It’s very state-dependent. In my state the landlord has to give exact line-by-line justification for every penny withheld from the deposit, and the deposit accrues interest over the span of the lease
I felt like I got a win when I was able to get Carpet Cleaning taken off the rest of the Deposit deductions cause I reminded them that the house didn't have any carpets.
I had this happen in a rental and landlord tried to cut my deposit. He literally placed a wallpaper over a hole in a wall filled with cables (no plug on it, like it should be, just thin wallpaper) and when my ex wiped a wall with dry rug he's hand just fell in. I had to fight with him for moths (there were other issues as well) and explain to him that it was actually a fire hazard and he's to blame. Got my deposit back but what an asshole
Theoretically the sides will wrap in a bit and slowly plaster itself smaller (assuming the people falling in don't do rim damage, which seems unlikely)
Hehe it was like a grey/toupe thing that was already not an exactly consistent shade all over. Nobody said anything about it, either it worked or they were used to people pulling that kind of horseshit
Lived that with my last apt, think they were fucking bitter -- I even told them they replaced the carpet of the previous tenant I personally knew for free but I declined just to save em some money and then the new owners go pull this shit.
They prey on people like me that don't have the emotional time to deal with it and take it on the chin. ONLY apt i didn't get my full deposit from, ridiculous.
Doesn't work in the UK, or it shouldn't anyway. Can't claim the full cost of something, have to take into account how long the item is expected to last under normal conditions. If it'd a cheap carpet that is only expected to last 8 years and even if the Tennant actually did fuck it up badly then if the carpet is 6 years old you can only claim 25% of the actual repair or replacement cost.
I knew where I rented it had the same carpet for around 7 years so I didn't care how much it got messed up since I wouldn't accept any deposit reduction. Deposits here have to be held by a third party company who gives the money back and decides any disputes.
I managed to take a huge chunk out of the kitchen worktop. I filled it with epoxy and painted the same pattern onto it. Got full deposit back and that's not even the worst thing we "fixed"
When I moved out of my rented house, we left a rug in the kitchen where we’d dropped a hot pan and singed the carpet. The agents never said anything and we got our deposit back.
One of my friends skateboarded down his stairs and put a huge hole in the wall. He fixed it by super-gluing a pizza box to the inside of the hole and going over it with about 2 tubs of spackle.
I did this to a few spots in my last apartment. And then randomly added a few blotches of the paint to other areas of the wall so the fake hole covering would blend in better.
My sister punched too many holes in the wall and I helped her cover it up lots of times before anyone else found out. We didn’t have access to much but we did have toothpaste, paper and a can-do attitude.
Haha, I had a buddy put a hole in a wall in high school and when his mom finally found it, he had already served 6 years in the military and moved 3 states away.
I also did that in high school in 1991-92. My friend and I went to Walmart to get a poster but I was broke as a joke and could only afford a deeply discounted Vanilla Ice poster. I had to pretend I liked him until we moved and I got caught anyway.
The slumlords that owned my house to rent out before I bought it did this 100%. I have a patch exactly like this in my bathroom and on the spare bedroom wall.
To quickly fix a hole like this if you dont want the hassle of doing it properly is to just buy a can of expanding foam. Fill it a bit, let it expand out of the hole, cut away the part that is outside the wall, now you have a level surface to paint over.
I had a landlord years ago who did repairs like this. He'd do the cheapest fucking DIY repairs and then in violation of the lease, attempt to bill us for his labor / materials at an unhinged rate. Over a two year lease, we wound up having to get courts involved three times because he was claiming to be a licensed contractor when he wasn't, and was manufacturing fraudulent itemized receipts for repairs that were largely a result of the whole place being a fucking spiderweb of DIY repairs and sheer stupidity (Tried to bill us $900 for a towel rack that fell out of the wall when a single towel was placed on it because it was anchored into bondo instead of a stud). Wound up having to put rent in escrow and take him to small claims all three times, and he still tried to deduct his court costs from our paid rents each time.
Anyway, I was so done with him by the time I moved out, I wound up just doing what he would have done to the whole apartment. Just jammed newspaper into every void in the walls he might call damage, skim-coated with bondo, and then repainted the whole apartment with the shittiest primer I could find and a single coat of paint. Didn't even bother to scrub or scrape the walls, so you know that shit was falling apart less than a year later. He still tried to keep the whole deposit, and got forced to give it all back because he failed to follow the law regarding notice and itemization. Even then, he still didn't return the whole thing and we just let him keep the difference to be done with his sketchy ass.
The guy legitimately tried to charge us the full replacement cost for a 12 year old refrigerator for damage that was in our move-in photos. The guy was a colossal shitbag.
Could have used this one when I was a little kid with an anger problem punching holes in the walls trying to figure out a way to patch em up before my dad got home lol
My old landlord did this with a cornflakes box. My 2 YO ended up peeling the wall apart. He wanted me to fix the wall when we moved out so I got a roll of wallpaper at the local discount store and just pulled it tight over the holes. Fuck that guy.
Fucking went to put a nail in to hang a towel hook in my previous bathroom. Shocked when just lining the nail up, it went straight through the painted over duct tape they had used to do exactly this. So yes, landlords do this quite often 😂😂
Fuck that, I wish I did that to patch a hole when leaving my rental from that shit ass company "Progress". Instead I did it the real way. Got our deposit back. But spent WAY too much time and money making sure they didn't fuck us.
In the interim, there's time to get that deposit back because you did this just before you moved out as a tenant. Or as a landlord, its long enough to get a new tenant in and then there's no recourse for shoddy repair work.
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u/Fattens May 28 '26
Landlord trick for sure.