Unreachable landlord, uncaring management company: We're going to be homeless!
As forewarned in the title, this is a complicated situation. I don’t know if any specific question will come out of all this other than, “What am I going to/should I do about this?” You’ll get the whole picture when I finish this ridiculous story. Apologies for it being so long.
Here goes:
In October of last year, my boss informed me that we’d be moving my segment of the company out West in 6 months. That means I’d have to find a short-term lease on an apartment, something that takes some doing in Tampa. My wife and I eventually found one, at The Grande Oasis, which is half apartment, half condo.
We signed the lease at the end of October, and on the day the associate who walked through the lease and signed with us informed us that the apartment was owned by an individual (rather than Atlantic and Pacific, the company that manages the complex), and that we’d be mailing rent checks to this individual, who lives in Orlando. Additionally, if any maintenance issues were to occur, we would need to make those requests directly to the owner, at which point the owner would notify Atlantic and Pacific, who would have the work done and, presumably, bill the owner.
As luck would have it, we noticed a plumbing issue in the bathroom in the first month. I called the owner, who, as it turned out, didn’t speak any English. I got this information from her son, who answered the number we were given, and who also didn’t speak a lot of English. I told him my problem, and he assured me he’d let his mother know. Unconvinced, I called the woman who signed the lease and let her know of the situation. This woman, who we’ll call Jill, told me that since we were in the first 30 days of the lease, they would repair the issue, but that any further requests would need to be made to the owner directly. Jill offered to translate for me, should this situation arise again.
The issue was fixed. The economy tanked, and my boss was now keeping my segment of the company in Tampa. My wife and I started looking at purchasing a house. All was well. Until a month ago.
At the point in which this occurred, our check for March rent had just cleared. We would now have one more month of rent to pay, in April and essentially two more months in our lease contract.
Honestly, three days later, the contents of the garbage disposal began spewing into the dish washer. I’m not a plumber, but I can only surmise that something is screwed in the plumbing between the two, since the disposal still appears to work, so long as we don’t run the dish washer (which makes terrible noises any time we run it).
So, I called the number we have for the owner of the apartment. Disconnected. I make a trip to The Grande Oasis’ sales office to see if I can’t retrieve more information on the owner. The sales office is reticent to provide me with any more information but, after pouring some honey on the situation, they give me all that they have, which just happens to be all that I have. Ok. I inform the office that I can’t contact the owner anymore, and there’s this problem in the apartment. The Grade Oasis essentially shrugs their collective shoulders and says, “So? We don’t have anything to do with you anymore, since you pay rent to the owner. The management contract passed from us to her. It’s her responsibility.” Hmmm.
I send my lease to my father, who’s a contract lawyer in Georgia. After looking over the lease, he can find no language in the contract at all that absolves Atlantic and Pacific from responsibility for me or the apartment. So we write some letters. We were going to put our notice out anyway, since we’re planning on buying a house, so 30 days notice goes into three envelopes: 1 sent certified to the owner of the apartment, 1 sent certified to Atlantic and Pacific corporate and 1 hand delivered to the office of The Grande Oasis. The second letter is an outlining of the issue at hand, regarding the plumbing and the inability to contact the owner for necessary repairs. Now, I should mention that I know it’s within my right to hire a plumber to fix the problem and then deduct that from my next month’s rent.
Here’s the issue: My rent is $905 a month and I’m sure fixing the problem is going to cost more than that. So, if I had it fixed, I’d come out of pocket over whatever I “deducted” from the rent.
So, now, it’s mid-March and we still haven’t even been able to make an offer on a house, which means we’re still, best case scenario, 30 days from closing on something. That’s cutting things mighty close and on April 30th, me and my wife are homeless.
What can I do? What should I do? What happens if, in the intervening days something that makes the apartment untenable occurs? Sure, I can vacate the apartment (I could vacate now, if I so desired), but that doesn’t change the fact that I have nowhere to go.
