Landlords have it tough right now. Frankly, I can’t think I someone I dislike more than the landlords of my building.
Occasionally, however, I’ll hear a story from someone who owns a building with a nightmare tenant and have to admit “that sounds rough.” Landlords are people too (despite replying to your emails like an automaton).
When it comes to getting the secret dirt from people in the know, I turn to Reddit. People there seem to dish about everything without actually worrying about the consequences.
Multiple people have asked some variation on “landlords of Reddit: who was your worst tenant and why?” There are some frightening answers.
Here are the best replies to the question “who was your worst tenant?”:
1. They vanished.
“My mother owns a house on the coast she inherited from her aunt and rents it out to people now that she’s moved. Makes great money considering it’s a decent sized town and the house is close to the beach.
She doesn’t allow animals due to the old wool carpets that are not easily replaceable. But she legally can not keep children out.
I didn’t see it for myself, but after several attempts to contact the tenants, she drove down there herself and let herself in. Place was fucking pigsty. Diapers, vomit, baby food everywhere, literal shit smeared on the wall and flung onto the ceilings; carpets were soaked and stained with piss. Tenants were no where to be found. She talked to the neighbor and they’d apparently been gone for a month. Had to get the police to track them down.” –strangersIknow
2. The Family strikes again.
“A family of hippies. And I mean full-on, flowers-in-their-hair, guitar-playing, kumbaya-singing, smelled-like-ass hippies. I used to manage a complex of town houses, and they moved into one of our houses.
After four days, they threw a huge fit about how they’d had to take their daughter to the ER due to “radiation” from a nearby cell tower. They told us they were moving out immediately and demanded an on-the-spot refund of their deposit.
Of course, I said no and went to check the town house. It was completely destroyed. There were black marks and baseball-sized holes all over the walls. The carpet had been torn up and the entire place smelled of urine and feces (we later found animal feces under the carpet). It was just absolutely disgusting. Quite frankly, I was astonished that anyone could do that much damage in just 4 days.
…somehow I don’t think the cell tower was what made their daughter sick. And needless to say, they didn’t get their deposit back.” –sixcount
3. That’s the ultimate bummer.
“Worked for a large rental property company. A man called one of the properties and asked if they had any units available on a high floor. This was a high rise in a great location, where the upper floors had a nice view of the city, so the request wasn’t unusual.
The man came to view the unit, and a leasing agent took him on the tour. She opened the balcony to show him the view, and then she went back into the unit, expecting him to follow. When he didn’t, she turned around and he was gone. He jumped from the balcony onto the road below. The unit was on something like the 20th floor.” –wamme6
4. Tough break, kid.
“Parents had rental houses growing up. One tenant got evicted and, before leaving, poured wax down the drains and used cat litter in the vents. Luckily, they had free child labor to help clean up houses like that.” –sushkunes
5. Dear Lord.
“Had a whole house being rented. Evicted tenant. Went to clean up after they left and this was the basement. They had a dog that went in the basement to crap. Instead of cleaning it up they poured latex paint on it to seal in the smell. The dog kept crapping and they kept pouring. A latex-dog poo lasagna filling an entire room. The floor was a mound about 4ft high and 10ft wide, filling the entire basement, of nothing but layers of latex paint and dog crap from several years of them living there. Took air hammers and chisels and weeks of work to clean.
Once we got that done we were able to get the the storage closet in the basement. It was jammed shut from this crap on the floor but the door had a hole in the top. They used this closed off room with the hole as a diaper disposal for their infant. A room about 4ftx4ft filled to the top with years of dirty baby diapers.” –muxman
6. Don’t do this.
“My neighbours rented their place. They decided to do some renos without notifying the landlord. He’s a cool dude, and I don’t think he would have minded too much, but these were serious renos. My neighbours knocked out a wall, added a patio, before rupturing a pipe. That’s when we found out they had hired friends to do all the work, and were “fixing” the house with plywood they got from the dump. The space between the patio and the back wall included a 75 cm gap, which they said just to jump over. They have three year old twins.” –diceblue
7. Yikes.
“Son of a landlord. I was sent to clean out a garage unit for a few extra bucks. brought a guy with me because it was a lot. Turns out the lady who’d been renting the unit had been secretly living in the garage for months. We threw out used needles, family photos, one particularly odd couch that we had to break into pieces just to lift it out of there, and the piece de resistence…. four five gallon buckets full of human waste. We didn’t know it was human waste until the last bucket was on the truck and the lid popped off and splashed a little bit. I have never smelled anything so foul.” –Spontanemoose
8. Sincerely trying to ruin someone’s life.
“I wasnt old enough to remember this, but my dad tells me the story once in a while. We rented our second floor to this older lady who always was behind on her Bill’s and tried every excuse in the book to postpone or not pay them. Well one day, my dad and her got to the house at the same time so he was able to confront her about some payments that were very late, and she was like “Oh I have the money upstairs. Just follow me”. While they were heading upstairs, she dialed 911, unbeknownst to my dad, and when they got upstairs she was stalling pretending to look for the money until a cop car came. When she heard the car, she started screaming and pushing my dad, and was yelling to the cop that my dad was trying to sexually assault her.
Fortunately for us, the lady was keeping a secret roommate without my parents knowledge, and she happened to be in one of the rooms and heard the whole thing. She came out of the room while the officer was starting to apprehend my dad and explained to the officer what actually happened.” –N3MO_
9. Rich people with jobs live in odd ways.
“My dad rented out our old house. He thought he had a good tenant. Tenent even asked to repaint the interior if we deducted one months rent. Sounded good.
Then when they wanted to move out we got a look at the place. When they painted they used the cheapest paint, painted door knobs and outlets and left big paint strokes. Looked way worse than what it must have looked unpainted. And there were large holes torn in the carpet. And none of the toilets worked, they just ran constantly. And they must have hung wet clothes on the bathroom facets because none of those worked and were rusted beyond repair. My childhood home looked terrible and we had to repair.
Oh, the reason we thought he’d be a good tenant? He was an executive hire to run the local hospital. Seems him and his family must have just lived like pigs in that filth.” –cyberdrunk
10. What needs to be fixed costs money.
“This couple, nicknamed dumb and dumber, are helpless. She overloaded the bathroom outlet and flipped the outlet switch. She didn’t know all she had to do what push the button back in and she would have electricity again, so she calls an electrictian who warns her it will be a minimum of $150 for him to drive out there and fix this. He walks in and spends less than a second pushing the button in. She then sends the landlord the bill, which the landlord refused to pay. Calls asking who will clean their bathroom, mow their grass, can they come out to flip the breaker box for them, I don’t like this fridge…buy us a new one, why is it a big deal if we are late with rent, our washing machine we moved in with isn’t working well isn’t it your job to buy us a new one, what is an air filter and why do I have to change it, I need someone to hold our mail while we go on vacation can you contact the post office? Two absolutely helpless adults with kids.
Oh, and I had to add this in. The air conditioner fails. She lets them know at maybe 9pm at night. They contact an HVAC repair company who will be out there in the AM. Instead of waiting less than 12 hours, she goes to the store in the middle of the night and buys multiple window units to install at 2am. Which she cannot do, because outlets are too hard for her. She then tells the landlord theyre responsible for repaying her for the multiple window AC units. HVAC guy had the AC repaired in less than an hour that morning. The tenant is still out $400 because legally the landlord doesn’t have to pay her for that.” –CybReader
11. No good deed.
“Our parents rented a floor of their 2-family home to a guy who was an electrician. In return for lower rent, he did electrical improvements and minor repairs to the house.
All of a sudden, our parents’ electric bill nearly doubled. So they called the power company for an inspection and discovered that the tenant had illegally re-wired his connection so that it was drawing most of the current for his apartment from their electric meter instead of his.
They had given him a substantial break in the rent, and he abused their kindness. Dad simply said, “No good deed goes unpunished.” –Back2Bach
12. Repairman who’s glad he’s not a landlord.
“Not a landlord, but I worked as a handyman one summer and we had to repair a house that was rented out by college students. We get inside and the place is absolutely trashed. There holes in the walls, in the doors, the windows were broken, cabinets ripped off and to top it all off, the entire place reeked of pee because the previous tenants locked their dog in a small room while they went home on vacation. We put an absurd amount of work into the house over a three-day span. I’ve never seen a house in that condition before.
But one day we were talking to the landlord and she makes the comment “These were the second-worst tenants we’ve ever had.” My coworker and I look at each other and ask what the worst tenants were, because, like I said, it looked like a war was fought inside this house. She tells us that one time, the house had pretty similar damage, except before the tenants left, they filled hundreds of condoms with water and pinned them to the ceiling. I don’t repair houses anymore.” –lostglastonbury
13. Huffing it.
“Glue huffer. I was putting veneer on cabinets with a respirator. She walked into the unit asking where “it” was. I thought the odor was too strong and apologized. She went right for the bucket and started taking deep breaths. My buddy and I both said nooooo in what seemed to be in slow motion. It wasn’t her first glue rodeo, so you can imagine how fried her brain already was/is.” –lowlatitude
14. I need an adult.
“I own a 2 family house so I rent out the other unit. One of my first tenants, let’s call him Richard, was a young kid just out of college. He was a nice enough guy and we became friends. I have a decent sized backyard with a grill and a pool. We spent the entire summer drinking and hanging out in the backyard.
The fall comes. Richard gets it in his head that he wants to re-paint his living room. He asks me if that’s ok and I say sure. He says he will paint it himself if I buy the paint. I buy the paint he picked out which is a nice neutral color. I’m kind of impressed that he had such good taste. He starts painting.
About a week later I get a call from Richard in the middle of the night. I was in bed with my wife and sleeping. He says he’s having problems with the paint and asked if I could come up to help. At that point I thought he was done painting. It doesn’t take a week to paint a room. WTF? I begrudgingly agree to go upstairs and help.
I walk up the stairs in the middle of the night. I hear music blaring from the apartment. The door to his apartment is open and I walk in. There’s Richard. He’s completely naked with an erect penis, a roller in hand, and dancing to Goodbye Horses. I noped the fuck out and told him to put some tarp down since he was getting paint on my hard wood floors.” –TheNewGuyAgain
15. Mysterious.
“I had a female tenant who lived in a basement apartment. We regularly heard a dog barking in her unit. Funny thing though, she didn’t own a dog. She had every light in the unit on, 24/7, until she called complaining about not having any power. Went in to check it and she had power. Every light bulb was burned out though. All she had in the place was a futon and Bibles. Bibles in every room, open to different pages. When we finally got her out for nonpayment (of course), she hired a moving company to move her belongings. The futon and a garbage bag full of clothes.” –il18yog
16. Free housing, eventually.
“I had a tenant that turned out to be my realestate agent (using someone else’s credentials), and then stole my identity, bought an Audi and a Yamaha motorcycle and left me with the bill…. oh, and he put holes in all the walls and didn’t pay rent. It’s a longer story than that, but he was caught, and now he is housed in prison.” –x3nn3x
17. Ummm… what?
“I own a commercial building which rents mostly to small businesses. One tenant was a “consulting firm” run by two Scandinavian girls.
Every day, men (and only men) would be coming in and out of their space. Other tenants complained that some kind of weird vapor or steam would regularly escape from their unit.
As I recall, it turned out they were running an unregistered sperm bank and the vapor was coming from a big container of liquid nitrogen used to store the sperm donations.” –abbe_grill
18. True love.
“My dad rents a few houses out and about 10 years ago he was going to collect rent from an older couple in one of his houses. Lets call her Annie, answered the door and made my dad a cuppa. He was surprised her husband, lets call him Frank, was not sitting in his normal arm chair, he was quite a big man and was always there when my dad came round.
So dad asked Annie where he was and she said ‘He’s in bed, he died last Tuesday, I’m not really sure what to do.’ This was Saturday and dad asked where she had been sleeping, ‘In beside Frank.’ she said. So dad was able to help Annie with the undertakers and had to help them get big Frank down the narrow stairs. He got Annie sorted with a new house to rent as well. Grief can make people do very strange things.” –Quail_eater
19. The mold clause.
“My last landlord had in our agreement a “mold clause” Basically he explained that he rented a unit to a guy and he lined the walls of the apartment with what I can assume was plastic wrap. and got the humidity in the house so high and was growing mold and mushrooms on the walls of the place. So when the guy eventually was evicted they had to gut the entire unit.” –Jaci_D
20. Meth is a heck of a drug.
“Had a rented who started doing meth. He got obsessed with Chuck Norris and fake karate stuff. He had two little dogs he started training to kill. Only the dogs were tiny and couldn’t do much. He got really demanding and also did not pay rent for three months. I finally told him he had to leave. He got very angry and called the city. The city told me to evict him. So I did. He destroyed the place and at age 40+ his parents came to pick him and his nunchucks and killer dogs up. First of many crappy tenants.” –sunshineineugene
21. Wow. That’s a lot.
“There was this one guy, who had a small family as a downstairs neighbour who were constantly complaining about him making excessive noise. Many noise complaints were filed, and the police were called multiple times. Neither we nor the police actually heard him making noise though. And he kept pleading that he always kept it quiet, and that the noise wasn’t him.
The weeks went by, and they kept arguing, taking up most of our time with complaints and attempts to negotiate an agreement so they would stop arguing.
We later got a phone call from the mans downstairs neighbour, they were hysterical and told us to come over immediately. When we arrived, we found that he had sawed a hole in his floor, and taken a giant shit down to the neighbours living room.” –Pistolerodota
h/t Reddit: r/AkReddit