My Landlord Kept My Deposit, Then the Inspector Knocked

When I moved out of the apartment I had kept for three years, I left it cleaner than I found it. I spent a whole weekend on it. My landlord did a five-minute walkthrough, then sent me a letter claiming a long list of damage: stains, a cracked counter, a broken blind, and kept my entire deposit, which was not small.

None of it was true. I had done what everyone tells you to do and forget: I had taken date-stamped photos of every room the day I moved in and the day I moved out. The counter he called cracked was, in my photos, already chipped in exactly that spot on the day I arrived, three years earlier. The blind he called broken was, in his own move-in checklist that he had signed, already noted as broken.

I emailed him the photos and the checklist politely and asked for the deposit back. He replied that I could "take him to court and see how that goes," and that he had been doing this a long time.

What he did not know was that his refusal to fix the heating for two winters had already put me in contact with the city housing office, and that an inspector was scheduled to visit the building that very week about the boiler. When the inspector came, I mentioned, just in passing, the deposit and the invented damages and the signed checklist.

The inspector was very interested. It turned out my landlord had a history of complaints, and the invented-damage letter, combined with the heating violations, was exactly the pattern the office had been trying to document. I got my full deposit back within ten days, with a written apology. The building got its boiler fixed. I hear he is much more careful now.