Originally posted by @Joe Splitrock:
@Amie D. paint in rental properties will last 5-7 years. That is considered the useful life. Even if you determine the tenant is to blame for it needing to be painted prematurely, you can't charge 100% of the cost. This is true of any depreciable item (carpet, appliances, etc). You have to establish the lifespan of the item, then prorate. Let's say you determine wall paint should last 10 years, then the tenant is responsible for 5/10 of the cost or 50%. I would expect a rental property to require repainting after a 5+ year tenant, touch up for anything less than that. As far as the rooms they painted without permission, I would charge them for repainting but only the prorated amount of remaining life.
The fact that you have a PM in the middle stating it is common wear and tear, hurts your position greatly. A third party is saying it is acceptable wear, so now if you go to court it is your tenant and the PM against you. Your PM is not helping here as you already know, which is why you fired them.
I will disagree with your statement that the PM "figure it's easier to get me to pay for it than take the previous tenants to court." You are paying for this either way. Even if they take the tenant to court, you still need to pay the bill while you try to recoup the money. In most PM agreements, the PM gets reimbursed for time in court, so it could cost you more chasing money you will never get.
Repainting rooms between tenants is an expense/maintenance cost not a capitalized depreciable asset, if you can show me differently I’d be interested in seeing that for future reference. This also wasn’t that we just found they had painted. They specifically asked the PM for those colors in those rooms, and we said No. Especially since most were dark and would take more paint to recover back to neutral. I’ve got that all documented. As I stated, the rooms they didn’t paint they had poorly filled in holes everywhere, that will need to be sanded and fixed.
I spoke to the owner of the company and he was apologetic and said he would go over there himself to do the inspection, as he thought that I was simply moving on to the new manager. I’m not sure why that would matter, why do a slipshod job in any case.
The reason I said that the pm is getting me to pay for the paint is it seems suspicious that they would charge the current tenants for cleaning and removal of the items they left up to almost their entire deposit and then the rest billed to me, done by their maintenance company of course. Also almost twenty bad reviews online by former tenants and many had mentioned this using the deposit for cleaning fees similarly. So I dunno, maybe they just do it that way for everyone but they get paid in the end either way.
I doubt I will do more than bill the tenants for what they would need to pay beyond their deposit. Even if I won in small claims it would probably be difficult to reclaim the funds in the end. I’m getting bids for the work so at least it lowers my bill. The property is sitting vacant while this is all going on as well.
I’m half tempted to go there and paint it and fix the floors myself just to get this done finally lol.
