A Kelowna woman says she nearly passed out when she walked into the house she was renting out.
“I couldn’t believe somebody could do this to somebody’s home,” Mary Blaskovits said. “This is disgusting.”
The roughly 2,000 square foot house was littered with cat feces and personal belongings such as dirty laundry and dirty dishes strewn all around. The mess she says is one thing, the damage another.
“It was very shocking, very, very shocking,” Blaskovits said. “and disrespectful.”
Some of the damage includes a broken fridge, broken windows, a smashed stairwell railing and electric baseboard heaters broken into pieces.
Blaskovits says the home was being rented out by a mother and her three children. They moved into the house in March 2016 and signed a one year lease. The family, however, broke the lease and gave notice in early December. Shortly after the tenants moved out, Blaskovits went in with her maintenance worker, Jason Side, and discovered the huge mess inside.
“I was stunned,” Side said. “I could not believe the shape it was in.”
The tenant did pay the required half month’s damage deposit, which in this case was $900. Side however, says the money will barely begin to cover the cost of repairs and clean-up.
“To get get it back ready for rental with fridge and windows that were broken and patio doors that were broken and all the cleaning and disinfecting, we could be upwards of $4,600, $4,700,” Side said.
The landlord could turn to the B.C. residential tenancy branch for help in this kind of situation, but recouping costs is not always a guarantee.
“Arbitration is a great thing especially when a person has credit or other things to lose but there is an old saying in the business ‘you don’t throw good money to bad money”, a person can have six judgments against them and you still can’t collect off them,” Side said.
The experience has left Blaskovits warning others who rent out property to be very careful when choosing tenants.
“To the landlords, beware who you rent to,”Blaskovits said. “I don’t think we can get enough references nowadays.”
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