(Ex)Tenant-Landlord Dispute: small claims, civil suit, or walk away?

[CaseyB]

Originally Posted by greyhorsewoman

It sounds like they have a good chance of recovery. I'd go ahead ... in small claims court it won't be that expensive.

Yes, file it in small claims. You don't need a lawyer.

[GoggleWearingGeek]

Thanks all for your comments. Yes, we did send the keys and 93A demand letter by certified mail, to the provided PO Box to the address which appears to be where they live. And we do have an official government inspector who noted down the fact that the owner was in "our" house without permission, and the owner stated to his face that we are not his tenants. I can't imagine what more we can do other than knock on the door and ask the current tenants whether they're tenants. We did find out after we found another place that the owners have been fixing up the place, for reasons unknown to us (but not too hard to imagine).

They were willing to give me back my security deposit, but they don't see why they should return me the last month's rent. I begged them to meet me halfway, give me half last month's rent as a compromise (which my wife strongly disagrees with) but they simply refused to budge.

I hate wasting time in court. I don't want to kick a hornet's nest. I just want my deposits back. We don't have that much money and it's been a huge hardship to shell out three months' rent, then continue living in our old place where we paid an extra month's rent, then shell out three more months' rent for the new place we found (which fortunately has been a very nice little house with no problems, and the owners have been very reasonable about fixing stuff).

I'm a fix-it kind of guy and I love tackling problems like installing ceiling fans, fixing doors, replacing flapper valves, etc. We were prepared to stay in the house--if they would have honored their verbal agreement to fix a few things. But they were so upset by the list of things we sent them (many of which we offered to fix and pay for ourselves, leaving just a few major problems we discovered such as the moldy, rotted out stuff that obviously we can't fix by ourselves and shouldn't have to) that they themselves instigated the lease termination. Yet, they balked at giving us back more than our security, even though it had been only a couple of weeks and we hadn't moved in, just moved a few boxes into the living room basically.

By the way, I didn't mean to denigrate Chinese people. I'm not Chinese, but I was a China major and spent a couple of years in Taiwan during college. I love China's people and culture. It's just that these owners seem to hide behind linguistic barriers to an extent, and furthermore they behave pretty much as you'd expect sleazy landlords to back home in Taiwan--if you give me money, it's mine, and you'll never get it back unless you send some thugs to break down my door.