Landlord shows $10K of damage done by tenants in just 6 months

Landlords get a lot of flak for being unreasonable, hard to get a ahold of, and exploitative. And many of them are! But we don't often acknowledge that landlords are, in fact, taking a risk when they rent their property out to you. They often have good reason to require extensive background checks, reference checks, and expensive security deposits.  

When most people rent an apartment, they treat it like a home, sure, and they also keep it relatively clean and livable. Occasionally, though, someone super destructive will cause thousands of dollars in damage. That's what happened to this landlord, Jerry Ciro Ucci, who took to Facebook to share the reason he charges so much for rent and security deposits. Warning: Some of these photos are really gross.

"People wonder why rents and security deposits are high, or why property managers and landlords require such detailed background and reference checks, well folks, this is a prime example of those reasons," Jerry writes in a now-viral Facebook post. 

"I rented this apartment to a family for a short-term six-month lease, they passed the job and reference checks, I got the initial month's rent and security deposit and then the nightmare began..." 

"By the time I got them out," Jerry writes, "they had caused upwards of 10k in damages, between that and the back rent owed, we're out 15k in six months." This is clearly a nightmare. I learned from the individual photo captions that the pellets below seem to be... rabbit feces. So so gross. 

"They left animals locked in bedrooms urinating for days on end to the point where urine was leaking through the ceiling of the business below them," Jerry writes. "Every room has either animal or human poop smeared on floors, shelves, inside cupboards and walls!"  

Well, this is beyond horrifying. Obviously, this is not the norm, but this is a risk landlords take when they rent out their houses. This family passed all the checks and paid everything they needed to up front, so there was absolutely no reason to suspect they wouldn't continue to pay rent or trash the place so completely. 

In addition to the garbage everywhere, the feces smeared on walls and floors, and the pet urine soaking into the floors, there was more. Jerry writes, "Every single wall has been colored on from children running rampant, the amount of flies / fruit flies in this apartment would rival any transfer station, and the smell is so bad I don't know if we will ever be able to get rid of it!" 

I feel like I can smell the apartment through the pictures, and it's not a good smell. Jerry concludes his post by writing, "I would normally never post something like this, but I just want to make people aware of what landlords go through when they try and provide a nice home for people to live in. 

"Most of the time our tenants are great! But it's these few disgusting people who ruin it for everyone else!" 

Clearly, this family had no regard for the fact that they were borrowing this space, that it didn't belong to them. Additionally, they clearly mistreated their pets and created an unsafe environment for their children. That's a whole separate issue. 

Jerry's post has tens of thousands of reactions and shares and hundreds of sympathetic comments. Most people who aren't landlords don't ever really think about the risk landlords assume when they rent apartments to strangers.  

But renting is a two-way street, and as much as renters expect their landlords to be reasonable people, landlords also sometimes have nightmare tenants who completely trash their apartments and make it harder for them to trust the people they rent to.  

Editor's Note: The article was originally published in February 2020. It has since been updated.