Getting the landlord to make repairs is one of the top concerns of tenants. Refusing, delaying, or attempting to shift financial responsibility for repairs and maintenance seems to be a favorite tactic of landlords, especially the Wall Street corporate ones like American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes. When you are paying exorbitantly high monthly rental amounts, you rightfully expect to receive good and timely service. You don’t expect to get the run around from your landlord and find yourself living in unacceptable conditions. Read on for tips that can help you avoid being victimized by your landlord.
One of the biggest areas of concern for tenants, especially those who rent from the giant corporate Wall Street single family residential (“SFR”) landlords like American Homes 4 Rent, FirstKey Homes, Invitation Homes, Main Street Renewal, or Progress Residential, is how long it takes for these multi-billion dollar companies to make repairs. That, of course, is when they are willing to make repairs. We also get a lot of complaints from tenants when the landlord refuses to make repairs and tries to shift responsibility onto the tenant. We’ll be addressing this in a future post.
One AH4R tenant moved into a property only to soon find out that there was a leak coming from the dishwasher. He notified the company of the problem. Nothing was done about it. Later into his tenancy, a broken HVAC air handler caused water to leak out into the upstairs hallway. They sent a vendor who could not replicate the leak so nothing was fixed. Of course the problem reoccurred. A second vendor came out and said the air handler needed to be replaced. A few months later and the repair still had not been made.
Another AH4R tenant said that the property she rented was delivered with faulty plumbing and mold. According to her complaint, it took at least three weeks for the landlord to send someone out to look at the problem. We won’t even try to count the number of tenants who complain of air conditioning systems breaking in the summer or heating systems breaking in the winter and being forced to go weeks in extremely hot or freezing cold homes despite paying market-breaking monthly rental amounts. On complaint website after website, with the Better Business Bureau and other consumer protection agencies, thousands of tenants of the corporate Wall Street residential landlords like American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes feel mistreated to such an extent that they take time out of their busy lives to file negative reviews about their multi-billion dollar Wall Street landlords in an effort to publicly shame the companies into being responsive and to warn other consumers/potential victims to be wary of dealing with the Wall Street landlords.
At ProTenant Agency, helping tenants is our passion. Read our story at https://protenantagency.fairness4tenants.com/about-us/ to better understand why we are dedicated to helping tenants. One of the ways we are trying to deliver help to tenants is by providing information, tips, tools and tricks that tenants can use when they try to make these faceless behemoth landlords live up to their responsibilities as landlords. In this post we are providing some general guidance along with a few action steps that you can take. We’ll be writing more about repairs with greater detail in upcoming posts. However, if you have a situation that needs help right now, please take a look at what we offer by going to Our Services at https://protenantagency.fairness4tenants.com/our-services/. Let us know if you think we might be able to assist you.
Beware The Call Center
One thing that all the multi-billion dollar Wall Street residential landlords have in common is that they have spent an unbelievable amount of money and other resources to create, staff, and operate centralized “maintenance” call centers. You have to question why your landlord, whose sole reason for being seems to be generating profits for Wall Street investors, would spend millions on these so-called “maintenance” call centers. The Wall Street landlords have local offices staffed with property managers and maintenance personnel. Why doesn’t your landlord have you do the sensible thing which would be to just notify your property manager or someone else at the local office instead of having to call some place that is usually hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from your home? You can bet your rent money that no matter what the multi-billion dollar Wall Street landlords try to tell you, these call centers are not there for your convenience or to make things easier for you. It is simply a delay tactic. The big corporate Wall Street landlords fully understand both their and your obligations under state landlord-tenant laws. In most instances, state law requires that you give your landlord written notice of needed repairs. Often, the clock does not start to run on the landlord’s legal obligation to make repairs, until written notice is received. This is one of the real reasons that the Wall Street landlords use leases that require you to call a call center hundreds of miles away to request repairs. Another reason is that it prevents you from having evidence that can be produced in court if you have to sue them in small claims court because they failed to make necessary repairs. In order to win a small claims court case, you must have evidence or proof to show the judge that you complied with your obligation to give the landlord notice of needed repairs. Maybe because of how often they are sued, these multi-billion dollar Wall Street landlords understand that you can’t take a telephone call into court to use as evidence against them.
Making Your Landlord Get ‘Er Done
So what’s a tenant to do? Our recommendation as former employees of these companies is that you must make sure that you follow the terms of the lease and at the same time, follow the requirements of your state’s landlord-tenant law. This means that you would likely need to take the following steps when reporting problems or making repair requests:
- Phone the maintenance call center or follow whatever specific instructions you have been given by your particular landlord. If you aren’t already, start keeping a journal of all issues or problems that you have while living in the property. Be certain to include any major or cosmetic maintenance or repair issues that you notice (this will be useful when you have to fight to receive your security deposit back). You should write down what the issue is and the date that you first noticed it. In addition, you should also write down all contact that you have with any of your landlord’s employees concerning the issue. Whenever you have to call the call center, write the date and time of the call in your journal. When your call is answered, ask the person with whom you are speaking for his or her name. Write this in the journal. After reporting your issue, ask the person with whom you are speaking when someone will be there to look at the reported issue. If they tell you it will be more than 48 hours, you should respectfully tell them that is not a reasonable amount of time for a response and that you need someone to be there within 48 hours. Be sure to write all of this down in your journal. Finally, before ending the call, you should ask this employee to give you his or her email address so that you can send written followup/confirmation of the call. This will catch them off guard but it is worthwhile to insist that you get this information.
- Immediately after ending the call, you should send an email to your property manager. If the call center employee gave you an email address, you should copy that person on this email as well. The email should include your name, the address of the rental property, and that you are following up on the repair request that you submitted at __:__ am/pm (time) on ____________ (date) by speaking with_______________ (name of the call center employee) in which you requested that the company address needed repairs for ___________________(whatever you reported as the issue). Your email should state that you expect a repair person to visit the property within the next 48 hours to fix the problem.
- If the company does not have someone out to the property in 48 hours or if someone comes out but does not fix the problem, you need to send a follow up email to the same people. The follow up email should make clear that the company failed to send someone out at the agreed upon time or that the person who came out did not fix the problem. This email should specifically state that this failure might place the company in violation of state law. After sending this email, you should print it out and actually mail it to the local office (or whatever address is listed as the address for giving notice to the landlord in your lease) by United States Postal Service certified mail – return receipt requested.
If the above actions do not result in repairs being completed within a week (which is in the most general terms what most states consider a reasonable amount of time for repairs to be completed), you will likely need to take further action against your landlord. We will discuss other steps (including filing consumer complaints with the state or filing a small claims lawsuit) in future posts.
A final parting thought – you are the customer and as the old saying goes, the customer is always right. Sadly, if you find yourself renting from the multi-billion dollar Wall Street landlords, you are likely to find that they do not believe in or honor that old saying. When dealing with these Goliaths, if you want action and to be treated fairly as a customer, you will have to become comfortable with being a squeaky wheel and making a lot of noise. Set out clear but reasonable terms and tell them that you expect them to meet those terms. The main thing they want from you is your rent money. If you are honoring your obligation to pay them rent in a timely manner and they refuse to honor their obligation to provide you with a safe and secure property that is fit to live in, bet your monthly rent that you do not have to take the mistreatment. Whatever you do, don’t back down. Be as pleasant as possible while you firmly make it clear that you will take all steps necessary to make them treat you like a person and a customer who deserves respect.
Are you having, or have you had, a hard time getting your landlord to make repairs? Tell us and your fellow tenants about it in the comment section below.