setquk

(if you want to burn all your money on a lawyer that is)

It's honestly best to cut your losses and walk away.

Unlikely. There was some intelligence behind it. He was aware the locks had been changed as I explained his in an SMS so I did what he asked explicitly. Secondly I could apologise for the mistake of leaving the wrong keys inside the property. As for the marmite, some kid did a prank! Ooops. Based on the police's previous attitude, would they likely come out for a bit of marmite in a letterbox.

The put the keys through the letterbox thing was actually a masterpiece of idiocy on his part which I refrained from mentioning to him.

Hahaha that's never a good thing :)

Totally agree. Good to hear this level of enforcement is taking place.

I certainly understand how bad it can get for landlords. I'm not excusing any bad tenants here for sure. I will at least read the synopsis for that film :)

I did. See one of my other comments.

I just asked my other half how she was feeling about it after 16 years and she laughed so clearly petty justice has a lasting effect.

I think the person in question would be in vastly larger amounts of trouble for even raising his head above the cesspool he floated in for a moment. It would be like a chase from the Benny Hill show with local housing enforcement, HMRC, the police and a trail of angry and abused tenants.

The best move is making the game worthless so there are no winners. Shit on the board. It's a stalemate then.

It's not quite that straightforward here in the UK. Well it is but the other way. The landlord has no right to enter a property outright. The property is for exclusive enjoyment by the tenant according to law. They can give 24 hours' notice and enter to do repairs etc but you can refuse that outright and they have no rights beyond that without taking you to court.

If they turn up unannounced this is actually harassment under UK law.

We had some rather unpleasant slum landlords between the 1950s and 1970s which caused a few laws to be introduced. Unfortunately the nature of being a landlord seems to attract certain people who find new and creative ways to be dicks. Not the majority of landlords I will say who are mostly pretty good, but enough to cause problems.

Sometimes it is not about personal gain but making sure that any unfair gains are worthless.

We'll agree to disagree on that. After 22 years of putting up with marmite in the house I still don't like it ;)

Yeah that's roughly what happened here. Although I knew he was likely in there because he parked his motorbike outside.

He was actually in my 2 year old daughter's bedroom when I opened the door. I heard him leave it and come down the stairs.

Small argument ensued and he sent me an SMS right there on his phone saying that he was coming to do an inspection on date X which was that day. Then said "oh sorry must have been delayed" with a smirk on his face, got back on his motorbike and rode off.

Actually it's not quite that easy. If you think anyone even gives a crap about this sort of stuff then you're mistaken. Even today.

Firstly, I spoke to the police and they said they couldn't do anything because I likely couldn't prove he was snooping and couldn't prove that it wasn't against the terms and it wouldn't be worthy of their time investigating it and it was probably a civil or contractual issue. "go see a solicitor". Which I couldn't afford.

Secondly, local housing officer was contacted and I was asked to attend the local council about it and I sat there for 4 hours and was told to go home because they had run out of time. I got a letter apologising and attempts to get a second appointment were fruitless.

This was option three.

This was one of the points in my life I realised there is no magical state run safety blanket who will protect you from dickheads.

I thought I went too far for a few years to be honest. Now I realise that no protection whatsoever was afforded to any private tenants back then other than taking the landlord to court which was expensive, time consuming, resulted in unpaid days off work and generally a waste of time. The moral high ground doesn't necessarily drive the point home either.

Now we have a deposit scheme in the UK which stops landlords doing this because the deposit is held in trust. The landlord has to prove it. Therefore there's escrow and a third party involved. Not being in this scheme is illegal and results in fines that go directly to the tenant as well.

This action is not necessary now, but changing the locks still is because it's your personal space and security and you genuinely don't know who has access to that unless you do it. Could even be the previous tenants with key copies.

Nothing at all. Paid on time every time and basically decorated the place. Went on the market for £100/month more the moment the tenancy expired and he evicted us.

The guy ran umbrella companies to hide his assets and address and to rip people off, got caught going through our stuff.

He’s still a landlord and has been the director of about 12 companies now in the last 20 years all dissolved.

Who’s the bad one? Hmm

Edit: also the place we had after that I rented for 11 years with no problems direct from landlord and they were excellent and we were excellent back.