All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

Update on the situation: We send a very formal and respectful deposit dispute, with pictures, and she replied (in a very hostile and unprofessional way) that she won't pursue it legally, but it will be considered an unpaid balance - essentially, that though she won't take us to court, she will destroy our credit...

@Will Gaston Thank you for your advice! That sounds like a great idea to get some written estimates.

Also @Account Closed, sorry to bombard you with comments, but so far there's no indication that she wants to take us to court. This is just from the initial deposit reconciliation letter.

@Will Gaston it is 1,041 sf, so correct me if my math is wrong, but wouldn't that amount to ~$260.25? And @Account Closed, I didn't see the house, but they do have some pictures, and I don't see anything that warranted heavy cleaning at all. She sent pictures to us upon our request, but they were all of the outside, which makes me suspicious. If she had a case against us in terms of the inside of the house, I would've expected her to send those pictures, too. I do genuinely wish I knew her case though, and why she thinks we owe this much.

@Andrey Y. I guess I wasn't specific - those things were what my roommates did prior to move-out, before the cleaners came in

@Bettina F. Our first response asked for the photos, and she replied (in 22 consecutive e-mails) with dozens of pictures of the outside. Curiously, none of them were of the inside?

@Andrew Johnson Thank you for your advice! At this point I think our stance is going to be to send a letter trying to negotiate. If she keeps our $1000 deposit, we'd like her to drop any further claims she has towards us. I see it as both sides winning then, and still maintaining a halfways decent relationship. If she doesn't want the hassle, we're hoping she won't come after us. We thought we had a great relationship with her (she commended us in several e-mails, thanking us for taking such great care of the house), so this is really a shock to have her asking for money on top of a fairly hefty deposit.

@Andrew Johnson @Account Closed To be specific, she is claiming our $1,000 deposit and asking for $604.13 on top of that. So that's about $535 each. She had a lot of nit-picky charges, but the fact that the cleaning fee amounts to about 1/3 of all of those charges was the red flag for me.

Like I said, I was studying abroad for the summer, but I can't imagine that my roommates managed to destroy the place in three months, and the pictures we have from the inside show it being spotless upon move out. I appreciate hearing both sides of this, though! That's exactly what I wanted to hear.

Recently received a hefty cleaning fee, being taken out of our deposit. We were renting a 3 bedroom, 1 level house. Half of it was hardwood, the other half carpet. We were charged $109 for the carpet cleaning (per our lease, that makes sense to me), but then we were charged $595 for a cleaning fee on top of that! 

Apparently, two people, at $35/hour each, took 8.5 hours (so, 17 hours of work total), to clean our house - and these are professionals! Unfortunately, I was studying abroad during our transition to a new place, so I only know what my roommates told me about the condition of the house, but I trust that they didn't leave it so badly that it warranted that kind of cleaning. 

They claim they did the usual (vacuuming, sweeping, swiffering, wiping down all of the countertops, cleaning the bathrooms head to toe, spot cleaning walls, wiping down window sills, and running drain cleaner through the sinks). 

Does this seem unreasonable? What are average cleaning rates for this kind of house? I want some opinions from other landlords here. I know we weren't the "tenants from hell" (we paid rent on time, never broke anything, never had neighbor complaints), but we also live in a university town. I want to make sure that we aren't being taken advantage of here.

I agree with the others here. She sounds like she's probably had a bad experience with getting dinged for pre-existing conditions in her previous lease, and had her damage deposit nickled and dimed into nothing. Just had that happen to me, as I was studying abroad and my roommates failed to take pictures upon move-out, so we have next to nothing to combat a $600 cleaning fee with (that's for a 1 level, 3 bedroom house, btw, and the carpet cleaning was a separate fee...). For now, I'd say she's just a proactive tenant, and time will tell whether she's a trouble tenant. Your friend should go over there, take pictures, and get in writing that he/she will fix (xyz), and that the tenant agrees that the rest are fine to be left as is, and that your friend acknowledges they were pre-existing damages. The only ones I wouldn't be too concerned about would be the wooden flooring, the TV mounting rod, and possibly the tap and the A/C. Everything else sounds like it should probably be fixed, and sooner rather than later. It would benefit everyone in the long run to keep the place in tip top shape (and make sure your friend keeps a record of these fixes and updates)!