Need Help!! Absurd Cleaning Charges (real estate, apartments, lease)
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Need help Please! My husband stayed in Meadowbrook apartments in Parsippany, NJ for almost 1 and half years and at the end of lease, he received a huge bill for cleaning. Can anyone suggest, what can we do about it? We sent number of emails to Claudia but she refuses to do any adjustments. Please suggest if anything can be done about it. Thank you!!
Did you take pictures when you moved out of the condition of the apartment and the areas that are being charged for? If not, you have zero chance of making an argument that the fees are excessive.
If you did and the apartment was left empty and broom swept then they have zero right to charge this amount for cleaning services.
Did you do a final walkthough with the landlord before turning over the keys and the landlord acknowledged the state of the apartment?
A real estate lawyer, for significanly less than those cleaning charges can draft a letter stating that as per NJ Tenant laws and your attached pictures, you left the apartment cleaned out and in broom swept condition with no damage and as such LL has no rights to your security deposit and they have 30 days to return it. Etc etc.
Does it list the amounts in the lease or anywhere what they charge to clean those items?
If not the charges have to be reasonable for a Judge to accept. And they would have to show pics to show the condition.
Good chance you would get them reduced or thrown out. But would need to file a simple small claims court case.
Even better if you can get a maid service to go in and give a quote on cleaning those items. Then you can prove what is a reasonable charge.
They may or may not be far off on the charges. Without pics we can not really say how long it could take to clean those items.
This is true but NJ Tenant laws do not allow for landlords to charge cleaning fees for normal wear and tear. If the microwave and stove were a disgusting mess, the landlord may be right, but if they are just cleaning them in regular after tenant cleaning then the fee isnt appropriate.
There is no way that a dishwasher required that much cleaning unless they left it full of dirty dishes. A kitchen sink either.
I suspect they regularly overcharge because they dont think the tenant will fight them.
When we bought our house we moved out of our month to month lease and the landlord tried to argue that we owed an extra months rent plus keeping our entire security deposit to make repairs.
We agreed we owed the months rent because we only gave 30 days notice instead of 60 because our closing got delayed and delayed and delayed then we closed on the 31st of the month. So we moved out 30 days after that. But we refused to pay for the "repairs" they wanted as they were wear and tear related as we lived there for 4 years.
Our closing attorney wrote us a letter for a few hundred dollars and avoided us having to deal with a lawsuit for them to sue us for the extra 2k they wanted
This is true but NJ Tenant laws do not allow for landlords to charge cleaning fees for normal wear and tear. If the microwave and stove were a disgusting mess, the landlord may be right, but if they are just cleaning them in regular after tenant cleaning then the fee isnt appropriate.
There is no way that a dishwasher required that much cleaning unless they left it full of dirty dishes. A kitchen sink either.
I suspect they regularly overcharge because they dont think the tenant will fight them.
When we bought our house we moved out of our month to month lease and the landlord tried to argue that we owed an extra months rent plus keeping our entire security deposit to make repairs.
We agreed we owed the months rent because we only gave 30 days notice instead of 60 because our closing got delayed and delayed and delayed then we closed on the 31st of the month. So we moved out 30 days after that. But we refused to pay for the "repairs" they wanted as they were wear and tear related as we lived there for 4 years.
Our closing attorney wrote us a letter for a few hundred dollars and avoided us having to deal with a lawsuit for them to sue us for the extra 2k they wanted
If cleaning a microwave costs $100, I would just buy a new microwave. I might have to start a microwave cleaning business and undercut the competition at $95.
If cleaning a microwave costs $100, I would just buy a new microwave. I might have to start a microwave cleaning business and undercut the competition at $95.
Need help Please! My husband stayed in Meadowbrook apartments in Parsippany, NJ for almost 1 and half years and at the end of lease, he received a huge bill for cleaning. Can anyone suggest, what can we do about it? We sent number of emails to Claudia but she refuses to do any adjustments. Please suggest if anything can be done about it. Thank you!!
Charges are excessive. How can they charge $75 to clean a sink?
Someone asked if charges are written in the lease, normally people get about $50 an hour to clean. It sure wouldn't take me that long to clean any of them. 3 hours to clean a bathroom? An hour and a half for the kitchen sink? Same for the dishwasher, even if there was moldy water left in it that I had to bale out due to something being hooked up wrong.
The company just doesn't want to give his deposit back.
Just pay it and move on. Chalk it up as a life lesson on how to protect yourself from crummy landlords in the future. Take pictures of everything when you move in and take pictures when you move out.
Not enough money to get attorneys involved....for either side.
You don't need to get attorney's involved. This is an easy win in small claims court given the ridiculousness of the fees. Moreover, the landlord is required to hire a cleaning service. In NJ, they cannot bill you for their own labor. File the suit for $30 and take them to court. This goes both ways. It's not enough for them to pay a lawyer either. I've won twice my security deposit back. Landlords rely on the fact that people are too lazy to spend a day fighting.
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