Tenants from Hell

Don’t rent your flat to lawyers or pop stars, Bruce Beresford was told by a friend. If only he’d listened

As I’ve split my time between London and Sydney for many years, I thought – naïvely –that renting out the residence in the city from which I was absent would be a good idea.

Disillusion with estate agents and occupiers descended rapidly.

Initially, before leaving London, I met an agent who seemed both experienced and practical. He would, he said, have no problem renting out my West End flat.

Back in Sydney, I often called for rental news and was invariably told the flat had been shown to a number of people – with no result. ‘The market is slow,’ was the standard explanation.

My son was at Oxford at the time. He phoned me in Sydney and said he’d been in London, was cycling past the flat and noticed the lights were on. So the flat had been rented? About time – around four months had passed.

I asked my son to call in to the flat the next day for information. His phone call and description of the occupant revealed it was the estate agent himself who was the occupier.

Evidently my son’s visit promoted panic. The agent left the flat quickly with his possessions – as well as some of mine. I phoned his office a few times but the number had been disconnected.

Another agent was contacted. This one quickly found a lady from the USA who wanted the flat for a year. She was a lawyer working for some corporation.

I could see no problems. I ignored the advice of a friend – ‘Don’t rent to rock/ pop groups because they’ll wreck the place and don’t rent to lawyers because they come up with reasons why they don’t have to pay any rent at all.’

After a couple of months with no payments, I called the flat and the lady lawyer said she’d deposited no rent as there was no microwave.

I had a microwave delivered.

A month or so later, there were still no payments ‘because the fridge is leaking’. I managed to find a Polish handyman who reported back that he’d fixed a minute leak.

Halfway through the year, I made another desperate call. This time, I was told there were still no payments as the flat had been burgled, ‘probably by the porters’ – as they had keys. Jewellery was missing, but the matter had mysteriously not been reported to the police.

Having known the porters – who had attended to the entire block for some years – it seemed highly unlikely to me that any of them were part-time thieves.

In the final month of the alleged ‘rental’, I told the lady lawyer I was not returning her deposit as not one penny/ cent of the agreed monthly sum had ever been placed in my account.

She then calmly informed me that my modest, but treasured, collection of paintings (which had remained in the flat) would be slashed/destroyed.

The agent, who had been no help in extracting rent, assured me that the lady lawyer was bluffing. In view of her past behaviour, I doubted this, especially as I’d found out from the porters that she had sub-let the flat for some months while she was back in the USA.

I returned the deposit.

Back in Sydney, during the era of the above events, my wife and I bought a charming terrace house in Paddington, close to the city.

It seemed perfect, having been ‘restored by the previous owners’. It turned out to be our own Potemkin village. On our first night, I was reading in the living room, while my wife was having a bath in the upstairs bathroom. Suddenly I was drenched by a downpour from the ceiling – once the bath plug was pulled, the water simply emptied into the room below.

The following morning, a plumber informed me there were no water pipes from the bath. No plumbing at all.

Noticing an unpleasant smell in the kitchen, I looked underneath the sink to check the food-disposal device. This had always made a reassuring grinding noise when it was turned on – but all I found was a tiny toy motor. There was no waste machine. Food scraps, emptied down the chute, simply piled up in the cupboard underneath.

A visually appealing part of the house were the beautiful Victorian stained-glass panels in the front door – a delightful feature of many Australian houses of the era. We returned from a film screening one night to discover two large gaps in the door. The panels had been removed by the vendor.

I realised, of course, that they were a key part of the vendor’s overall sales plan. I had never met this person but dealt only with his estate agent.

The agent was non-committal – not to say evasive – about the problems with the house and unperturbed when he heard my furious complaints about the devious sale agreement. He smoothly assured me he didn’t have – and had never had – contact numbers or a postal address for the vendors.

Oh, and by the way, I have also had disastrous experiences with my forays into Airbnb rentals…