Saturday, July 16, 2011

Greedy landlord


I'm posting today about what I call greedy landlords. The greedy ones are the ones that will lease a basement apartment to anyone without any regard for the safety of the tenant and are asking top price.



This is what I mean by unsafe.

In this old city of Hull there are lots of these sort of basement apartments. I have been in a couple of them and what I saw in those I would not even leave my dog to sleep in one of them over night for fear of fire.

Most of the ones that I've seen, the kitchen is the first thing you walk into. Then there might be one or two bedrooms and then a bathroom. My problem with this, is that there is  no way to escape if a fire starts in the kitchen for some reason and you happen to be sleeping beyond the kitchen where the entrance/exit is. In most of these there are no windows or another door that you can escape from and the only door is the one that you come in through. The kitchen and the glass in the door is the only window.

Some of these apartment have windows around the basement but most of the ones that I’ve seen you're lucky if you can open them because they are old and some of them have solid steel bars in them stuck in cement and the ones that you can open if your over one hundred pounds you cannot get out because they are just too small. At least the ones that I have been in to visit.

Then you have the other type of landlord. 

This other type is the one that thinks about leasing an apartment to cover his mortgage and taxes  and the apartment is not even worth half of what he wants to lease it for. Some of these landlords I would not have anything negative to say because there are some nice apartments and the asking price is worth it.

What really riles me now are the landlords that leases out apartments but no smoking or dogs are allowed. I don’t think I would rent to someone if I owned a building with  dogs unless I was sure that the dog would not bark all the time to disturb other tenants. I'd also want to make sure that the tenant would clean up after the dog had done his or her business. 

The best one I have seen in the newspaper last night was. 

"Apartment for rent two bedrooms kitchen living room. I will rent to any one except smokers druggies or  alcoholics  and no dogs."

I guess this one must have had some bad experiences.  Dogs though in the same category as alcoholics?  Doesn't seen fair.

That is my rant for to-day and that’s enough.

Bob

2 comments:

  1. There was a case near here a couple of years ago where a family of five was killed in a townhouse fire. The townhouses were very small and the news reports indicated the family was trapped because of where the fire broke out. I imagine the rest of the row of townhouses was probably designed the same way which means the risk of it being repeated is pretty high.

    That's not to mention the risk of fire spreading more quickly in townhouses than in detached homes.

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  2. I have to agree with that considering as to what I have seen here

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