[tptacek]

I think your lawyer is not good at their job. It's likely if you took your landlord to court, it'd take 12-18 months (during which you'd do nothing and incur minimal expenses waiting on the court calendar), and then, before you got to trial, your landlord would offer to settle for 50%.

The case itself, hit or miss, but 50% > 0%.

My big lesson from taking landlords to court is that the security deposit is a negotiation.

[HarryHirsch]

No, the law is not good at its job. This is in a small college town, it's a large property administration company that looks after ~ 100 investment properties. From what I hear, they habitually do not return the deposit. This shouldn't happen.

How much are you willing to bet? The demand letter is in the mail, if the money doesn't show up next Friday the matter will end up at the qadi's.

[tptacek]

All landlords habitually don't return deposits. I have rented cheap apartments and expensive apartments and houses and vacation rentals, in college towns (Ann Arbor) and all over Chicago and San Francisco --- all places with good tenants unions. In SF, I paid up front my whole year's rent. I have never, ever had a landlord return a security deposit. Not once.

Landlords expect you to come at them for the deposit. If you don't, it's a 13th month rent. The serious renters just treat the deposit as their 12th month rent, but if you didn't do that, or care about your reference, you sue for it.

IANAL let alone your L, but at this point, in my 42nd year of life, if I don't get my security deposit back, I drop a buck fifty and put a suit in process, fully expecting the landlord to whine at me and then start the actual negotiation.

[runako]

Wait is this really a thing?

I've rented in 5 cities across the US. I have never once had to even ask for my security deposit to be returned. It's just assumed that I would get it back, and I do.

In the cities where I've lived, I've never heard of anyone not getting their security deposit back. I honestly had no idea we were so lucky!

[FireBeyond]

Really. I have busted my apartment complex having "pre-written" the move out report, complete with thousands of dollars of cleaning "required", before we had the inspection. They just made the mistake of leaving it on the PM's desk in sight of me.

[tptacek]

It is really a thing. You've been super lucky. After my first apartment, we started hiring cleaning services to do a pre-move-out clean, which, in retrospect, was pretty stupid, because the condition of the apartment's got nothing to do with anything.

[rleigh]

It is in most of the UK rental agreements I've had. If they have to hire a cleaning service to clean it up, they recover the cost from your deposit. You're supposed to leave it in the good condition it was when you moved in.

[tptacek]

Sorry, I can't speak to the UK, just the US.

[thrower123]

As somebody who is a landlord, albeit far from the bay area, I've never seen any tenant that expected the security deposit back. Usually, they break the lease before the lease terms are up, and want to have the security deposit applied as last month's rent. I've had nondestructive tenants and am a generally over-nice guy, so I usually go with it...

[tptacek]

I rented a house for a week in Michigan this summer --- the whole rent was paid up front --- and the landlord illegally retained a substantial portion of the security deposit. They have the money. Why would they ever give it back if they didn't have to?

[thrower123]

I'm sure there are scummy ones that do that. The other shoe is that landlords have to deal with the shifty end of people a lot of the time. When I bought my current rental, the previous owner went to great lengths to educate me on what could be done with non-paying tenants and eviction procedures; it seemed that knowledge was hard earned.

[rleigh]

This got so prevalent in England, that the law was changed UK-wide to require all deposits to go into a third-party deposit scheme so that the landlords didn't have possession of it themselves. Any repairs need to be justified and it can be contested. It is a drastic step to take, but when a significant minority of landlords were abusing their privilege, it was I think a reasonable solution.