Not all landlords can be trusted. Sometimes they can be downright horrible to their tenants.

In today’s story, the landlord is just plain malicious, but he messes with the wrong person!

Let’s see the price he paid for this bad behavior…

Shady Landlord loses his fancy truck… And just about everything else.

This is going to be a very long, but considering I ruined this guy’s life… (Not an exaggeration.)

Location, the deep south. 2007-2008

My ex-husband and I have always gotten along very well and we have, (at the time of this story 7 years old), a daughter.

We have always lived near each other for convenience sake and have on occasion even lived in the same house after divorcing.

An amicable sounding story so far.

So I was thrilled when the people across the street from him sold their place and apparently it was going to be for rent!

I had known the folks across the street, nice people and had even been in the house a time a two, so when I showed up with my other half to look the place over, I kinda knew what we would be getting.

The landlord was working on the house when we pulled up (we had gone out to eat before this and so I know he was unaware he was talking to someone who knew the people who had lived there and been in the house). His big ole dually was in the drive with his company name stenciled on it.

This seems a little suspicious.

He meets us in the garage and immediately starts lying.

He told me this was his family home and he was fixing it up, but there were a lot of memories there and his kids had grown up in that house. I realized he was “adding value.”

I kept my mouth shut because it was right across the street from my ex-husband and it was literally the bus stop for the school for my daughter.

He continued to lie and I kinda tuned him out. The place was a little worse for wear, dirty, gross carpet, chipped paint.

I made a comment on a broken light switch and he told me he was having a cleaning crew come through and clean up the place and having everything painted and the carpet redone.

Steep but you pay for convenience, right?

The price was a little high but once again I really wanted it and it wasn’t nightmare high, just 200 over what I was expecting. I had an small Australian shepherd, so first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and pet deposit.

1250 for each one. Ouch.

So about two weeks later it was move in day. I should have known something was up when the key was left in a combo box on the door. We had paid through a service so he had the money, and we had the key… And a mess.

He had done literally nothing except replace a set of rotted outdoor steps that he probably had to for liability purposes.

We dragged out the digital camera and started taking pictures. It was a 3bdrm 2bath with a partial basement. We took over 1100 pictures.

Yikes. This is one dirty laundry list!

Here are some highlights:

Ketchup smeared on the kitchen walls and floor, nothing in there had been cleaned. The fridge was awful.

Had what smelled like hair gel rubbed into it in the dining room and outside the front bathroom door.

Fireplace literally had soot covering all of it and up to the ceiling. (The reason for all the non working lights became apparent at the point, he kept it dim for showings.)

Garage full of trash.

Partial basement which we hadn’t seen because that was where he had a big saw set up and wasn’t really a selling point for us?

Mold. All the mold.

It’s never easy negotiating with a liar.

So I called him up and basically said, “what the hell?”

And he replied that money and keys had already exchanged hands and if I had a problem I needed to put in a maintenance request. He said, “I don’t remember it being that bad, sounds like you made a mess moving in.”

Ok, so now I knew exactly how shitty of a person I am dealing with.

It was time to seriously start cleaning.

Put in a maintenance request about the mold. Went out and bought ALL the bleach, other cleaning supplies, and a carpet cleaner.

I am a military brat who lived in base housing. I know how to clean. And we got to work.

It took two days of 4 adults, my ex, and a friend who came over to help to get the place passable. We even changed out the blinds. (They were broken and dangerous.)

During this, landlord comes over to look at the mold, and I KID YOU NOT, grabs a roll of my paper towels and MY BLEACH SPRAY and starts wiping the mold off the walls.

He had just walked into the garage, grabbed some cleaning stuff I had down in the garage and I found him about halfway through his “cleaning” job.

That’s all he did.

Don’t complain about things you do even worse!

Fast forward 3 months. Time for an inspection!

Ok, he tells me he will be there tomorrow at 8am. He shows up at 6:30 pm. Demands to be let in.

I let him in and he starts taking pictures of dishes in the sink, dinner was still on the table, and lecturing me about cleaning up when I cook. So in front of him I pulled out my digital camera and took one of him taking a pic of dishes for dinner with dinner still on the table and a time date stamp.

Jerk.

Talk about an invasion of privacy!

He wanted to go through drawers in my bedroom.

I laughed at him.

Didn’t hear from him again till move out time. (If you thought I was staying there longer than a year then you are crazier than I was when I rented that place.)

He sent me a move out checklist. Professional steam cleaning and white glove clean of the entire house. New pine straw for landscaping. All rooms needed to be repainted “wheat.” (When we moved in the bathroom was literally TURQUOISE.)

So we got to work. Steam cleaned, white glove clean, etc. Then took another 1000 pics.

He wanted a LOT more money!

He walks through and is pissed. He even ran a white rag on the top of the ceiling fan. He snatched the keys out of my hand and told me to expect to hear from him in 10 days about the deposit. Hmmm. That doesn’t sound good.

2 weeks later I get a bill. For 3750.

For more professional steam cleaning.

HVAC clean out.

Apparently we didn’t use the RIGHT brand of “wheat.” (OH YES WE DID!)

She records anything suspicious.

Two things I haven’t disclosed. I have a bad habit of recording bad people or just to CYA, and my mom is a landlord in the next state.

(She is the good kind who never was able to make money at it. If people told her they couldn’t afford to pay her because they needed the money to feed their children, well my mom usually GAVE them money… So glad she got out.)

But my mom was very familiar with the laws and had looked a few things up about my landlord.

So I grabbed my little recorder and called him. He owns a real estate business, his side hustle is rental stuff and his and his wife’s grown daughters bought and sold houses.

Sounds like this guy is a professional threatener.

His oldest daughter picks up and transfers me to him.

It gets ugly fast and he tells me that I must have let my Australian Shepherd pee in the vent grates, (what the heck), and that the way I take care of my daughter would be very interesting to CPS.

He can help me work out a payment plan but pretty soon we would be getting into collections territory. At one point he actually says that “all tenants are liars.”

Nice. About 20 mins of being threatened.

Mom had some advice.

I call my mom back. TBH I am pretty darn shook up. CPS? For what?

So my mom tells me to pretend like I am playing along and ask for an itemized receipt. Tell him your mom is going to cover it and tell him you mom needs it before turning over the money. I had one 10 mins after I asked.

On my end.

The professional steam cleaner was a friend of mine who had a business and gave me a discount.

HVAC was a scam. The company he listed belonged to his brother in law, was defunct, and out of another state. Since I had before/after/AND HIS NEW LISTING pictures I knew he hadn’t hired anyone to do HVAC cleaning. The vents were painted to the wall… In all the pics.

We saved our paint receipts and I actually had pics of us painting. You can see the right brand and color clear as day.

Time to call the business AGAIN!

I called his business and told his daughter that I would be taking him to court. She obviously was unaware of what a snit her father was because when I told her, “no one threatens my little girl” she didn’t know what I was talking about.

So I put her on speakerphone and played a recording of her dad threatening to have CPS come visit if I didn’t pay up and she made it most of the way through before asking me to turn it off. And then she put me on hold to get her mom, his wife.

She tried to “reason” with me, and I backed up the tape to the part where he talks about what happens to kids in the foster system and played it. She told me they would get back to me.

They actually did! The mom and eldest called me on speakerphone and apologized!

They told me how the business was divided and how they normally don’t deal with rental stuff. I told them it was fine, but I was still taking him to court.

Time for court.

This military brat knows when to get litigious.

We ended up in arbitration. I showed up with two laptops, for before and after, proof of his fake HVAC crap, a stack of literal receipts, him committing a crime by threatening to falsely call CPS, and a pretty good working knowledge of renter law in that state. At one point the arbitrator asked me if I was a paralegal.

Ha!

He had a picture of dirty dishes and stories about how I lived like a pig.

I pulled up the pic of the same sink of dishes, with dinner in the foreground, time and date stamped. The arbitrator actually asked, “Did you expect her to do the dishes before she ate her dinner?”

Even the woman taking notes for the arbitrator was grossed out when I showed them the ketchup and basement mold pics.

Vigilante justice at its finest!

Did you know you can get 3x what you ask for in a rental dispute, depending on your state? Yeah, you can. I did. The arbitrator used the word “appalling” when describing the landlord’s behavior.

When I went out in the hallway afterwards there was a young couple there asking the clerk if landlord was available yet. Apparently they were waiting for their turn at arbitration.

I asked them if their case was HVAC related, sure enough, it was. I pulled out all the paperwork I had about it and handed it to them with my number. Actually got several calls from his other tenants.

He had been running that scam a while and these kids I had handed the paper to had looked up every house on the landlord’s website and went door to door warning them.

Smart! I hadn’t thought of that.

So what happened to this guy?

Meanwhile… My mother was filing a complaint with everyone she could think of because he had his business listed as a suite… which turned out to be a P.O. Box. Huge no-no. Your business must be a location that can be served by the courts.

A year later I saw a truck with his logo drive past. But it wasn’t the dually, it was an older F150. So I looked him up in the county clerk’s records.

Well first, it seems he got divorced. And cleaned out.

The house, big truck, everything went to her. Then she sued him for the business. He got to keep the name, and she took everything else.

I looked up the realty website using her maiden name to search, her and the eldest daughter were using her maiden name and had a whole new web page and set up.

He lost everything.

Also, my mom got notice that her complaint was being addressed and he had his license suspended and a huge fine to get to reinstated. My mom kept and eye on the records for home deeds in the area and all but two of his properties were sold at auction.

So, let’s sum up. He had to pay me 3 times what I asked for. Lost his big money making scam. Lost his wife. Lost his house(s.) Lost his truck. Lost his license for a while.

No regrets.

This dirty landlord got cleaned out by a savvy tenant.

He was a scam artist who met his match – in a literal soldier.

Let’s see what the comments on Reddit say…

This person says, rock on!

This person wants to dish about that dirty dishes ploy.

As an LL this person hates when people bring down their kind.

Another commenter says congrats on taking out the trash.

And this person says, a picture is worth a thousand words… and maybe thousands of dollars!

Picture this: Your photo evidence takes out a trashy landlord.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.