When you rent an apartment or house, you usually have to pay a security deposit when you first move in. This is money that you should get back as long as you don’t do any damage to the rental property.

What would you do if your landlord tried to keep part of your security deposit for a ridiculous reason? Would you fight to get all the money back, or would you let it go and just move out?

In this story, one tenant lives in the UK where there are rules surrounding security deposits, rules that should protect tenants.

The landlord doesn’t follow the rules, but the tenant doesn’t know that until she has already moved out.

What follows is how she proceeds to call her landlord out on the rules and convince her to pay much more than just the security deposit refund.

Let’s read all about it.

Landlord tries to rip me off for £400, ends up having to pay me over £6.5k

Last year I moved out of a house that I had rented for 5 years with no problems. I always had a good relationship with the landlord.

There are 2 relevant bits of background to this story:

Here’s the first one.

In the UK, where I live, the standard practice when renting a house is to sign a tenancy agreement for a year. At the end of the year, if you want to stay in the house and the landlord is happy with that, you can just do nothing and the tenancy will continue automatically until either tenant or landlord gives notice.

Alternatively you can sign a new 1-year tenancy agreement each year, which isn’t really necessary but some landlords want it.

My landlord wanted me to sign a new tenancy agreement each year – fine, whatever. So, since I rented the house for 5 years, there were 5 tenancy agreements in total.

Now the second bit of information…

By law the landlord was required to protect my security deposit. That meant that she had to put it into a special kind of account within 30 days of receiving it.

The tenant then receives login details for the account so that they can check that it’s protected and view various info about it.

One point of doing this is so that the deposit is held by an independent party who can mediate if the landlord and tenant disagree about any deductions – there is a dispute process that the tenant can request and which is free (for the tenant) to use.

She has decided to move.

So, I’d been living in the house for almost 5 years and I gave notice to end the tenancy, because I was buying a house.

After I’d given notice, the landlord emailed me to ask if I was planning to hire a gardener to ensure that the garden would be returned to the (pretty manicured) state it was in when I moved in.

I thought this was strange, because my tenancy agreement explicitly forbade me from doing the sorts of things in the garden that would have been necessary to maintain its original state (e.g. it said that I was not allowed to lop any shrubs or bushes). So, all I’d been doing is cutting the grass and the hedge.

Basically, that clause looked like something that a landlord would include if they planned to maintain the garden themselves, except she didn’t maintain it while I was living there – in retrospect, it seems that she didn’t read her own tenancy agreement properly.

They emailed back and forth.

I replied to the landlord’s email about the garden. I quoted the part of the tenancy agreement that forbade me from doing certain things in the garden, and expressed my confusion. I asked her to clarify what her expectations were about the state of the garden, given what it said in the tenancy agreement.

She didn’t reply, but a couple of weeks later, I received an email from her husband/boyfriend telling me that the landlord was anxious about the garden and I should ensure that it is returned to the same state as at the start of the tenancy.

I replied to him and again asked for clarification, given the wording of the tenancy agreement.

He replied saying he’d have the landlord get back to me herself, which she never did.

She decided to make the garden look as good as she reasonably could.

Without any guidance about the garden, I just did my best with it. My boyfriend, who is an experienced gardener, did the work here – I asked him just to do whatever he thought was best.

He cut back bushes and cleared loads of stuff – I spent a few hundred £££ on having garden waste removed.

I knew that technically I did not need to do that, but wanted to do what I could to keep relations good between me and the landlord.

She moved out, but there was a problem.

I moved out, the tenancy ended, and after not hearing anything from the landlord for a couple of weeks, and not having my deposit back, I emailed the landlord to ask about the deposit.

Having ignored my queries about the garden before the end of the tenancy, she chose this moment to announce that she wanted to deduct £400 from my deposit to carry out work on the garden.

There followed a really time-wasting back-and-forth by email in which I pointed out that the terms of the tenancy agreement were incompatible with my being able to maintain the original state of the garden, and she just kept repeating that the garden was not returned to her in its original state.

In the end, I suggested that since we couldn’t agree about deductions from my deposit, we should use the independent dispute process offered by the company that was holding the deposit. That process needs to be kicked off by the landlord, so I asked her to authorise it.

This landlord sounds awful!

She didn’t do that – instead she kept wasting my time by sending me emails trying to negotiate an amount to put the garden right, which I wasn’t going to entertain.

Meanwhile, I could not log into the account where my deposit was being held. I contacted the company and it turned out that my landlord had ‘accidentally’ input my email address incorrectly when registering the deposit … which I found very strange, because she had emailed me successfully dozens of times throughout the time I was living in the house, so she definitely knew my email address.

Without being able to log in, I was unable to officially dispute any deductions she was proposing. There is a window of 3 months after the end of the tenancy when you can dispute any deductions, after that you either take what the landlord is willing to return or go to court.

Apparently (according to Justice for Tenants, who I contacted for advice) it’s relatively common for unscrupulous landlords to register their tenants’ details incorrectly in an attempt to make it harder for them to recover their deposits in the timeframe available for disputes.

She discovered something else the landlord did wrong.

I had a long back-and-forth with the deposit company, after which I finally gained access to my deposit account.

When I got into it, I looked at the info and noticed that the landlord had not protected my deposit until the day after I gave her notice to end the tenancy. That meant she protected my deposit well after the 30-day deadline by which she was supposed to do it by law.

There are penalties for landlords that fail to comply with the laws around tenancy deposits: if they break the rules and the tenant takes them to court, they have to return the full deposit PLUS between 1 and 3 times the amount of the deposit as compensation.

Also, they are not allowed to make any deductions from a tenant’s deposit if they haven’t complied with the law.

She finally got a win.

I emailed the landlady a bit more firmly than I had previously (things had been cordial but increasingly frosty). I pointed out that she could not make any deductions from my deposit because she had not complied with the law.

She responded by sending me quite a tantrummy, insulting email and authorising the return of my full deposit.

So, yay for the deposit back, but what a witch insulting me when I hadn’t done anything wrong.

I was ticked off by the fact that she tried to rip me off and wasted hours and hours of my time trying to sort this out. Not to mention the stress – just seeing an email from her land in my inbox caused my stomach to flip by this point.

But it’s not over yet!

This is when things started to get a bit more exciting.

As I said above, landlords who don’t comply with the law around tenancy deposits have to pay between 1 and 3 times the value of the deposit in compensation, plus return the full deposit, if they get taken to court.

The documentation from the tenancy deposit scheme proved that she had broken the law.

I’d already had my deposit back, but it was clear that if I took her to court, I would receive a minimum of that amount again.

But it gets better.

Except, of course, I didn’t have just the one tenancy agreement with her. As I already mentioned, she had insisted on my signing a new tenancy agreement every year. So, I’d had 5 tenancy agreements in total.

I spent a few hours checking the law and going through old emails and documentation, and it turned out that she had failed to protect my deposit correctly in all of the 5 tenancies I had with her.

I had a ton of documentation to prove that.

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That meant that, if I took her to court, I stood to receive a minimum of not 1 but 5 times the amount of my original deposit (over £6.5k).

She wanted to go to court, but there was something she had to do first.

It would cost me a couple of hundred £ to take her to court, and I was 100% willing to do that – in fact, at this point I was relishing that prospect.

In order to take her to court, I first had to send her a ‘letter before action’ in which I set out my complaint against her and gave her an opportunity to make an offer to avoid going to court. I had a barrister friend who was helping me out at this point with advice, for free.

The landlord replied to my letter quite dismissively, basically saying that it was ‘clearly’ just an admin error that caused her to fail to protect my deposit correctly every year for 5 years (lol), and accusing me of being motivated by a ‘windfall’.

I replied by email, correcting her various mistaken assumptions and repeating the need for her to make an offer in order to avoid court.

Now, this is the real win of the story!

After a while she replied and offered me £4000.

I told her that the minimum I would accept was a little over £6.5k (I forget the exact figure) since that was the minimum I would stand to get in court.

She agreed, with certain conditions attached – perhaps conditions that she thought I might not be able to fulfil (things like sending her copies of all the documentation relating to the deposit for previous years’ tenancies) but which I was able to do immediately.

All she wanted was an apology.

When the money landed in my bank account, I emailed her to explain that I would have dropped my complaint against her immediately had she at any point offered a sincere apology (which was true, at least up until that final email where she insulted me). I also said that I hoped she would deal more fairly and reasonably with future tenants.

She didn’t reply.

I hope that I will never again be a tenant, but having spent many years being messed around by bad landlords and letting agents, it was satisfying to end my renting days with such a satisfying and profitable middle finger.

That landlord was truly awful. I’m sure the mistakes were intentional and not actually mistakes at all. OP definitely won in this story!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a thrift store worker who is absolutely exhausted by having to thwart theft attempts until after closing.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This person loved the ending.

Another person found the revenge satisfying.

Here’s more praise for the revenge.

I like this idea!

I love how she got all of her money back multiple times over without even having to go to court! This might be the best revenge story against a landlord I’ve ever read.

The final statement at the end saying she just wanted an apology and that she hopes the landlord learned something was truly the icing on the already delicious cake.

Now, I hope this woman can move on with life with her new house and her boyfriend putting this crazy landlord drama behind her and using some of the money to celebrate her hard earned success. She deserves it after all that stress.