Looking for a new place to live isn’t an easy thing. It not only comes with financial stress but also with the responsibility of picking a nice place where you’ll be able to live normally, preferably without any kind of infestations. Yet, it isn’t such an easy task. Some landlords are pretty good at hiding nasty stuff until you agree to rent a place, and then stuff like mold, rodents, and bugs come out.
Recently, a couple in Brisbane, the third-most populous city in Australia and Oceania, went for a rental inspection at a $480-per-week apartment. Luckily, there are some people in the world who are ready to take down lousy landlords. For example, ex-tenants who warn future ones about the place’s awfulness in a creative and kind of mysterious way.
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How should you react when you find a scary note telling you to run in the place you were planning to live in?
A couple in Brisbane was doing a rental inspection at a place they were planning to rent when they came across a warning from previous tenants that said to run away as fast as they could
In April, it was reported that the median rent in Brisbane is around $636 per week for three-bedroom houses and around $570 per week for units. So, the OPs were planning to pay lower-than-average weekly rent, which might look like quite a good choice.
But the rental inspection changed their minds. And it did it not in the way it typically does. Typically, during this kind of tour, possible tenants find apartment flaws that scare them off. But in this case, it seemed that the major flaws were hidden, as what warned the couple wasn’t the flaws.
Rather, it was a warning about them, written in red ink and hidden in a cupboard. If you’re a Shining fan or a Stephen King fan, you can kind of compare it to the famous “Redrum” writing. Only the writing in this story wasn’t related to supernatural horror but real-life horror instead. To be more specific, the horror of terrible landlords.
This note was basically a bullet point list of the worst things about the apartment, from mold to, as we said, an awful landlord who likes to snoop around, doesn’t fix the stuff he’s supposed to, and so on. The note concluded with a phrase: “worst rental experience ever. RUN,” which, well, doesn’t sound promising, does it?
Even if the note looked like it was from a famous horror story, it wasn’t so bad for this couple. While, yes, they lost quite a cheap apartment, they definitely dodged a bullet of mold, cockroaches, and an annoying landlord. The ex-tenants, who went out of their way to write the warning, surely did them a solid.
People online fully agreed with this sentiment. Some even suggested that everyone should start leaving reviews about their terrible rental properties to warn others about scammy landlords.
You might wonder why being a landlord is such a hated profession. Well, it all comes down to several things. First, people tend not to like landlords due to power dynamics. People in this profession tend to hold quite a lot of power over tenants regarding their living situation, which can make some people feel a tad helpless.
Secondly and more commonly, some landlords are just very bad at their jobs. Just take a look at the one from today’s story — his ex-tenants warned others that he likes to visit the apartment unannounced, and he doesn’t fix anything at the place, which sounds like a mold, cockroach, and mice nightmare. And he is surely not the only one like that. In fact, there are worse landlords than him. So, people simply tend to not like others who don’t do their jobs and neglect the people they’re supposed to serve.
There’s also money at play here. We all are aware that rent isn’t cheap. In fact, a lot of times, it is straight-up overly expensive. So, in a way, landlords are seen as the embodiment of greed and exploitation. After all, by charging excessive rent prices, they are exploiting people who need shelter. What is even worse is that, quite often, expensive shelter is in fairly poor condition.
And when people can’t afford such high prices, some landlords heartlessly throw them out onto the streets, which creates another social problem of homelessness. So, as we and other people online have already decided — warning people about your poor rental experiences is a good thing, as you might save others from suffering the way you did. Ultimately, shouldn’t we all strive to do good for others to make this world a slightly better place, huh?
