Apartment Maintenance: How to Get Your Landlord to Act

If you're an apartment dweller, you know how difficult it can sometimes be to get your landlord or management company to act on a maintenance request. They put a low priority on small maintenance issues, such as a leaky faucet, or a broken cabinet, but these small issues can be slowly driving you nuts. Here are a few tips for how to get your landlord to hurry up and do something about your maintenance requests.

Don't Call, Show Up

When you get people on the phone they will say whatever they need to say to get you off the phone. They aren't pressured to look into the issue because they don't have to look in your eye and make a promise. This is especially so when you are dealing with a large landlord's management office. They get plenty of calls each day asking for something or another to get done.

The best thing to do is to take some time out of your day, maybe early before you go to work, or on your lunch break, to go down to the management office in person and ask them about your maintenance request eye to eye. The management office will be more likely to act for several reasons. One, because they do not like to have to deal with people coming up to their office, and they don't want any drama, so they will want to squash the matter ASAP. Two, because they will be forced to either actually look up the request while you're standing there and take action on it or call the maintenance guy while you're there to ask if it's on his list for that day. And if not, when.

By the way, if you think calling your landlord doesn't get results, that's nothing compared to the ineffectiveness of email! Never underestimate the power of popping up unexpected.

Write Everything Down on Paper

If you are having an especially hard time getting things done at your apartment, you have better start keeping a journal of the problem. Keep a running list of all of your attempts at contacting the landlord for the issue, including dates, how you contacted them, and what they said they would do. After many attempts at getting the problem fixed, you might want to go ahead and write a note to the landlord with a copy of the history of your problem, notarized if possible.

When the landlord's management company gets something in writing it alerts them that you intend on taking this to court if necessary. If your problem is making your home inhabitable, you may be entitled by law to use part of your rent money to have the problem fixed yourself, and they definitely don't want that to happen. (You can even mention in your communication that that is what you intend to do if they do not fix the problem by a certain day.) So when the management company receives your complaint in writing they will probably be inclined to act on the problem quickly.

Professional landlords and their management companies know the importance of responding to maintenance requests in a timely fashion. If you're not getting that type of response, use one or both of the tactics above to get some results.