20 Landlords Who Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Rent Out to Tenants

If we can make a general assumption, most tenants hate their landlords and landlords can’t understand why this is happening. Of course, there are always exceptions and landlords who have their tenants’ well-being as a priority. However, there are so so many cases where landlords prove to be disappointing to say the least.

Now I’ve Seen Everything is shocked at how awful some landlords are, and these 20 stories will surely make you feel for the tenants.

• When I rented, the landlady made me bring her the water and electricity bill with the “paid” stamp. I used to pay by mobile banking and apps, and it was a constant struggle to bring the stamped receipts. © Alo’o Lopez / Facebook
• When I rented with my husband, the landlady went every day to see who was coming in and out. One day, we were sleeping and we heard a noise, she was in the dining room standing there snooping around. She didn’t know what to say to me when I opened the bedroom door and saw her. That was the last day I was there. The next day, we left, we didn’t trust her anymore because she was always coming in and out. © Verito Bustamante / Facebook
• Not mine, but my friend used to live in a house where the landlord painted over the black mold. © mcp613 / Reddit

• My mom’s the landlord in this scenario, so I guess this is a bad tenant story, the same theme though. Anyway, she had tenants who just had a newborn child. They kept flushing the baby wipes (which aren’t flushable) and they caused the entire basement to flood. Huge nightmare. Anyway, after fixing it, they continued to flush the wipes until the basement flooded again just a few months later. Huge nightmare. © JohnnyShakeNBak / Reddit
• The lady who rented me a half-furnished room told me that it was forbidden to bring in food and that I made everything dirty. She came in to check on me when I was working, told me that it was forbidden to stay awake at night, and that I had to take a bath before 6 o’clock because she could not turn on the water boiler several times a day. I had to bathe with cold water in winter. © Marina Hernandez Gomez / Facebook
• I lived with my ex-partner for almost 2 years in a rented cottage. The landlady, who was the neighbor, moved out and left her cats on the land, so out of pity I took care of them as if they were my own. When it was time to leave the house, she invented that the walls had worn paint (which is normal wear and tear if you paint with poor quality paint) and that she had to calculate the price of the paint and labor to deduct it from the deposit. It was obvious that she did the calculations and wasn’t pleased with what she had to deduct because she invented more things to not give me back the deposit at all. © Paula Pérezz Rodríguez / Facebook

• I once found a very nice apartment. When I was waiting to sign the contract, I discovered that there was a door that looked like a wall panel leading to the neighboring apartment, where the owner lived. He had the key and could come in at any time, and he told me so. In my face! I got out as fast as possible. © Pa Su / Facebook
• We rented an apartment and the owners lived next door. They had a camera at the entrance and they were aware of when we were leaving or arriving. And when someone visited us, the owners always asked who that person was and why they had come, and they also entered without asking permission. © Abby Zavala / Facebook
• When I went to live alone in another state, they told me to go to a kind of pension, so I went to check it out. It was only for women and they charged $150 dollars for rent (this was about 18 years ago). It was a super small room with a cot, the shower was a tube, and you could only take a shower for 5 minutes. You couldn’t cook or bring food, and at 10 o’clock at night, the doors were locked. Also, for an extra fee, the owner gave you food and breakfast, and the shower was blocked by the toilet bowl. By the way, there were about 10 small rooms, I thanked her and she said, “Look, this is your chance, I have many people that are interested, but I am giving you priority.” I said, “Thank you, ma’am, I still don’t want to live in a jail, let alone pay for that.” © Alejandra Gilibert / Facebook

• It was the mid-2000s. My wife and I had just bought a house and were able to schedule our closing date to be shortly before the end of our lease. We notified our landlords, an elderly couple, that we would not be renewing, and agreed we’d be out by the last day of the lease.
  We had gotten all of our things moved to the house. My wife got a call from one of the landlords that they had stopped by the rental and had concerns about the amount of cleaning that we had done. We hadn’t really done any deep cleaning yet, as we planned to do that on a different day. The fact the landlords had stopped by without notice, even if the rental was unoccupied, should have been a red flag to us.
  We go do our deep cleaning, expecting to get our security deposit back. When we get our letter from the landlords, it states that since we didn’t use a carpet cleaner to deep clean the carpets, we wouldn’t be getting all our deposit back.
  I mentioned this to a coworker. I was able to learn that it was very illegal for them to force us to use a carpet cleaner as well as enter the rental without any notice, as local laws required at least 24 hours, which was stricter than the state law of at least 12 hours. I drafted a polite but stern letter noting the multiple laws they had broken and requesting the remainder of the security deposit, or we would contact the appropriate authorities. We received the rest of our deposit and were glad to be rid of them. © balthazar_blue / Reddit

• I am a homeowner now, but when I was renting it was near impossible to get hold of my landlord when I needed anything. I had mold on my walls in the main bedroom (to the point I actually got an infection), my shower broke after one week and didn’t work again for 6 months when I finally just had it fixed myself, the window in the living room wouldn’t shut properly so I had perma-draft, the hob had 2 rings that didn’t work, and my downstairs neighbor, who was also his tenant, would stay up until 3 a.m. every single night playing hardcore rave music at max volume and refused to stop when I asked politely, again not so politely, once more with feeling, and finally told him to stop. I called dozens of times (literally dozens), sent texts and emails, and even wrote a letter. Didn’t fix any of the issues. But I missed one rent payment (deliberately, to get his attention), and he was hammering on my door the very next day. © MagnificentColossus / Reddit
• I rented a condo and they sold it from under me. They gave me 60 days to move out. I moved out in 30 and they charged me for the full 2 months. © DarrenEdwards / Reddit

• Three times over the course of several months my shower and toilet backed up with sewage. Every time, landlord tried to pin it on us and refused to find out why this kept happening. Took us ages to figure it out. © Zewbacca / reddit
• I had an apartment by campus that had all utilities included in the rent. It was in a house converted into multiple apartments. The landlord kept trying to get all the tenants to put the bills in one of our names about half way through the lease, and when we refused he allowed the heat to be turned off in February. Then the power all together. While we were still living there. © jwallathon / reddit

Have you ever had a terrible landlord who made your life miserable? What did you do about it?