Leaking basement, absent landlord.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m currently renting a house. It’s by no means a great house, but the location is fantastic- we’re out in the country, on two acres, but only about ten minutes from my office. We’re in kind of a weird tenant situation- we’ve never actually met, or directly spoken to, our landlord. Our neighbor has been taking care of the place for the owner, who now lives in another state. We send the rent to the owner, but our neighbor’s been the one to handle repairs and such.

Only problem is, my neighbor has become completely unresponsive. Messages left on her phone and her email have gone unanswered. She spends a lot of time visiting family in another state, so we don’t even know when she’s home. We’ve had a leaky pipe in the basement for months now- I just keep a bucket underneath it and empty it every few days.

However, the recent rains have presented us with another problem- there’s apparently a leak in the foundation, and we’ve suddenly got a very damp room down there. As in, “completely soaked carpet”. I’ve got a fan running in there now, and a dehumidifier… but it’s still really wet, and I shudder to think how much mold we’re going to have. Also, the humidifier is really heating up the basement- and that’s where we have our living room, so we spend a lot of time down there.

I’m going to send another letter to the landlord describing the situation, and try to contact our neighbor again… but I’m not really confident that I’ll have any luck getting the cracked foundation fixed. Hell, I don’t know what they’re going to do, if anything.

This situation sucks. As I said, we *love *living here, and we aren’t planning on buying our own place 'til next May, and we really don’t want to spend the time and money on moving into yet another rental house. We obviously can’t ignore the leaks, but I really get the feeling that the landlord and the neighbor are both trying to spend as little money as they possibly can on maintaining the house.

So, yeah- any suggestions?

2

You have a situation that affects habitability and arguably your family’s health.
As a tenant you have certain rights. I don’t know the rules in your state. In my state you could do the following. Notify and record your contacts with the landlord and purported maintenance person. Then go ahead and repair or have the leaks repaired or mitigated in a reasonable way. Deduct the cost from future rent. Mitigation is an important concept here. You, as the person living there, have some responsibility too. In my personal case, I would probably fix the leaky pipe myself as I have the tools and material to do that. I would remove that carpet and throw it in the trash so it will not be a source of mold. Bleach and treat the floor as necessary. Then you can see the floor better and trace the leak. You or a professional may find that the foundation leak is not that difficult to resolve. If it only leaks when it rains, the solution could be as simple as increasing the grade away from the house on the wall having the leak. If water is leaking up from where the wall meets the floor and even in dry weather, you may have a high water table and clogged drain tiles around the perimeter of the dwelling. Technology now employs a new piece of vac equipment that can solve that problem in hours. Knowledge is power and right now all you know is that you have two leaks so you have little power.

3

Have a talk with a lawyer regarding whether your landlord’s unresponsiveness could enable you to subtract the cost of the repairs from the rent without a signed agreement with the landlord. The key words here are obviously “talk with a lawyer.”

4

Rent an extractor (or a carpet cleaning machine) to suck most of the water out of the carpet. Contact a flood restoration company and get some estimates. Let the landlord know you will be withholding rent to pay for the repairs unless the landlord steps up.

5

You should check your rental agreement and the laws in your state. I’m not convinced that the landlord is liable for damage to stuff in your basement–there is tenant’s insurance for that sort of thing, and as any homeowner knows, basements can flood. If the basement has a history of flooding that should have been disclosed when you signed the lease, and the landlord might be liable in that event.

As far as fixing the problem going forward, it might be wise to send a certified letter that you are withholding the rent until someone addresses this issue to your satisfaction. Again, talk to a lawyer or at least get a better source of legal information than SDMB, but non-responsiveness from the landlord should not be an option. In my experience, basement leaks are not always fixable, or a reliable fix can be cost-prohibitive. So you may be negotiating a lower rent or cash payment for your trouble.

6

If you are interested, I have a fantastic cleaning agent that is designed for after-flood clean-up.

It gets into all of the crevices and nooks and crannies and gets rid of the bacteria.