‘Tenants from hell’ leave $14,000 in repairs and bills

Mount Magnet’s biggest private landlord said he would be up to $14,000 out of pocket after “tenants from hell” left one of his houses in a terrible state, with unpaid rent and water bills.

“They have just done a runner and the place is just riddled with cockroaches, it’s a filthy pigsty,” Ian Black said.

“I installed a new $4000 kitchen for them and they have destroyed that and burned a great hole in the new kitchen benchtop.

“The damage to the walls is 10 or 11 small holes the size of a fist, and the kids have got hold of paint and drawn all over the walls, hand painting.”

Mr Black said they had left after a two-year tenancy owing $3400 rent and $1200 worth of unpaid water bills. “Not only that, we took two 3.5 tonne truckloads of rubbish from the backyard and one from the front,” he said.

“The kids put things like rubber balls down the toilet and normally that is the tenant’s responsibility but because I have got a sewerage licence I fixed it half a dozen times.”

Mr Black said he had another prospective tenant waiting to move in but it would cost him from $7000 to $10,000 to prepare the property for them.

REIWA deputy president Lisa Joyce said she had managed 1100 properties over 12 years and could count “on one hand” the number of tenants she had managed who had been this bad.

“Hopefully Mr Black has a landlord insurance policy that will help mitigate his loss under a malicious damage claim,” she said.

“A landlord insurance policy is a really critical part of the process.

“It protects against these really dramatic situations.”

Ms Joyce said tenancy legislation allowed landlords to inspect a rental property up to four times a year.

“If we don’t deal with issues throughout the tenancy, at the end of the tenancy the tenant will take the view that everything’s OK.”