Jen
647-989-8572
[email protected]
While it’s always clear one may never get a house they wish to rent, stringing tenants along is not only NOT good business, but shows that the landlord doesn’t respect potential tenants.
This property 1275 Langley Gate is in Oshawa.
Driving out there from the extreme west end of Toronto means it would take about 1 1/2 hours of my time & gas.
So, when my assistant screened this house & landlord, & he was very thorough.
First he talked to Jen, the landlord’s girlfriend. She answered all his questions by 3waying it with the landlord who is off in Vancouver.
He told my assistant it was going to be a 1-2 year lease.
After all the questions were answered, I took over & e-mailed & then called & spoke to Jen. She said she couldn’t show the house until Sunday, even though I was prepared to see it on Thursday or Friday.
They were both told it was crucial I know asap whether I would get the place since I was on a strict timeline.
I was told that he couldn’t give me an answer until Monday. I accepted that & was still willing to see the house.
I remembered that she never gave me an answer about references, so I had to ask her again on Sunday if that was going to be fine because I wasn’t driving all the way out there only to find out this was going to be a problem.
I spoke to the landord on the phone, & he seemed nice enough, but then all of a sudden he changes his mind about the lease saying it will probably only be one year.
I started to discuss blinds & phone jacks because there were none. He said he’d be willing to have that done. He sounded like he was interested in having me as a tenant, but of course we were getting ahead of ourselves, but he wanted to make sure I’d allow him to store his furniture in the house, etc.
He gave me his mother’s number & told me I would have to pick her up on the way. I found this very strange having never encountered this before, but being the nice person I am, I agreed.
I called his mother & we made arrangements & she told me no one else had seen the house that day or was going to see the house that day, so I found this all very strange since I was told Sunday was the day 2 other people were coming by. I took this as a good sign.
When I got to her place, that’s when I was told her sister was coming along too. I was a little shocked, but didn’t say anything. Of course driving 2 people in the car is additional weight & additional gas usage, plus getting off the highway takes time & gas.
We get to the house & I said how in the world are we going to get to the house, it was all covered in snow.
So they went to a neighbours & asked for a shovel & my son had to shovel up to the front door.
Then they couldn’t get the door open, so my son had to help them with that.
When I got inside, everything looked ok, except I was kind of shocked that fridge was so dirty, but the mother said she had to clean it up.
I also asked about this metal thing hanging from the wall which turned out to be a plasma wall mount which I said of course would have to be taken down, I don’t have a plasma TV.
We had been told it was a brand new house that he barely lived in.
That is when I found out that Jen, his girlfriend had lived in there for a few months before she moved back with her mother. Then I found out they had the house for longer than we were led to believe. Not that this mattered, there were just discrepancies, like his mother said her son said he bought blinds, yet he told me he had none.
I saw a non payment of gas bill in the bathroom which I inquired about because Consumers Gas said they were going to shut off the gas if payment wasn’t made & that was back in 2005, so I was really confused now since I didn’t think the house was 3 years old.
On the way to the house I was told by his mother that her son was very unorganized & he expected her to do everything for him.
I said, “he has to grow up some time.” Her response was that she has felt this way for a long time now, but clearly she’s an enabler. It was supposedly underneath her name too, not his. Nice mom.
There were things broken in the house like the toilet upstairs & some floor board that made a racket when you stepped on that. I started to ask myself how they were going to get the house all ready for move-in by the time I got there on March 14th, 2008, which was 5 days later.
There was a missing light fixture (they didn’t know what light fixture meant meant) in the dining room, & I questioned where the dryer vent was (they didn’t understand that either, it took like 10 minutes to explain it) because there didn’t seem to be one.
I wrote all of these things down to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
Another problem I encountered is I had to make a detour to drop off his aunt & mother, I missed seeing another house in the same area because I didn’t want to go back West towards Oshawa again since it was already 8 pm & I was tired from the long drive there & all the nonsense.
When I got back home, I e-mailed his girlfriend Jen because he told me to contact him when I got home & I realized I never got his number.
I asked her for his e-mail address & phone number, & she refused to give it to me using the excuse that he’s 3 hours behind, so I should send everything to her. Umm, so what if he’s 3 hours behind? He’s the landlord, he’s making the final decision, I thought she was just setting up the appointments.
The following night she informs me that they gave the house to someone else, & I was very upset.We bent over backwards for these people & in the end we chauffeured his family around, shoveled his walkway for him & we were nothing but nice to his mother & aunt, not to mention I was unable to see another house because of this nonsense of me driving his family around.
This is UNACCEPTABLE how we were treated. He never even bothered to talk to me on the phone again which I found odd.
I believe the real reason is he either changed his mind (once again), or it’s because my list of things that had to be done weren’t acceptable to him.
I told his girlfriend I was going to put them on my blog & why, & her response about the shoveling was that they told us no one lived in the house.
Oh, so now I’m supposed to read minds & know in advance that there’s no way to get to the front door without getting my feet & clothes all wet. We aren’t talking a little bit of snow here, we are talking like 3-4 feet of snow.
They were unprofessional, & the entire thing sounded very weird. According to the Jen, the guy didn’t even want to rent it out to tenants, they wasted months looking for some friends to rent it out & finally when they couldn’t find anyone, she convinced him to put it on Craigs List.
He claimed he didn’t care that much about price, but rather the quality of the tenants who would take care of his house, & we were quality tenants.
If he cared soooo much about his bloody house, the toilet wouldn’t be leaking water all over the floor, & he would have had all the things fixed that needed to be fixed since it’s all covered under the Ontario New Home Warranty Association anyway, not to mention there wouldn’t have been garbage all over the bathroom floors & the fridge wasn’t a little bit messy, it looked really gross.
So that’s my story on that property.