Collecting Damages from Landlord (Thousand Oaks: apartments, lease, movers)

[afan95]

Long story short, my apartment was not ready on move in day...nothing cleaned, full of cockroaches.

Was never informed that apartment would not be ready and had furniture moved by movers and had to pay again to have it returned to original house.

Got back security deposit. Landlord said he "couldn't help" that moving costs were incurred. I already know I can and will make claim for expenses through small claims court for moving expenses.

However, what about expenses incurred for turning gas and electric on and off. Can I ask for reimbursement through small claims court for those expenses as well?

Thanks...

[Listener2307]

Originally Posted by afan95

Long story short, my apartment was not ready on move in day...nothing cleaned, full of cockroaches.

Was never informed that apartment would not be ready and had furniture moved by movers and had to pay again to have it returned to original house.

Got back security deposit. Landlord said he "couldn't help" that moving costs were incurred. I already know I can and will make claim for expenses through small claims court for moving expenses.

However, what about expenses incurred for turning gas and electric on and off. Can I ask for reimbursement through small claims court for those expenses as well?

Thanks...

Depends on where you are. In Mississippi you may have a claim with some judges, but there is no guarantee.

I think you will probably get your utility expenses reimbursed. But the judge is going to note that those cockroaches were there on the day you looked at it. Moving expenses are yours, I'm betting. You agreed to move in with the cockroaches and changed your mind.

[afan95]

NO, no, no...
Looked in the apartment and saw the situation and told landlord that this apartment was inhabitable which made the landlord in breach of contract. Mover turned around and had to put my stuff in my parent's garage.
This is in California

[brrabbit]

You can demand double of your damages... It should cover little other inconveniences, including time to go through the small courts. One word of advice - make sure whom do you sue... If you had a contract with an Inc and LLC, sue them, if there is no LLC/Inc word on the contract, even if it looked "official" it can be just a DBA and then you must sue physical guy who operates under this DBA.

[munchitup]

This sucks and sort of happened to us in Hollywood.

We had everything set up for the move in over Thanksgiving weekend. We were temporarily up in the Bay Area and so moving day was a big deal and we only had one day to do it.

We get to about Thousand Oaks when I get a call from the assistant building manager saying we can't move in because the background checks did not go due to the holiday. They knew this on Thursday but waited until Sunday (moving day) to tell us. Keep in mind my wife had just been admitted into the California State Bar, which requires extremely rigorous background checks and she offered to use that as a temporary background check so we could at least move in for a few days until the checks were cleared (neither of us have ever been arrested so we weren't worried).

This assistant can't print the lease or something stupid like that because of a password lock that only some corporate bigwig knew, and without a lease he could not give us keys. He called her and we emailed her and apparently she was mad at us for ruining her holiday. Long story short we spent all afternoon driving around LA hoping that she would not be a lazy c-word and help us out - and also looking for new apartments. She didn't and we couldn't move in.

Thankfully we had friends in Ventura County that put my wife and our stuff up for a week until I could come back down from the Bay and help move again (we could have moved in the next f-ing day but I had to go to work).

The best thing that came of it was that the actual building manager (a different person from the assistant and the corporate bigwig) was horrified and she offered to remove our pet deposit as well as remove the pet rent (like 150 a month or something). It ended up working out for us because then we got a dog and still didn't pay pet rent (HA! passive aggression) - we probably saved a couple grand over the 3 years we lived there.

Anyways we got lucky that the building manager actually had a soul (she quit like 2 weeks after we moved in, for obvious reasons) and hooked us up. We weren't going to take it to small claims, we simply would have just found a new place if not for their offer to drop the pet costs.

[afan95]

Appreciate the information.