What do you call a landlord that does this?
They:
- did not send lease renewal until the last minute (less than 20 days before the end of the lease, a sneaky way of not reminding us that we could end the lease and move out)
- did not send lease renewal docs until I requested them
- did no maintenance until we called the leasing agent, even though we submitted a work order on their website per their directions
- took weeks to arrange a dishwasher repair
- did not initially pay us the full deposit refund amount
- sent deposit refunds to wrong address
- forced us to sign unnecessary legal language to cash a deposit refund check
- gave us absolutely NO thanks for busting our butts vacating the unit (the owner wanted to put it up for sale before our lease was up, we did not want the hassle of leaving every time they held an open house or showed it, so they let us out of the lease and we moved out)
As you may have guessed, we call them a former landlord.
I considered adding them to the Hall of Shame, but decided against it. Their good reference may yet be worthwhile.
I end with this anecdote. A husband and wife owned the rental company and associated real estate business, with the husband running the rentals and the wife serving as real estate agent. Small company, a few employees, and the good ones had left, apparently. The month before we vacated, the wife called and left a message asking for the name of the resident manager (we rented a unit in a condo complex). We did not bother calling her back, because she should have asked her husband for that info. We were not rental 411!