Landlord Blues: Renting out the house from hell

Earlier on in his tenancy Gerald had threatened to report us to the council. The electricity had got cut off when the only female tenant at the time, a pleasant South African woman, had moved out (she had always sorted out their contributions to the electric bill). From then on none of them had paid a penny, even though all their names were on the contract and they were legally bound to pay it, according to their tenancy agreements. This then became our fault. 
Gerald said to Adrian, ‘I’ve got a right to heating and hot water.’ 
Adrian answered: ‘Yes, and you’ve got a legal responsibility to pay the bills. In fact, have you ever paid anything towards the electricity since Joy left?’ 
‘What’s the point’, Gerald answered, ‘when the others won’t?’ 
Adrian repeated, ‘So, have you ever paid?’ 
And he said: ‘No. Joy left, not having paid hers, so there was no point.’ 
In fact, they believed Joy owed £30 when she vacated, so allegedly decided never to pay again. They’d treated the only woman tenant like she was their mother. 
A whole saga ensued, during which a bill of £1,400 was run up, they were given and ignored countless warnings by the electricity company and finally a meter was installed. This meant that every time the money ran out on the meter and the electricity went off, apart from being plunged into darkness and the heaters not working (which frankly was their own bloody fault for not paying the bills), the fire alarm wouldn’t work, which meant we were contravening the law. 
It was all well and good to think, ‘I’m not paying, because they should have paid the bill’, but we had to operate in the real world. But we just didn’t know how to sort it out; it was one of those problems you had to sleep on and hope that a solution would float to the surface of your mind. We didn’t want to sacrifice £1,400 of our money because of them. In the end, we had no choice and we settled the bill in full with the electricity company. We then tried to claw back what we could, by using deposits if we could when people left (most left with arrears, though, making this impossible) and recouped about £500. 
This was complicated by the fact that around the time the meter was fitted, two tenants had been evicted and we had two empty rooms to fill. We couldn’t let out two rooms in a house where there was an electric meter with a massive debt attached (meaning that each time £30 was put in, £20 was swallowed up by the company towards the debt), as this would have meant that people who had not accrued the debt would be forced to pay towards it and no new tenants would agree to that. So, if we had not paid it off, we would have had two empty rooms forever more, and lost about £5,000 in rental income each year. 
We had also learnt from our first experience of paying the bills for tenants at another house that it was necessary to put a clause in tenancy agreements which included bills, stating we would pay a maximum of £100 in any given month, and that they must pay anything above that. We had another house where we were also paying the bills and since we took over the responsibility it was also a constantly boiling and brightly-lit house, at all times of the day and night.
It was galling when we were so careful with gas and electricity in our own house, keeping the bills down and not wasting the earth’s resources, only for others to completely abuse the fact that we were paying the bills. In one of the houses with an inclusive rent, we would find the heating on constantly, and they would even then open the windows because it was too hot. And lights on in the daytime – why did people do that? Was it mood lighting?  Well, it didn’t improve my mood.
 
TIP:
If you let rooms to different tenants who don’t have a shared tenancy, it is advisable to charge a rent inclusive of bills (with a ceiling of how much gas, electricity and water the landlord will pay for). Tenants otherwise don’t seem able to arrange the payment between themselves, especially if they move in at different times and if they use or abuse the utilities in different ways. 
     

On the morning of the 11th of January I drove over to the house to let Gary, the plumber, in to fix the boiler; typically, predictably and infuriatingly, the hall lights were on and the electric storage heaters were on full blast, with no-one at home. Three of them worked, with only one on benefits at this point, but it was not necessarily the unemployed one who’d left it all on; it’s what people generally do when someone else is paying the bills. Anyway, I found a tiny, rickety trestle table to stand on and, risking life and limb, got up to the height of the electric meter by the front door, planning to read the meter and then check and see what they used in the next three months (of course, I later forgot to follow this up), as we could charge them for anything over £100 a month, according to our tenancy agreements (although we never once did this).

Later in January, Gerald rang in answer to a text from Adrian. He was in a rotten mood:

‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing, texting me, accusing me of not paying the £70? I paid it at the end of last week. So why are you asking for £140 this week?’

Adrian said, ‘Okay, I’ll check the bank account and get back to you.’ It turned out he had paid £70 on the Friday, but we’d received several payments that day and he hadn’t put his name as a reference, so it came up as an anonymous payment. We then didn’t get around to texting him back. The following morning he sent a message saying, 'I didn't sleep all night with the worry.'

He hadn’t cared one iota when he’d ignored the electricity bills for a year, and the debt went up to £1,400, but now he was worried about whether we’d received £70.

One night I even dreamt about him. In the dream I went to his market stall to ask him for the rent, as by then he'd completely stopped paying. In the dream he offered me £80 and I said that wasn’t good enough as he owed us over £500. He then stormed off, leaving me behind on the stall. When I’d arrived, there’d been quite a queue of shoppers waiting to buy things; he was doing very well! As I was now left to run the stall, one customer came and was interested in a blouse. I asked what she was willing to pay for it. ‘Half a dozen’, she said, bizarrely.

‘I thought maybe 12’, I replied, ‘so let’s meet half-way at 9.’

‘I couldn’t go above 8’, she said, ‘and I need to pay by cheque.’

‘Make it out to ‘R Lynch’’ I said, thinking it was better than nothing. My early Sunday morning dreams now included that beer-bellied, toothless wonder. We were trying not to get too angry, as he would be out soon and in a year’s time he would be a distant memory… That is one of the techniques one is supposed to use in order to stay calm.

Adrian tried a different tack another day, texting Gerald, to say he'd be in the area and would call in and pick up the rent as Gerald always professed he hadn’t paid the rent into the bank because he couldn’t leave his market stall unattended. He texted back to say that Adrian could, by all means, come to see him but that he was ‘not in a position to pay anything.’  

Gerald turns bad:

Gerald had always been rough around the edges, but he started to become downright rude and his rental payments started to falter. One day, he was talking to Adrian on the ‘phone whilst we were out shopping for a second-hand car. Our electrician, Paul, had been to Hill View and all the tenants had been informed that there were going to be works going on throughout the house (the council had stipulated new, expensive additions, like low-level lighting as though they were living on an aeroplane). When Gerald realised someone had been in his room, he was furious. He never allowed anyone in there, not even Adrian. Paul had gone in to install a smoke detector and Gerald went ballistic. He shouted at Adrian on the ‘phone:

‘You weren’t f***ing clear! If anyone ever needs to go in the room, they'd better f***ing tell me first! I'm not having anyone in there without me seeing what they're f***ing doing.’

I could see Adrian getting worked up as he listened to this torrent.

‘Well, if any works need doing then, you’ll have to take time off your market stall.’

‘No I f***ing won't,’ he countered, ‘they’ll have to fit in with me.’

This would have meant workers could only come evenings and weekends, which wasn't practical. Adrian pointed this out and Gerald hit the roof.

'Don't get f***ing funny with me! I'm telling you I'm not having f***ing strangers in my room!'

'And I won't have you effing and blinding at me. So you can stop right this minute! I always speak to you civilly and that's how you can speak to me!'

Gerald seemed to calm down then and stopped swearing.

'How come he's so worked up about a little thing like an electrician going into his room?' I asked Adrian. 'It's for his own good, so that he doesn't get burnt to death.'

'Well, he's obviously got something to hide,' he suggested.

It later became clear what an untrustworthy person he was; and he assumed everyone else was equally deceitful (and years later, thinking about it and about the fact that he lived under the radar, paid no taxes and had no bank account, a light bulb went on - 'He's probably got all his money stashed in the room! He'd have to, if he doesn't put anything in the bank,' I declared to Adrian).

Two months before Christmas, he had solemnly promised to pay £70 a week in order to keep up current rental payments and pay off some of his arrears, but then just before Christmas, he said he couldn’t pay because of the snow, but that he would pay double the following week. The next week, when he was due to make this double payment, Adrian sent him a text reminder and he immediately ‘phoned back complaining about being ‘pressured’ by Adrian. By then, he owed us some of October’s rent, plus all of November and December’s rent – more than £500, with us paying not only the mortgage, but the council tax, water, and electricity bills. Maybe he thought we were his mother and father, despite us being younger than him.

As it was a Saturday, he then said:

‘Well, is Natwest open after 12 today?’

Adrian said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, if I can’t get it in on time, you’ll have to come up for it.’

‘No, I won’t,' Adrian corrected him. 'You have to pay it in.’

He texted a while later to say he'd paid, but it was clear he hadn’t been intending to do so before Adrian had 'pressured' him.