tenant making repairs (live, plumber, water)

[TexasTony]

Lesson learned here. If they can get it done within reasonable time i.e. < 2-4 days then so can you. This might not have been best time to do bargain shopping

[ToyYot]

Wow, you planned on leaving them hanging for three days without water. Obviously no real effort was being made to get a plumber. I'd be looking for a new rental as soon as the lease was up.

Glad I don't have some of you for a landlord !

[LandLordLu]

TexasTony-What do you mean if they can? I had the plumber out the same day. The plumber and tenant scheduled when he was gonna come out again. Tenant decided they couldn't wait after all. Was no bargain shopping, though I was looking for reasonable.

ToyYot - Leaving them hanging? I had a plumber out same day and was calling on another. I'm not planning to rent to them again, so no worries on that.

[aero100]

Originally Posted by LandLordLu

TexasTony-What do you mean if they can? I had the plumber out the same day. The plumber and tenant scheduled when he was gonna come out again. Tenant decided they couldn't wait after all. Was no bargain shopping, though I was looking for reasonable.

Aha - the fact that the tenant scheduled the followup trip and then unilaterally decided on calling a different plumber wasn't clear in your initial post. You are right, they should not have done that without checking with you. The tenant has to cover the difference between what your plumber cost and the new one they hired on their own, not you.

Assuming you are on a standard lease, they cannot simply deduct the cost of the repair from their rent payment without your agreement (although they might go ahead and do that). In this case, you have two choices:

- You can demand full payment of the rent. If they don't, you can start the process to to evict. This is probably not practical and will end up costing you more in the long run.

- I'd deduct it from the security deposit when they leave. They'll have to sue you to get it back. It's unlikely they will do that and if they do it's unlikely they will win provided you are documenting the communications on this since you made reasonable efforts to resolve the situation immediately.

[ToyYot]

Originally Posted by aero100

Aha - the fact that the tenant scheduled the followup trip and then unilaterally decided on calling a different plumber wasn't clear in your initial post. You are right, they should not have done that without checking with you. The tenant has to cover the difference between what your plumber cost and the new one they hired on their own, not you.

But the first plumber didn't make the repair, but what the hey, lets evict the tenant anyway, clearly he's a troublemaker.

Fine bunch we have here.

[aero100]

Originally Posted by ToyYot

But the first plumber didn't make the repair, but what the hey, lets evict the tenant anyway, clearly he's a troublemaker.

Fine bunch we have here.

The landlord got a plumber there in a reasonable amount of time. The tenant scheduled the followup trip for several days later. Then the tenant called a second plumber *on his own* because the delay was apparently too long. He did this without coordinating with the landlord (which is the problem).

The landlord deserves the opportunity to remedy the situation before the tenant does it. If the tenant would have worked with the landlord to demand that "your plumber is going to take 3 days to get out here, it's too long" then he would have a strong case if the landlord didn't do anything. But he didn't do it that way.

[oespinoza83]

Sounds like the initial plumber was a horrible plumber.

We had a similar issue happen with a shower a few years ago. The plumber could not replace the part then and there (had to order it like your story indicates) when we called him, so he did the SENSIBLE thing and cut the plumbing line and capped it. We wouldn't have access to THAT shower, but the rest of the house had water access. He came a couple of days later and finished the shower. Why was this not done?

[Meyerland]

Originally Posted by oespinoza83

Sounds like the initial plumber was a horrible plumber.

We had a similar issue happen with a shower a few years ago. The plumber could not replace the part then and there (had to order it like your story indicates) when we called him, so he did the SENSIBLE thing and cut the plumbing line and capped it. We wouldn't have access to THAT shower, but the rest of the house had water access. He came a couple of days later and finished the shower. Why was this not done?

Exactly. I think this was a substandard and bargain plumber.

[NYC_transplant_in_Houston]

A faucet is not a specialty item like let's say an igniter for a hot water heater. Plumber could have ran out and bought one or at the very least, cap the pipe so the rest of the house has water. Just my opinion, but a broken faucet doesn't seem reasonable to inconvenience the tenants like this. I would've insisted he fix it or called another plumber.

[Lbjen]

They said the original plumber was able to come back the next day but tenant was unavailable. Plumber was not available on the second day after. I guess the tenant was able to make themselves available after all.