How Tenants Can Avoid Conflicts With Landlords by Taking Care of Rental Property
Key Points:
- Damaging floors or choosing heavy, scratch-prone furniture can lead to fines or disputes between tenants and landlords
- Expert shares how tenants can avoid expensive conflicts with landlords
- How to protect rental property and maintain good landlord relationships, from the expert
Renting residential or commercial property comes with responsibilities. The property obviously doesn’t belong to the tenant, who must therefore take responsibility for it. This, of course, means not damaging the property.
Everyday wear is one thing, but material damage to property is another, as the latter can lead to expensive disputes with landlords. Who is legally bound to pay for damage, and what is ‘damage’ and what is just wear and tear? When push comes to shove, arbitration might be required, and things can get costly – and nasty.
Yet, much of this can be avoided if tenants are smart about it, according to Daniel Ufland, the co-founder of interior styling platform Flitch. He is warning tenants about an often-seen mistake that tends to lead to landlord disputes.
One Person’s Ceiling
“The most common mistake tenants make is neglecting floors,” Daniel says. “Floors can be vulnerable to furniture or footfall scuffing, things being split, and heavy stuff being dragged around. This is the case whether the floor is carpeted or floorboarded. Carpets and floorboards get damaged easily if not shown enough respect, say, while moving in and moving out, or just moving heavy stuff around the interior.”
Moving heavy furniture around won’t just annoy the residents on the floor below, it can scratch floorboards or damage carpets. Both types of flooring can be expensive to fix or replace, a problem that will more than likely tick-off the landlord. Conflicts can ensue.
“If you’ve got heavy furniture or heavy utilities like fridges or wardrobes and you need to move them, put castors or furniture foot-pads on the furniture before you move them. If the item doesn’t have feet – perhaps it’s a fridge – rugs can be handy. Put a rug under the heavy item you need to move. Then you just drag the rug, providing an easy way to move the heavy thing that won’t damage the floor,” advises Daniel.
Scratch That
While floors can be damaged easily by furniture, the furniture itself needs to be looked after, too. Some furniture is more vulnerable than others, of course: you can’t scratch most sofas though you can use a cosy wrap to protect sofas, but you can scratch a wooden coffee table or nest of drawers.
“Scratch-prone furniture is vulnerable to wear and tear – things get scuffed and marked by normal use,” Daniel points out. “Such furniture can also get seriously damaged by carelessness, however. It may get harmed beyond repair, and need replacing.”
Who will pay for this repair or purchase? The tenant may attempt to avoid paying, and the landlord will no doubt try to exact some form of remuneration for furniture damaged by tenant neglect.
“As with the flooring, all this can be avoided by treating scratch-prone furniture that belongs to the landlord with basic care,” concludes Daniel.
Furniture or floors, residential or commercial – property to let must be treated with respect by tenants to avoid expensive disputes with even more expensive outcomes. As Daniels says, “A little care and common sense applied is the simple answer.”