By Robert Griswold
Question: My tenant recently moved out at the end of his lease. I made a quick walkthrough of the rental unit and things seemed to be fine so I immediately returned their entire security deposit.A week later when I went through the unit more carefully, I found there were several costly items (oven, garbage disposal and dishwasher) that were broken by the tenant's negligence. Can I recover the cost of repairing these items? If so, how?
Property manager Griswold replies:
You were a little quick on the deposit return, as virtually all states allow from two weeks to 30 days to provide an accounting and return of any balance of the security deposit.
I believe that you can still sue the tenant in small claims court for the undiscovered damages, but it will be an uphill battle. The judge will have to be satisfied that a reasonable person could not have discovered these latent defects without a close inspection. If the judge believes you, you will be able to recover the repair and replacement expenses to the oven, garbage disposal, and dishwasher.
Next time, make sure you check out these appliances when doing the walk-through, and take your time on returning the security deposit.
Tenants' attorney Kellman replies:
The law gives a landlord certain benefits in the deduction of deposit monies for lawful purposes. However, these benefits disappear with too much time. If the tenant did the damage, you should have been able to detect it rather quickly, but certainly within three weeks of getting the property back. It only takes one day to turn on appliances to check them out. Thus, coming up one or two months later with these claims of tenant damage is possible but will not likely be accepted by a court.
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