Before you buy or rent a home, if at all possible, look at it in person. Otherwise, you might realize after you’ve already moved in that there are a lot more problems than you expected.

What would you do if you were renting a place where it seemed like everything kept breaking?

Would you patiently wait for repairs, or would you be determined to make the landlord pay as much as possible to get everything fixed perfectly?

In this story, one frustrated tenant uses the HOA’s rules against his landlord, and it gets pretty expensive.

Let’s read all the details.

Using an HOA’s rules to get back at a lousy landlord…

Before my wife and I bought our house, we rented an apartment from a complex that we learned halfway through the rental process was a condo conversion.

For those that don’t know what this means (we didn’t at the time either) this is an (usually small) apartment complex that instead of being owned by a single company and run by either an onsite manager or property management group, each unit in the complex is individually owned either by a person or company, and each owner chooses their own property management group or person (if they don’t live in the unit, that is).

In order for everyone to follow the same set of rules, they established an HOA that applies to all owners and/or tenants.

We only learned about this when we were signing the lease agreement and were handed a badly photocopied stack of papers saying these were the Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&R – aka HOA rules and regulations) that we needed to follow…. Hokay… Thanks for throwing that at us at the last minute.

He wasn’t concerned about the HOA rules.

I’d rented before, and wasn’t horribly worried about it, as I had always been a good tenant.

So we moved in, and sat down to try to read the CC&R’s we’d been handed in a little more detail. Most were pretty reasonable, a few were kinda silly, but a few of them were contradictory, nonsensical, or just plain didn’t apply (I particularly liked the one about the playground that didn’t exist, and never had as far as I was able to determine).

In any case, we moved in, got settled, got to know our neighbors…

And then stuff started breaking in our apartment.

Uh-oh.

No biggie, contact our property management group, let them know there’s an issue.

The interesting thing is, the CC&R they handed us was actually more restrictive on repair issues than state law (this is important) and attached daily fines to residents who didn’t keep their property “in good repair”.

Now interestingly enough, they defined “in good repair” pretty broadly. This included the appliances they provided, the mechanical systems of the building, and the structure itself.

This is when we learned that the unit we were in was apparently the problem child of the complex. The owner always tried to skimp on maintenance, was notoriously slow to repair things, and *really* hated spending money on his investment.

This is weird.

So we contact the property manager this guy hired and they… Well… Let’s just say they were interesting. They sent out their “handyman” to take a look at the issue.

Our washer machine had died. He looks at it, goes, “Yup, it’s dead!” and leaves. That’s it.

So I call up the property management folks before he’s even left the parking lot.

ME: “Your guy just left here, after taking a glance at the washer, saying it’s dead, and walking out the door. Didn’t say anything else to us”.

This is taking too long.

PropertyManager: “Oh, it’s not a big deal,we’ll get a repairman out there in the next couple of days.”

“Ok, just make sure you let us know when he’s coming so we can be sure to be here.”

5 days later…. No repairman…. Call them back up:

Me: “Hey, we still haven’t seen the repairman or heard anything regarding when he’s coming out”

There’s another problem.

PropertyManager: “Sorry, we haven’t been able to contact the owner of your unit to get his authorization to send out a repairman.”

Huh…

Me: “Well, any idea when you might get someone out here? Trekking to the laundromat to do our laundry is getting a bit bothersome….”

PropertyManager: “No clue, we have to contact the owner first per his instructions…”

He knew the rules, and he wasn’t afraid to quote them.

Me: “Ok… can you hold on a minute?” [thumbthumbthumb] “I’m looking at the CC&R’s you provided us, looking at the section that states that the units are to be kept in good repair, and where it includes the appliances… I’m looking specifically at the section that says, “all repairs must be started within 24 hours” and the section that states that owners will be fined x amount per day for repairs that are not started in that time frame”.

PropertyManager: “Umm….. Let me call you right back!”

Me: “Please do. At this point we are approaching 5 days, and probably rapidly approaching the replacement value of the washing machine in fines…”

Well, that was the start of the war.

The property owner was a nightmare.

Anytime something broke, they’d send their “handyman” and things would either go unrepaired, or get broken worse by this knucklehead.

And everything. *EVERYTHING* was a fight with the property owner.

He tried several times to cause problems for my wife and I, everything from claiming we had caused the damage to the unit (HOW did we cause the upstairs neighbor to just happen to put a nail through the main toilet sewer stack, and therefore cause raw sewage to leak between the walls?) to looking for issues to cost him money (at the end, that was becoming true – but only because he was such an jerk about everything).

Here’s where our revenge begins.

He was determined to make sure everything was up to code.

The CC&R’s stated that all repairs had to meet current applicable building codes. Now, normally some things get grandfathered in when you’re dealing with older buildings like this, but hey, their CC&R’s are “legally binding on all parties” (third sentence of the opening paragraph, if memory serves).

Well, we had an issue with our windows. They wouldn’t close unless you pushed on them from the outside (old crank to close casement windows). Simple fix, just replace the crank, right?

Except by this point, I’d gotten thoroughly ticked off by the property owner and his shenanigans on different issues over the few months we’d been there. So I called up the property management company, they come out to replace the cranks on the windows.

And then I point out the fact that the CC&R’s require repairs to be up to code, and those single pane aluminum framed windows are *NOT* up to code….

Yep. They got to replace all the old aluminum windows in our apartment with double pane vinyl windows….

He knew how to time it.

I waited until they had replaced the siding and repainted everything to match to point out that the windows in the bedrooms were not up to code, they did not open sufficiently wide to be considered egress windows per code.

So they had to put us up in a hotel until they got that one fixed. They had to open up the wall on the inside and re-frame the windows in both bedrooms to meet current code.

I talked to the contractor one day – that one cost about $5,000 start to finish.

The worst though, was the mold issue.

Mold needs more than paint to fix it.

The way our unit was constructed, it was a quasi-basement unit (which meant they didn’t have to install fire sprinklers since it was two floors and a “basement” instead of three floors). The bottom half of the bedroom walls was poured concrete… And those walls were *always* cold.

The last winter we were there, we started to see mold develop on the walls due to the condensation and poor air movement in the closet. And that mold transferred over to some infrequently worn clothes and started growing like mad.

Contacted the property management company… They sent their “handyman” with a bottle of bleach and some rags. Their next suggestion was to hang some of the “damp rid” containers to try to absorb moisture. Then they slapped another coat of paint on the concrete wall as if that was going to do anything.

It was actually a really big problem.

That was the last straw in my book.

I contacted a half dozen agencies before finding out the right people to talk to. They sent over a representative to take samples and examine the construction of the apartment.

We were then only allowed to get belongings while wearing a respirator, and they ordered the property owner to get us a hotel “for the foreseeable future”.

Black mold, not just on the foundation wall, but also under the carpet in the closet. All our clothing had to be professionally cleaned/decontaminated.

Remember, everything needs to be to code.

Fortunately, it had not spread to the rest of the walls/structure, but was confined to one small section of concrete wall and floor. So the cleanup was actually relatively straightforward and only took about a week.

The remediation though. That was not so straightforward.

As best as I could figure out, when they built this complex, exterior waterproofing and insulation (to prevent exactly this scenario) on below grade walls wasn’t quite as stringently required in the code.

But remember the language in the CC&R’s about “all repairs having to meet current applicable code”?

whoops.

It was an expensive fix.

They got to excavate all the way around the foundation wall. back to about 3 feet to give them room to properly work on the wall.

They got to pressure wash the outside of the foundation wall, then apply the correct (read expensive!) waterproofing to the outside of the foundation wall.

Then they got to install foam insulation blocks (also expensive) on the exterior of the walls a week or so later, after all the waterproofing cured.

Now, while that last one wasn’t the owners fault, if he hadn’t been such a jerk about the repairs, and had been even the tiniest bit cooperative on repairs, I wouldn’t have dug nearly as hard into making sure it was fixed right.

And if the HOA’s CC&R’s weren’t so poorly written, he could of probably gotten away with a lot less.

When I asked the contractor for a ballpark of how much something like this cost, his answer was “more than $10,000”. He wouldn’t specify how much more.

The landlord lost money renting out this unit.

For those keeping score, that’s over $15,000 in repairs.

We were in this unit for about 2 1/2 years. 2 years on a lease, the remaining 6 months or so were month to month as we were wrapping up on buying our house.

Our rent was $750 a month, and from what we could find online on the purchase price of the unit and when it was purchased, the mortgage for it was probably about $500 a month.

Even without assuming other expenses like insurance, etc, that meant at most a profit of only $250 a month.

That’s only about $7500 in profit for the whole time we were there.

So if you are a landlord, don’t be a jerk. It may cost you way more than you expect.

At least it got repaired correctly. This won’t be an issue for future tenants.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This would’ve been less expensive.

Another person did something similar.

This person praises their landlady.

The HOA might’ve paid for the repairs.

This person is jealous of how well this worked out.

It’s ridiculous for a rental to need that many serious repairs!

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.