Renter's Lament

We are in the process of securing a new apartment. We are using a realtor, which necessitates a lot of annoying paperwork. However, we're finding ourselves wishing that we'd gone through these formalities at our current address. Following are some of the advantages of having a business-like relationship with your landlord.

There should be before and after pictures of the apartment, how it was when you moved in and how it was when you moved out. At our current apartment we had to do a lot of work before it was even habitable. There was wallpaper ripped off here and there and colored on with crayon, more crayons melted in the radiator. It took a month of scraping and painting and cleaning. But there is no legal evidence of this and the landlord can keep the security deposit if he chooses. When the law must choose between the word of a landlord and the word of a tenant, it is obligated to side with the property-owner.

When we moved into our present apartment it was with the understanding that certain repairs would be made before the temperature began to drop, but we were well into autumn before the windows were replaced. I believe that documentation of this intention would have motivated more speedy maintenance, and without the insistent pestering our worry included with every rent check after August.

To collect the rent, my former landlord would show up sometime at the beginning of the month, and if we weren't home we'd leave it taped to the door. He never gave us rent receipts, which now the realtor requests from us for the new apartment's application. Instead, we had to find copies of six months of rent checks, which required visits to two banks, one of which had to make a phone call to another branch. It took all morning.

To move into our current apartment there was no application at all. It was less hassle, but later we realized our neighbors were probably not very closely scrutinized either... The first day they moved in, we didn't know they were coming. We just saw a lot of stuff on our porch and my grandfather's rocking chair broken. Soon a broken-down monster truck was parked crooked in the driveway and a loud bass was rattling our dishes, disturbing our guppies, and vibrating us in personal places when we dared to sit down. See the article they inspired, called "Don't Smoke Pot, Eat It", http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1202367/dont_smoke_pot_eat_it.html?cat=7.

Our current landlord refuses to give any information to a realtor. It is true that realtors have no legal right to solicit information, but when a landlord refuses to cooperate it does make the application look suspicious. The realtors only want to be reassured that the applicants will pay the rent on time and respect the space they are applying to inhabit.

I am not a business person. I make fun of business people. They speak with a clear, confident tone and ask you to call them by their first name, then don't necessarily recognize you the next day. And they shake hands, which I always find awkward and a little silly. I'm a little scared of business people because of their potential to become robotic and loose their compassion.

It is not really a dog-eat-dog world, but the relationship of renter to landlord is a sensitive one that could benefit from some business-like precautions. Renting requires strangers to trust each other, and unfortunately, not everyone can be trusted. Releasing your credit report for judgment may feel insulting, but that is because you know you are trustworthy. Your potential landlord does not.

It is possible that all of these formalities will be used against us in the end, when we decide to move again. There may be some fine print we missed that will allow our new landlords to keep the security deposit for getting dirt on the door mat or leaving behind a certain aura detectable only by a specially-hired psychic. My sister's landlord charged her for a window that was cracked when she moved in; she brought him to court, but he won.

A landlord is only a middleman in an unnatural human convention. Once there was land owned by all and owning all, worshipped as the mother of all. People lived where they lived because they were born and had the right. Today a landlord's landlord is government, and the vast continent is united under this system. We are human animals born into this. I'll count our security deposit as lost and pray that it finds who needs it the most. Living in a system beyond my control, I am glad all they want from me is money.