Apartmentratings.com: the bane of my existence. It sounds like a good idea: a website where renters can rate apartment complexes/landlords on everything from maintenance service to amenities. Presumably, the original intention was to create an open forum to discuss the pros and cons of living in certain places. Ideally, it would be a way to keep people from making poor renting decisions and to put slumlords on notice, so to speak. But unfortunately NO ONE regulates this site. It costs nothing to post (You can even do so anonymously if you wish.) and is almost impossible to have comments removed. So, someone could post blatantly ridiculous lies such as, "My neighbor had a pet monkey that busted out my window and my landlord did nothing about it!" and conceivably I as the landlord in question could not have it removed.
Now, you can pay to have the right to post as a verified property owner/community manager, but how is that fair? I have to pay to defend myself against inane posts such as, "Thier cheats! They just take you money and donn't care about nobody!!!!" while any schizoid with an axe to grind can post his/her hucked-on-foniks-werked-fur-mee bullcrap? How democratic.
And where, oh where is the website for the discerning landlord? The site that will let you know that the guy who just filled out an application plans to never clean his bathroom for the next 12 months? Or that the nice couple to whom you just showed that one-bedroom are amateur taxidermists who will be stuffing rats with sand in their newly-carpeted living room? The answer, of course, is that there is no such website. Because that would be considered libel and therefore *gasp* illegal.
I had a tenant who broke his toilet, did not report the problem, and continued using it for a year. The toilet had to be removed by a biohazard team after he moved out. I had another tenant whose bathroom upon move-out was covered in hair clippings and an unidentifiable orange substance; it looked like someone with a penchant for munching Cheetos(and who also happened to be running a very profitable barber shop) had vomited everywhere. And it smelled like it too. Then there was the guy who filled his entire garage with Diet Coke cans full of urine. Or the man who collected dog feces in bags and kept them in a styrofoam container on his patio. Or the man who wanted to move out of his apartment because he was convinced the gay couple that lived above him would "burrow through his closet and get him." But my absolute favorite has to be the older couple who kept their armless grandson in a closet in their bedroom. (You read right - the word was armless.)
So, yeah, I'd like a website too. And fie on those grammatically-disinclined rejects who have the freedom to lie willy-nilly on the intarwebs. I just wanna know if you plan on hollowing out your oven and turning it into a NASCAR diorama, okay?
