Other Posts by Hapless Investor

• You can't always get what you want,
• Just when you though it was safe to go back in the water...
• Drying out
• It never rains but it pours
• The hand that rocks the cradle
• Career advice for the uninitiated.
• When the going gets tough...
• Would you Adam & Eve it?
• Reality Bites
• Buy two get one fee!
• The withdrawal method
• Home coming
• A tale of two cities
• Manchester and The CPO
• The rise of the text sick note, and the email rent avoidance excuse.
• The best laid plans of Mice and Men - and slugs named Nigel
• The cost of property developing
• Mancunian madness
• The story so far

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Be careful what you wish for 'cos you just might get it

By Hapless Investor

Now that the nights are drawing in we were doing our basic checks (boiler broken in Flat 1 - check) and noticed the exterior lights needed replacing. Calling in the electrician to get new floodlights fitted (enough to deter the homeless and drug addled not quite enough to encourage Boeing 747s to land in the front garden), I arrived at the flats to find someone had been there before me. Someone with a grudge against the downstairs tenant. For there on his front doorstep, over flowing onto the kickboard of the door itself, was a humungous pile of excrement. The "modern art" had been lovingly crafted and had clearly been done by a humanoid with a love of bran and persistence. Granted my medical knowledge only extends to 15 series of ER but unless the person had serious dietary issues they had actually come back on 3 occasions to ensure they had done everything that they needed to do.

Now you might well ask, WTF? Or to those less familiar with text speak Why?! Why would you do that?! What on Earth possesses someone to want to do that?

And so begins the saga of the downstairs tenant.

Dawg moved into the flat with, shall we say, some issues.

A former award winning body builder who wrecked his lungs with steroid abuse, Dawg was looking for a new start. He was clean but with diminished oxygen intake he was limited in his work options and was currently on housing benefit but looking to top up through part time restaurant work. This had been approved by the DHS and meant that he could pay the majority of the rent through his benefit and top up with his wages - and because he had a history of drug abuse he was able to get his housing benefit signed directly across to us. So far so good.

He wasn't able to provide a deposit (despite driving a Porsche) but he qualified for the council's new Deposit Bond Scheme. Not quite a deposit it acts as a "promise". The tenant promises that they will do nothing bad to the flat but if they do the council promises that they will pay up to £300 to rectify that damage. The tenant then promises to make an effort to pay into a savings scheme when they can, that can then be accessed by the council to cover that £300 if necessary. The savings scheme is voluntary however, and when Dawg signed his Deposit Scheme Agreement you could see how much he intended volunteering.

Things seemed to be going fine, assuming that you accept that he flooded the flat twice, binned our furniture and repainted the flat without permission (bathroom is now fuchsia pink) and failed to pay any of the top up rent. But we were still getting the main housing benefit cheque and was it worth cutting off our noses to spite our face? We were receiving 90% of the rent, and if we kicked him out we may have to go back to having an empty flat for a couple of months until we found new tenants. And although we hadn't agreed to the paint job, for the most part it was done well and he'd replaced our basic rental furniture with rather expensive stuff of his own. All in all he looked like he wanted the flat long term and was prepared to take care of it.

So we hid our niggling doubts: the fact that he would never meet us at the flat; that the curtains were never opened; that there were always a continuous procession of visitors to the flat...

As he opened his door this morning (ok afternoon - we seem to only have nocturnal tenants) "oh crap" was doubly apt.

I asked who he had upset and he answered that although he could think of no one he was the last bastion of defence between the local ne're do wells and outright anarchy. He stopped a group of local kids smashing up light bulbs in the alleyway and the Police had cautioned him. He had told a vagrant not to sleep in his doorway and found an upturned flowerpot on his step the next day. And now this.

This wasn't just maltreatment this was persecution. He was a good guy in a hard world being harassed because he stood up to neighbourhood oppression. I mean... the other day he was actually burgled. Just ask the police.

What? Hang on a second, someone was in the flat? Yeah they took everything. His laptop, TV, microwave (what? my microwave?), fridge freezer (again, my fridge freezer?), they tried to take the oven (that's built in!) and the sofas.

Why didn't you tell me this?

Oh...yeah...well I thought the police would tell you.

So they took my washing machine, fridge freezer...

Yeah but they took MY sofas! (cue righteous indignation)

According to Dawg, he virtually never leaves the flat (since his job had disappeared) and so someone must have been watching him. They must have known that he had a physiotherapy appointment, because when he left the flat at 11 the items were there and when he came back at 5 everything was gone.

I used to work at a cinema and every week I would come up with a new project that involved some strange piece of equipment being hauled up and down the street from my house to the cinema, and it did get to the point where my neighbours didn't bat an eyelid at a 12' tall Tyrannosaurus Rex making its way down the hill. But I refuse to believe that no one noticed someone stripping his flat down.

But fortunately Dawg had an answer for this as well. Apparently on the day that the items went someone was moving into a different flat in the courtyard and all the neighbours thought that the items must belong to them.

On my way out, armed with the crime reference number, and avoiding the do-do on the doorstep I checked the door for signs of forced entry (to go with my medical knowledge I also have several series of CSI under my belt so I was more than qualified). Zip, Zero, Nothing.

I spoke with the neighbours, who although having seen no furniture movement (either in nor out) did have several eyebrow raising tales to regale me with.  There was the one about the people trying to kick the door in at 2 in the morning, followed by the chase down the street with the iron bar, followed by the one where the elderly lady explained that the two big men who often came with the smaller man in the very posh car were actually enforcers for the drug dealer (she seemed extraordinarily proud that she knew this - apparently her grandson had explained it all to her).

But it was the police who were the most enlightening. Although due to data protection they weren't able to give me any real details the highly elaborate form of eyebrow raising Morse code and slow head nodding I was told that although there was a crime reference number it didn't necessarily mean that they believed that a crime had been committed and that they wouldn't be investigating. Either that or Timmy is trapped down the mine.

So ladies and gents, the decision is yours. Do we have a nefarious tenant who has turned our flat into a den of iniquity and should be removed before any more of his dodgy dealings backfire? Or is Dawg a good guy with a whole heap of bad luck? Bad luck that's affecting me. Well the CCTV is going up next week. Big Brother may be watching but is there anything to actually see?

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