In real estate, there’s the common saying location, location, location, which means that location really is the most important factor. You can change a lot of things about a house with renovations, additions and simple things like paint, or you can even tear down a house and start over. The one thing you can’t change is the location.

If you were divorced and a house was available for rent right across the street from your ex, would you want to rent it so that it would be super convenient for your daughter? Would it make a difference if the house wasn’t in very good condition?

In this story, one divorced woman jumps at the chance to rent a house across the street from her ex. She overlooks a lot of less than perfect things about the house. She knows the landlord is lying about certain things when he shows her the house, but she chooses to overlook that too. For her, it really is all about the location.

However, when she moves in, she quickly regrets deciding to overlook all the warning signs because the house is in much worse condition that she realized.

The whole story has a very dramatic ending in court where she is prepared to prove how awful this landlord really is.

Keep reading for all the details.

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

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. 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.

She knew the landlord was lying.

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.

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.”

She really wanted this house because of the location.

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.

Moving in was expensive.

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 months rent, last months 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.

They took a lot of pictures.

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.

Here are some highlights.

This really does sound like a mess!

• 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 he where he had a big saw set up and wasn’t really a selling point for us? Mold. All the mold.

The landlord blamed them for the mess.

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 horrible of a person I am dealing with.

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.

They recruited help with the cleaning.

It took two days of 4 adults, my ex and a friend 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.

The landlord sounds pretty unreasonable.

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.

They did not want to renew he lease.

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 check list. 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.

But that wasn’t good enough.

He walks through and is mad. 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.

Yikes! This is ridiculous!

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!)

There are a couple more key pieces of information.

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 is rental stuff and his wife’s and grown daughters bought and sold houses.

The landlord threatened her.

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 use the vent grates as a bathroom, (what the hell), 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.

Her mom gave her some advice.

I call my mom back. TBH I am pretty damn 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.

She knew more than the landlord realized.

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.

She talked to his daughter.

I called his business and told his daughter that I would be taking him to court.

She obviously was unaware of what a jerk 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 talked to 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. S

he 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.

Never Miss a Story

Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.

I told them it was fine, but I was still taking him to court.

She went to court well prepared.

Time for court.

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 commiting 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!

The landlord’s evidence was pathetic.

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.

But she wasn’t the only one who took the landlord to court.

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.

It got even worse for the landlord.

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.

He really did lose everything.

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.

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.

But did he learn a lesson from any of this? Does he have any regrets? I doubt it. He’s probably just trying another scam.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a cashier who met a customer outside of work, and now they can never go back to their old relationship.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

A landlord weighs in.

Here’s some praise for the revenge.

This is a good idea!

Everyone loved this story.

I understand that she overlooked pretty much everything because the location was truly ideal, but this story proves that sometimes location isn’t everything. Especially when you’re renting, you can’t make the necessary changes.

The best part of this revenge was that the landlord’s wife and daughter had no idea what a slumlord he was until OP told them. I’m definitely not pro divorce, but in this case, he deserved to lose his family and be miserable and alone. He had apparently been lying to his wife about the rental properties the same way he had been lying to the tenants.

It’s also great that another tenant took him to court and warned all of his other tenants. That landlord had no chance!