Landlords , Tenants & Uncertainty Pt.1
By Mr.e

Just last week I overheard someone complain about their landlord, lamenting the fact that it was getting increasingly more difficult and frustrating to find a decent one.

I found myself in total sympathy with this person.

As a tenant I’ve run the gamut of good and bad landlords and must say that finding a good one can be compared to buying a used car. You just never know what you will ‘really’ get.

Five years ago my wife and I stumbled into an unbelievable rental deal. We found a big house for a very reasonable rate with a private, fenced lot and manicured landscaping.

Dealing with a property manager instead of the landlords provided some welcome distance, breached only by the owners themselves when they began to renovate the lot. After all, the house was the place they wanted to live out their retirement in.

We were not exactly thrilled by having the new garage (not available to us) being built where the herb garden once flourished. The vast amounts of concrete that replaced lovely natural looking rock lined footpaths around the house added zip in terms of charm to the place but we appreciated the regular upkeep.

The only downer in that tenancy was the day we met the property manager face to face for the first time. It was the day he dropped by to personally deliver a notice from the landlords of their intention to occupy the house. Had five years really flown by so quickly? It was a total shock.

Even though we had three months to vacate the place we were in no mood to be forced out by a legal deadline so we immediately began searching for another suitable house in the same neighborhood. After a month of sifting through any papers we could get our hands on and spending our free time ‘going to look’, nada! Either the rent was too high or the places were squalid dives.

When we realized that we’d be forced to leave the neighborhood we loved, we bid farewell and moved to another place that boasted lower rent, more amenities and unbeknownst to us, the landlord from hell.

Fred sounded very pleasant on the phone and his outgoing nature charmed us to no end. However his name has become a name we will never utter again. This guy took the cake and should be entered in the dictionary under annoying, bothersome, intrusive, obnoxious and a host of other words that define pests.
No sooner had we moved into the house than he started to hang out at the house. He seemed to take pleasure in finding any and every excuse to drop by four or five times a day and work on some Mickey Mouse project, always unannounced. We felt like exotic bugs in a jar, his jar.

He didn’t scored any points with us when he used foam from some old sofa to plug the heat/air-conditioning vents in a cheap effort to ‘protect’ us from the cigarette smoke seeping into our part of the house from the downstairs apartment; whose tenants we had been assured had ‘quit smoking’. Before we moved in we’d stipulated that we wouldn’t move into a house with smokers.

We never even unpacked our stuff. The grim search was on again. Two months after moving into the bug jar we found another house in the old neighborhood. Fred was almost in tears when we told him we’d had enough and that we were moving.
Now comfortably back in ‘our old neighborhood’, we’ve settled down. Again we are dealing with a property manager. It’s a good thing too because the landlords are absentee landlords, living off shore.

So far, so good. Basic repairs have been affected with no lag between request for service and repair. The only indicator that it’s not our place is the mail addressed to the landlord.
Oh yea, they’re back for a while. Strange noises emanating from the basement suite have put the cats on constant alert and some unfamiliar and rather peculiar cooking smells seep into our living space from below. No, we don’t know how long they are back for this time.