Landlady's last scam? | ryuuzaki's Blog

Does this sound fishy to anyone else?

After a month of not receiving our damage deposits back from the previous landlady, one of our flatmates emailed her.  She got back a breakdown of how much was being taken from us.

So far, so good.

As expected, the landlady wants an extortionate ammount for the "cleaning and redecorating" of her house.  This ammount seems very high to me, but we all expected her to milk us for every penny.

The thing that seems fishy is that she's also deducted an ammount that was just shy of £500 for two flatmates that haven't paid their last month's rent.  I understand that she needs this money off them, but why is she deducting this off all of us?  Surely, as we all were separate tennants paying her separate rent, we shouldn't be expected to pay missing rent for other flatmates?

I contacted the landlady about this, leaving thinly veiled threat that if she disagreed with this, I would have to query it with the student union (as she's a landlady for students, if she is scamming us this could get her blacklisted with the university).  She still maintains that she is justified in deducting this rent from the rest of our damage deposits.

It's not just me, that seems odd doesn't it?

So I've had to email the union.  I hope they get back to me quickly as I really could do with the money back...