Complaint Review: John & Amy Hart

John & Amy Hart of Smiths Station, Alabama are not someone you want to rent from. They overcharge for the type of property they are renting (older mobile homes). They DO NOT respond to requests for maintenance, regardless to whether or not it is causing the rental to be unsafe and uninhabitable (by definition of the Alabama Landlord Tenant Act). They try to act like they are your friend one month, and then threaten to have you evicted the next.

My husband and I rented from them for just short of 6 months, there was never a written lease agreement, we had clogged plumbing from the time we moved all the way up until 2 weeks before moving out. We could not take showers, wash clothes, or flush toilets for the last 2 weeks we were there while moving. They illegally turned the water off to the rental once they found out we were moving out.

The electricity to the unit was not usable in the kitchen, living room, spare bedroom, and spare bath during the last 2 months due to a blown breaker, that they promised to fix 2 days after reporting it to them, they never did, but would not allow us to "fix and deduct" as allowed by state law.

The would not fix a sewage backup that was flooding the side yard, nor would they fix the plumbing so that the mobile home would quit flooding everytime we washed clothes prior to the last 2 weeks we were there.

I did report them to the Fair Housing Authority, and to the city for causing an unsafe and uninhabitable environment while we lived there.

Upon moving out, I mailed them a letter that pointed out all the problems, and quoted the sections of the Alabama Landlord Tenant Act that they were in violation of. They refused to give a refund of our deposit and claimed that the problems were caused by our children. Our children are very very young and they in no way caused the problems with the plumbing that existed when we first moved in, or the problems through out our stay in "hell".

I feel that a lot of the problems we encountered with them were because of us having children and them not wanting tenants with children. They knew when we rented the unit that we had children and should have made it clear then that they prefered not to rent to families. The worst part of it was they gave our children a christmas present that was something they could play with outside, while we were moving out they "stole" the gift out of the yard one night while we were sleeping.

To top it all off, before we had all of our belongings moved from the unit, they blocked the drive way so we could not get in the yard to finish packing and moving, so needless to say, they have about $600 of brand new carpeting that we had purchased as a birthday gift for my husbands mother to go in her house that was in the spare bedroom when they blocked the driveway.

Julie
Phenix City, Alabama
U.S.A.