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Resources Mentioned on this Episode:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/benarmson90/stopthelandlord

Show Transcription:

Eric Worral: (00:00)
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of RentPrep for Landlords. This is episode #298 and we just got a fun episode this week. Came across an article from BuzzFeed titled 15 Tweets about Renting. That made me laugh and then want to cry. I’m going to go over some of these tweets and share some of the highlights with you right after this.

Voice Over: (00:23)
Welcome to the RentPrep for Landlords podcast and now your host Eric.

Eric Worral: (00:27)
So as I mentioned, this article comes from Buzzfeed, the author, Ben Armisen and he wrote this article based on 15 tweets that make him want to cry when it comes to renting. So I’m not going to read all of them to you because some of them are a little weird or frankly I don’t understand. And that includes number one, but number two, tweet that made him want to cry.

Eric Worral: (00:51)
Said, welcome to renting in London. My landlord has just put our thermostat in a cage. Now you could probably imagine the image posts with it, one of those little thermostats. And this one, it’s a smart thermostat with a big cage around it. The plastic casing. I’m actually going through this myself right now actually in my own home because it turns out that the thermostat is kind of a, was installed pretty low and my son can go over and push the buttons and he likes to see the light turn on. So I’m looking at different plastic cages. I can put her on my thermostat. So that’s always a fun thing of a Parenthood that you don’t expect, you know having to make it look like, yeah, he’ll live in a rental where you don’t trust your renters. But my renter is a two-year-old.

Eric Worral: (01:33)
So number three, this came from or it says if you’re renting and your landlord has a no pets policy, you can keep bats as long as you pretend to be mad about it. That had a over 5,000 likes on there, on Twitter. Kind of a funny one right there. Yeah. You know, if you’re a tenant, had a pet bats but you, you showed up and they were screaming that there were bats in the house. I mean, I could see how you get around that. A number four on the list said to sum up, London renting my entire kitchen has flooded and my landlord just sent me a YouTube tutorial on how to fix it. That tutorial is how to clean and replace the filter on a washing machine, which doesn’t really make sense if you’re talking about a kitchen flooding. But I could imagine how for tenants that can be pretty frustrating if they have a pretty bad issue and you do have that landlord, this site. Well here’s a video fix it. Obviously not appropriate and hopefully if you’re listening to this podcast, that’s not something you do. All right. This one I’ve heard before, it’s pretty funny, but this person tweeted, they said landlords really want us paying full price for February and then February in all caps, February, Ella Mayo grow up.

Eric Worral: (02:48)
I love the, I love when people say something and you feel like you want to be like, Oh mom, I feel like you should grow up a little bit. I don’t know what this person was, just a joking around or if they’re serious, but yeah, February 28 days, although 29 days this month, I hear a leap year, but yeah, no, you still got to pay a full month. But it is an interesting concept, right? Like I shouldn’t be able to go to your gym and say, Hey, I’ve been paying $30 a month to come here, but there’s only 28 days this month. Can I give you $28? I think they’d say no, so, but you know, can’t blame them for trying. Right. All right. The seventh most popular tweet here, my landlord is obsessed with rent. That was literally due weeks ago. Move on, babe.

Eric Worral: (03:37)
43,000 people are talking about this 255,000 hearts. I don’t, I’m not even on Twitter, to be honest. I don’t know if you call it a like a heart, whatever, but yeah. It’s like the, the last one we were reading about you know, wanting to pay full rent in February. Yeah. landlord’s gonna be upset if runs late a few weeks, you know, that happens. So this is just amazing to me though, that there’s like 255,000 people that are just sitting on Twitter and being like, yeah, yeah, I shouldn’t have to pay late rent. Yeah, I agree with this. And I don’t know, Twitter is a weird place. Number eight, and this one’s got a valuable lesson in it. Just read a client’s contract for them. And the landlord had just written a clause that bands and quotes, spices and oils in all cooking. Imagine thinking you had the right to ban flavor from someone’s life.

Eric Worral: (04:26)
This one too. I mean, depending on how somebody wanted to attack it, I mean, you could claim that it’s discrimination. I think, especially when you get into, I’ve heard of issues where people ban certain types of cooking. Like you can’t cook Curry in this apartment because Curry does make a pretty strong odor. But you could claim that you’re actually discriminating against a certain class of people because obviously a certain group of ethnicity tend to cook Curry more. So just something to be aware of. Probably not a good idea to start getting that into the weeds on what people can cook. So going to the next one here, this tweet says, I’m beginning to think my landlord has a different relationship with the rent payment than I do. So it’s a screencap of a Venmo payment and the person said, you know, you paid December rent, but then the landlord responded with, thank you.

Eric Worral: (05:17)
And then three bottles of champagne. Yeah, that’s a funny one. I was accepting Venmo payment for a little bit on my runs. I stopped doing it because of reading up on it that it’s pretty easy to, you know, make a claim and let’s see, all of a sudden your relationship went sour with your tenant real fast. They, they’d go back in and try and you know, they make a claim on a payment. They made you and say that it was faulty and it’s really hard to deal with that situation is what I hear. But I also try to not reply to these, you know, you don’t want to make your tenant upset or something or I feel like it’s awkward to, if you don’t use Venmo, you like have to put an emoji in sometimes. And it’s just really awkward.

Eric Worral: (06:02)
I used to get this, like it would be like a little house icon and then it’d be like cache with like wings on it flying away. And that’s where my one finer would send me. Like kind of like make me feel bad that I’m looking at this thing and I’ll be like, Oh yeah, that’s right. Like you live in this house so your cash flies over to me because you live there. I don’t know. It’s just awkward. I hate that you have to put emojis on things too. But maybe this is just my you know, me being an old miser podcast where I’m gonna go watch Twitter and I hate emojis. I don’t know. All right. Number 10, James here tweeted that if I was a landlord, I would make rent-free as long as my tenants played a game of kickball with me once a week. James, I would suggest that you could try it, but I don’t think you’d be a landlord for very long with that strategy. Number 11, this one’s pretty funny. This person, they said becoming the landlord of my own body by refusing to fix anything wrong with it.

Eric Worral: (06:58)
That one’s actually pretty funny. I liked that one quite a bit. That’s great. Actually like, you know, right now it’s mid-February, we’re all like a over our new year’s resolutions and you know, mine was like, I’m going to, I’m going to exercise three days a week at the gym. I’m going to get into a morning routine where I’m stretching, drinking like this much water, you know, all the typical stuff you see. And I’m already like, I don’t have time to exercise. Like I skipping out on that and like just like getting right to work and Oh gosh. So yeah, I am the landlord of my own body as well. Refusing to fix what’s wrong with it. All right, let’s see. [inaudible] Number 13 told my landlord not to have baths as been leaking or told by my landlord not to have baths as it’s been leaking.

Eric Worral: (07:46)
And the floor could collapse at any moment. But Hey, we should all aspire to die doing something we love. Yeah, it’s a pretty silly one too. Cause I mean, you’re adding weight to a tub if you’re just standing at and taking a shower too. I understand. It’s not as much weight. Right. And interesting little tidbit I found out from the YouTube [inaudible] is if you’re caulking around a bath, cause I, this happened to me, I know this is going on a tangent, but I love a good tangent. If you’re caulking around a bathtub in between where the tile meets your tub in that space, you want to fill the bathtub up with water first and then caulk. What that does is it actually pulls the tub down just a little bit, especially if it’s like an acrylic tub, which is what I have in my house.

Eric Worral: (08:28)
And then when you put the caulk in and it hardens, you can let that water out I think like 24 hours later or something like that. So then the tub kind of comes up into the caulk as opposed to if you caulk without the tub being full and then the tub gets filled up and it pulls down a little bit. That’s what causes that little crack or separation in your caulk line in between the tile and the tub. So there is your random, you know, DIY home renovations, tip of the day, unsolicited and not ask for, all right, number 14 rent being due this month of all months. Read the room, Glen, my landlord, I don’t understand this one. Let me try this again. Rent being due this month of all months. Read the room, Glen, my landlord. Got it. So he’s saying, you know, I’m having a tough time or you know, read the room as in like I’m not, I don’t want to pay rent this month.

Eric Worral: (09:23)
Again, this is another one of those things where I read this and I’m like, why? If someone wants to explain Twitter to me and why I should actually be on it, go for it. But you see stuff like this and you’re like 41,000 likes. And I’m like, no, I’m good. Like this is just someone’s mind vomit and two a tweet. But all right, this one should be good exchange I’m currently having with my landlord. So this is a text exchange and he says, “The hot water is broken.” Landlord said, “How?” Next one says, “Can you send me some photos?”

Eric Worral: (09:55)
The person sends a photo back of a faucet on. So it’s like the kitchen faucet and then it says, “It looks like this but it’s not hot.” Oh man, that’s fantastic. I love that. So some of these I think are pretty funny cause like a lot of the homes, the landlord tenant relationship I feel like is pretty ridiculous. And that a landlord is a little too harsh, a little bit too pessimistic on tenants. And the same is true of tenants to landlords because it’s so easy to vilify the other side. But you know, tweets like this kind of bring the humanity back to it where you just see a renter with a funny, funny a picture right there of just a faucet running and saying it looks like this, but it’s not hot. Oh man, that’s great. Ah, there’s a few others that I didn’t get to probably cause I either didn’t understand them cause they had acronyms in them.

Eric Worral: (10:46)
Again, going back to that theme of me being too old today one of them had Kim Kardashian’s house on it and I was like, I don’t even know what they’re getting at. So I’m going to skip that one. But if you wanna check it out, I’ll have a link to the BuzzFeed article that sourcing 15 of the best tweets about your landlord. I figured you guys would find it funny. So and again definitely check it out because I think the last one’s worth it just to see that picture of Watson. Oh, that’s fantastic. All right, guys, I hope you’re having a great week and I look forward to catching up with you next week. All right. Take care.

#298 – 15 Ridiculous Renter Tweets

Can you do us a solid?

Resources Mentioned on this Episode:

Show Transcription: