We know you love your tenants, after all, tenants are the heart of the rental industry. However, every so often, a rental horror story comes along straight out of your nightmares. Watch this video where Rentec Direct expert and landlord Kaycee Miller reacts to these rental scary stories.
To work in the rental industry, great people skills and customer service is key. And most landlords and property managers love their tenants and have a great landlord-tenant relationship as a result.
However, there are those unique situations that can come up that are straight out of a Halloween nightmare. Read along and find the humour in the stress with this landlord reacts video from Rentec Direct’s Brentnie and Kaycee.
Landlord Reacts to Scary Rental Stories – Video Transcript
Kaycee:
Hey, it’s Kaycee and Brentnie from Rentec Direct. We’re coming to you today with some spooky stories, some spooky rental stories to be exact. So, over the years of being a landlord, from working in this industry, we’ve heard lots of tales. Usually they’re great stories from our landlords and our renters who are happy to be in this industry. But every now and then there’s a couple stories that make you cringe. I have a couple myself for my tenants, but right now Brentnie’s found some that she’s gonna share with us today, and you’re gonna get my live, real-time reaction.
Brentnie:
Okay, I am so excited for this. Like you said, most of our clients’ experiences with tenants is amazing, but it is always interesting to hear about these strange situations. I was on a couple of landlord forums finding the scariest rental stories out there, and I’m excited to read them to you.
Kaycee:
And to preface, Brentnie did say that there are some that were not suitable for work. So I know she did filter out some—
Story One: Concrete Poured Down Every Drain
Brentnie:
If you do decide to pop up on the forums, be prepared. There are some stories that get a little more wild than these. Okay, so our first one:
“Not me, but my best friend and his father run a property management company nearby. They had a couple for tenants on the third floor of a building that were apparently just not nice people. They were getting evicted and knew it. But in my state that’s a long, long process, three-plus months. So they proceeded to take anything of value and destroy everything else. They took the dishwasher, refrigerator, and some carpet. They destroyed the closets, bathroom fixtures, cabinets, walls, etc. They even left a bathroom bucket in the unit just because. And then the final straw—the guy used to work in construction and mixed up some quick-setting concrete and poured it into every drain. It literally destroyed most of the plumbing in the building as all the pipes all drained down to the floors below. They had to tear up the walls completely and redo all of the plumbing it touched. It was terrible and one of the biggest jerk moves I’ve ever heard.”
Kaycee:
My gosh. So you know what’s funny is this is not the first time I’ve heard of a disgruntled tenant using concrete or pouring cement down a pipe. So as soon as you said he was in construction and had some concrete, I was like, “No, I know where this is going.” This is so unfortunate. Not only are you making this a nightmare to clean up by destroying just the surface, but then to go in and destroy the plumbing and the internal guts of a whole building, not just a single-family property. These poor landlords and property managers who have to deal with stuff like that. That is super unfortunate. And also, bathroom bucket, why? You know what? I’m also surprised. Did they take the toilet and that’s all that was left? Yeah. Lots of these poor vendors and tenants. Thanks for sharing it. Let’s hear the next one.
Story Two: The Kitchen Island by the Pool
Brentnie:
Hey, this one is short and sweet. It’s a landlord that says, “I had a tenant remove the kitchen island and bring it outside by the pool because they needed an outdoor serving area.”
Kaycee:
My gosh. They just need a bar. So let’s take the one from inside. How big is this island?
Yeah, don’t they make little pushcart islands or a folding table that’s forty dollars at Home Depot?
Yeah, I wonder what the recourse of that. Talking about some of these stories, there’s—you can tell the concrete in the pipes and even removing a kitchen island, I don’t think that there’s a security deposit that’s gonna cover this. Obviously it’s intentional damage. So that’s not as bad as the pipe one, but still pretty unfortunate and pretty funny too, that someone needed a serving area that badly.
Brentnie:
Yeah, and creative solution, but I feel like with that kind of creativity a lot more options were available.
Kaycee:
Definitely.
Story Three: Dead Fish in the Walls
Brentnie:
Alright, let’s hop into the next one. This person says:
“This happened to my friend’s rental. Guy gets evicted. Instead of trashing the place, he cut off chunks of drywall, put dead fish in the walls, and sealed it back up. The tenant was a carpenter. The owners couldn’t figure out the smell for weeks. They got it professionally cleaned a few times, searched endlessly. Eventually they figured something must have died in the walls and started knocking holes into the wall. Turned out to be that move by the tenants.”
Kaycee:
My gosh, how could you even, yeah, find that? That’s because I’m assuming, like, you cut the—I can, like, see it happening. You cut the drywall, pull it out, put something in there, and then you can fully patch it, paint it, and you wouldn’t even be able to tell that, especially if they were, like, perfect on their paint match for it. That is kind of a brilliant hate prank that I’ll never condone. But also that might top the—in terms of, like, stress of trying to figure out what is wrong and where that smell is coming from, that might have risen to the top. Not as much damage, but still, like, that probably took them months to try and figure out and deal with. And I would be really mad at that tenant if that was going on. And can you imagine the state of that rotten fish by the time they ended up catching it?
Brentnie:
Well, and you think about as far as repairs go, having to mitigate the damage, it’s not gonna be as much expense as concrete poured down the drain. But I’m just thinking about all of the times that they hired cleaners and they—
Kaycee:
Gosh.
Brentnie:
kept finding ways to mitigate this issue, and lo and behold, it was in the walls the whole time.
Kaycee:
Yeah, or imagine you think you got it and then you move new tenants in and then there’s tenants that are just complaining about this smell and then you go over to do an inspection, you’re like, “I don’t smell anything,” and then those poor tenants can’t handle it, and that is, yeah, pretty good hate prank. Can’t deny it, but that is a rough one. Good find.
Story Four: The Christmas Eve Spider Call
Brentnie:
Alright, just a couple more.
“When I was a little kid, my parents bought a cheap house in the neighboring town and fixed it up to rent. Two young women moved in and were great, just out of college, working entry-level, getting by, no trouble. They called at six PM on Christmas Eve because there was a spider. My dad called back when he got home from a church service and asked what they wanted him to do. They said they wanted him to kill it. So he went out on Christmas Eve to kill their spider. They seemed to think this was normal, on par with what you’d expect your landlord to do if your water burst on Christmas Eve. The least he could do in the situation. Not a horror by any stretch, but it makes me laugh. He told me after that that I was not allowed to move out until I could kill spiders on my own.”
Kaycee:
Ha ha ha. That’s the best. Have you reached the level of maturity that you can live on your own, being able to kill spiders? I cannot believe he actually went there to go help them. That I kind of put that on the landlord for being like, “Okay, I’m gonna enable this, like, behavior of killing a spider or trapping it for them.” That is a pretty ridiculous tenant request, I think. I mean, even when we get complaints about bugs in our property or ants or something, I’m okay, put out an ant trap, this is your responsibility if it’s just a couple bugs here and there, but to even have the request of, “I need you to come remove the spider from my vision.” But some people are really, really scared of spiders. So yeah, I don’t get it, but I don’t know.
Brentnie:
I just love a Christmas Eve emergency maintenance call and you’re thinking, “What could this possibly be?” And it’s two young ladies who are very frightened of a spider.
Kaycee:
Yeah, hopefully the landlord lived nearby to go over and help with it and maybe his heart just went out to them, if they’re this in need to call for this kind of thing, maybe I should go help them and just give some sort of Christmas blessing that, like, “I got you this one time, but, like, you gotta figure this out in the future.”
Story Five: The Unplugged Washing Machine
Brentnie:
Alright, last one.
“My dad owns quite a few apartment buildings throughout Colorado. One summer, while I was in college, he was between managers for one of his 80-unit properties. So I acted in as the stand-in until he hired a new manager. I can’t say this was the worst tenant per se, but I definitely have a few funny stories surrounding one woman we’ll call Kate. One day, we were served to notice that Kate was taking us to small claims court. Why? Because in her unit, her washing machine was not working. Had she reported the problem to management? Nope. The maintenance man and I entered the unit that afternoon to fix the washing machine. The problem? It was unplugged.”
Kaycee:
Oh man. I thought you were gonna say the problem it was the dishwasher. Yeah, I just feel like that kind of goes along with the spider story of these tenants—can we do some problem solving before we get to that point of reporting a maintenance issue or taking it so far as to small claims? I wonder, that whole process blows my mind and takes so much energy for the managers, the maintenance staff, or even the tenants to get to that point. So there’s—these are kind of examples why there can be a lot of work in rental management if you’re working with tenants that aren’t self-sufficient or figuring things out on their own or willing to, like, do their work as a rental property resident. But that would be, yeah, kind of unfortunate to be like, “All that needed to happen was plug this in.” That’s like our basic tech support troubleshoot. Turn it off and turn it back on. But I guess the first step is plug it in.
Story Six: Shots Fired on the Fourth of July
Brentnie:
Ha ha ha. All right, the second story about Kate.
“Same summer, my dad awakens me at two AM saying the local police department is at the apartment because of a shots-fired report. When I arrive at the apartment, the place is lit up like Christmas with squad cars. There must have been twenty officers at the scene. What prompted the call? Kate and her friend were walking back from the bars. They heard two loud pops and decided someone was firing at them. What actually happened was two guys launched a bottle rocket from a nearby balcony. Also worth noting, this happened on the Fourth of July.”
Kaycee:
Yeah, poor Kate. She just, like, can’t figure some stuff out. I—yeah, I feel like it would take a lot for me to call 911 on Fourth of July, if I was hearing pops, because they go on, I feel like in our town, starting, like, a few days before and a few days after. So yeah, that is a high-maintenance tenant. Not as scary, but pretty high-maintenance, I would say. Reminds me of an article we wrote once that was like, “Do you have a high-maintenance tenant, or is this a legitimate complaint from a tenant?” So there’s definitely those stories that are out there and it sounds like Kate was a rough one to deal with. But no, fish in the walls or concrete down the drain.
Our Favorite Story and Final Thoughts
Brentnie:
I do think that the fish in the walls might be my new favorite rental scary story. Just because who would think?
Kaycee:
Who would think? It might be our new table conversation during our lunch work meetings too. So it’s a pretty good one.
Well, we love sharing these renter horror stories because it does bring a little bit of humor into our lives as landlords and property managers. We try to do this kind of fun-themed story every Halloween. And you can find more stories on the Rentec Direct blog, which we’ll share in the description and the links below. So go check out some of those other stories that we’ve gotten write-ins from some of our clients who have shared their experience as the landlord and property managers. And I’m always gonna say with these unfortunate stories, there’s 10x times good ones because I’ve been a landlord for over ten years. We have really, really good stories, some unfortunate ones, but there’s always ways to manage it and deal with it. So we love our renters. We’re happy to be a landlord and property manager and we encourage everyone to share their stories because there’s always humor in the distress if we can kind of come together with some of those stories. And remember, hopefully you just don’t have fish in the wall.
