Steve Skojec

I hate renting. We’re at a place in our life where it’s the best solution for us, but we’re hoping to be in the position to buy a home again some time soon. In the interest of working toward that goal, we’ve decided to move to a different house about 20 miles away in another D.C. suburb.  The town itself is not as nice as where we live now and my commute will get even longer, but we will get a lot more house for the money. The new place is an older but larger home with a big yard so the kids can finally play outside. It’s a single family (much better than the townhome we live in now) with an extra thousand square feet, and we’ll have the option to buy during our lease term. All in all, it’s a much better deal for us. The big move is Saturday.

We finalized the lease on our new house with quite a bit more than the thirty days’ notice we are required to give to terminate our current lease. We therefore assumed that our rent for this final month would simply be prorated to include the time we would be occupying the property and we would be refunded the difference.  Our landlord informed us that we were required, however, to pay for the entire month, something not stipulated in the lease.

We decided to let this slide because we didn’t mind having the extra week or two to clean and make any repairs we needed to.

Then, the landlord started scheduling showings well before February 1st, which marked our effective thirty days’ notice. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be too picky about this, though I found it odd that he exploited our courtesy of giving him six weeks notice by inconveniencing us with showings while we were packing. 

When Jamie had surgery the last week of January, she was put on bed rest for the first few days to begin her recovery. We asked that the landlord not schedule any showings during that time. He said he would “try not to” and then proceeded to schedule several for that weekend.  He also asked us to keep one of our reserved parking spots free for his prospective tenants, which I found ludicrous. As I was still paying for the spots, I was damn well going to use them.

Frankly, I was getting really pissed off. I fired off an email and told him that he needed to be considerate of us as tenants. He tried to hide behind the lease provisions for him to show the property. I responded by reminding him that legality doesn’t need to supercede consideration. I didn’t bother telling him that a post-surgery period wasn’t likely to be considered a “reasonable time” to show the house, as the law stipulates. I figured if he was too stupid to figure that out, I wouldn’t convince him. So I sucked it up and told myself we’d be leaving soon, let it go.

I found out today that he not only scheduled two showings for the morning we’re moving out, but actually rescheduled another one slated for the following day back to our moving day, leaving us to deal with three showings while we’re loading the truck. This after my wife asked him to reconsider the timing as the house would be full of people and in disarray.

The law in Virginia is clear:

§ 55-248.10:1. Landlord and tenant remedies for abuse of access.

If the tenant refuses to allow lawful access, the landlord may obtain injunctive relief to compel access, or terminate the rental agreement. In either case, the landlord may recover actual damages and reasonable attorney’s fees. If the landlord makes an unlawful entry or a lawful entry in an unreasonable manner or makes repeated demands for entry otherwise lawful but which have the effect of unreasonably harassing the tenant, the tenant may obtain injunctive relief to prevent the recurrence of the conduct, or terminate the rental agreement. In either case, the tenant may recover actual damages and reasonable attorney’s fees.

This obviously falls under lawful entry in an unreasonable manner. My wife already sent a pretty angry email to the landlord indicating her displeasure with his persistent unwillingness to be considerate of our needs, but I’m not sure that it will change anything.

I don’t intend to be accomodating. I’m thinking about making sure that the prospectives know what they’re getting into if they rent the place.

The sad thing is that I don’t think the landlord is really a bad guy, he’s just completely lacking in social graces and a slave to his own interests. He can be quite kind at times, as long as it doesn’t interfere with whatever agenda he perceives to be his greater good. He’s remarkably inflexible and real stickler for rules, too. This is why he hides behind the lease and the thinking that what he’s doing is “reasonable” and thus overrides our objections.

We’ve never given him a hard time about showing the place at reasonable times. We pay our rent early every month. We’ve contributed nearly $40,000 in rent to his bottom line over the past two years.

You’d think it would buy us some consideration. Evidently not.