Landlords From Hell

What happens when a pack of internet investors buy your apartment complex?

Things started to fall apart, though, sometime after the first months of the pandemic. Tenants moved out in the dead of night as if they didn’t want anyone to see them; eviction notices would show up on their doors long after they’d left. The gym and pool shut down for “safety” reasons; when the building was sold the summer after COVID hit, the latter turned green. According to McMullen-Clarke, phantom surcharges began showing up on every rent bill, but when she called the front office to discuss them the phone would ring and ring; she later learned they’d stopped paying the phone bill. The new management charged $40 a month for “valet” trash service, but canceled its contract with the company retained to pick up trash every evening, so the same overworked maintenance guy who did everything else on the property had to pick up trash as well, and only when he got around to it. “There was garbage everywhere, it was really tragic,” McMullen-Clarke says.

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Weeds grew, in which new tenants would let their dogs shit without picking it up. Management would shut the water off throughout the entire complex for hours constantly; once a week at first, then just about every other day. But when the water was on, it would leak from 100 different spots and attract ever more pestilence. The rat population exploded, eventually taking up residence in the ceiling above McMullen-Clarke’s bedroom, where they scratched and fought and made it hard to fall asleep. One day as she was ascending the stairway, she noticed a rat sitting contentedly on the handrail for which she’d been reaching. “I took a deep breath and said to myself, OK, one of us is leaving.”

RTWT