying to prevent headaches here if possible - would really like to just sign the lease agreement but wanted to get some feedback on if this sounds like a "skip it" situation or if we should suck it up and if there are also ways to protect ourselves or 'manage' the landlords so that we can prevent these types of issues from arising. One of the big reasons we want to make the move is to get our kids into the boundary of a certain school to get them enrolled in a language immersion program (guaranteed in if you are inside the neighborhood boundary of the school).

This would be on a 1 year lease, and the intention is that we would be looking for a new permanent home and hope to have bought by the time the lease is up anyway. The option of selling now and buying ASAP has come up but this would put other constraints and stress on us that I think would be just as if not more difficult (stress of prepping, staging and showing WHILE residing here, which means moving all our stuff around for paint work, carpet cleaning, etc. We also have new noisy upstairs neighbors who just moved in so this is partially driving our desire to generally just get out from living under someone. But even after this, we'd have to rent-back for 60 days or so and would still be on the clock to find a place and in the specific neighborhood of the school where we want our kids, and we'd be doing all this during the election timeframe, where there may be low inventory levels based on what we've heard from realtors in general etc - if we can't find anything, we'd have to rent anyway). The 1yr lease option I'm inquiring about gives us the most flexibility but at a higher cost and with potential conflict. 

Thoughts?