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peppermint_snowwolf t1_jbend5k wrote

Reply to comment by LakeEffectSnow in Apartment Hunting - Water/Sewer Budget by TheOnlyThingAvailabl

Ok well you win but I vehemently disagree and in all my own years as a landlord I never paid interest on security deposits. Half the time they were lucky to get any deposits back at all because some people don’t have any respect.

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LakeEffectSnow t1_jbeuj96 wrote

Well probably because it rarely comes up. Most landlords and tenants are like you, and ignore/are ignorant of that statute. Most of the time the money owed the tenant isn't enough for it to be worth suing your LL over. The specific circumstances of below don't happen very often:

- tenant leasing for long enough term for interest to compound enough to be worth the time to recover.

- tenant simultaneously taking care of unit properly the whole time

- a LL engaging in behaviors that make said long-term tenant angry enough to want to recover these funds.

So in our case, we used ours deposit interest as leverage over the LL to ensure he returned our full security deposit fairly without having to sue - he tried to keep the full security deposit to repaint an entire unit after 8 years of continuous tenancy with zero updates.

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peppermint_snowwolf t1_jbex7wr wrote

My father paid interest on the difference over the monthly amount. As specifically stated in what you referenced. But thank you for calling me ignorant.

I’m not actually surprised that, even though the rule seems to clearly state the opposite of what you said, that courts may find in favor of the tenant, because in my experience, the tenant had far more rights than the landlord. And my tenants had no compunction with doing thousands of dollars of damage to my house and then moving out. In fact, I stopped renting, because of so many bad experiences with tenants. The money just isn’t worth it.

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