This is the kind of reason why I never get anything done in the evenings lately >_<

[rallamajoop]

Yesterday, I checked the mailbox to find a letter from the real estate agent to say we hadn't been paying our rent. More exactly, it was phrased to say we were being evicted and had until the 30th to clear out, but with a clause down the bottom to add that we could still get away with staying there if we paid up within the next seven days.

AAAAHHHHHHHH WHAT!?!?!?!

Cue a panicked evening of running around madly, checking the online bank records for every payment I'd made in the last two months, then two phone calls to two different departments of the bank to make absolutely sure everything had gone through. Everything had. We took some solace in the knowledge that we could see no conceivable way whatever'd gone wrong was our fault, but the letter was obviously just a form letter with a signature at the bottom, so there were no actual details we could use to confirm. By that time, of course, it was far too late to phone the estate agency itself, so everything else had to be put off until tomorrow.

This morning, armed with as much paperwork as I could find to prove our case, I phoned them up. As soon as I told the lady who answered the phone who I was and why I was calling, she told me that we should be getting a letter of apology in the mail today. Apparently - much as we'd been guessing-slash-hoping - it was all due to a computer glitch at their end which hadn't recorded some of the dates correctly, and they were very sorry for all the trouble.

I could really do without any more of this stuff happening around here for a week or two, kthx. -_-

Comments

[j3ffu.livejournal.com]

That is TERRIBLE.
The least they could have done is to PHONE YOU UP instead of taking their sweet ass time to get a letter together to apologise and actually say you haven't been evicted.
THEN to send you an apology letter after you had been informed to ignore the letter.

[ex-seventee.livejournal.com]

Holy schiess! That's happened to us a few times but they were only a PAY YOUR RENT NOW messages, not an EVICTED!!1 message. Brr.

Computers are stupid and people would be foolish to rely solely on them for finding and correcting mistakes. (This is a lesson I still need to learn at work myself :P)

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

I think I'm going to agree with you very hard just as soon as I get over the mad relief that we're not being evicted, aren't going to have a permanent black mark against our names for non-rent payment, and aren't going to have to run down there and shell out a week's worth of extra cash. And that it genuinely wasn't our fault. We're all still so new to this renting stuff that it was a long time before I even let myself consider that this had come from their end and wasn't a result of us screwing something up.

One phone call sure would have gone a long way to preventing all this stress. They've got both Lisa and Shasta's mobile numbers, but as far as I know neither of them have had so much as a text message about it.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

No kidding. I got the impression that the EVICTED! notice basically is this agency's standard way of saying PAY YOUR RENT NOW in a manner which will scare you into paying it extra fast, particularly since the line about being able to fix things by paying up within a week had been helpfully highlighted for us down the bottom. If so, they get full marks for the scare factor, but about negative one million for manual double checking and tact.

[j3ffu.livejournal.com]

Well, to me, that is just a complete lack of professionalism. If I had to wait for alot of letters to be signed off to confirm things, I could add weeks and months to the processes in my job that could just be just as easily done by a single phone call.
Mailing people is nice, but it was inappropriate in this case. Hell, they didn't even need to mail, just give people a call and it would've been quicker and more efficient.
Thankfully you called them up and sorted it all out :)

[aphelion-orion.livejournal.com]

Wait, what?! o____O

Man. I'm sorry you had such a shock, that must have been terrible. *hugs* But seriously, what is it with all this "fire first, ask questions later" business that's been going around lately? I seem to recall days when people would bother inquiring before threatening and/or simply terminating contracts/evicting people from homes/filing lawsuits. Or maybe I'm just getting old, at twenty-three. *facepalm*

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction too. (I had stuff I was going to do with those couple of hours I lost running around madly and phoning banks and panicking! I do not have enough free hours in the week to waste it like this! *gnaws fingernails*)

The lady we spoke to when we signed the lease did make it very clear they considered paying the rent on time to be Serious Business and being late with it more than once or twice would be grounds for eviction, and if, say, a bank transfer went through a couple of days late or something it would be considered Our Fault for not paying well in advance. Sounds like by their standards, sending us an eviction letter with a highlighted clause at the bottom telling us we can get out of getting evicted by paying up quickly is their notion of a polite first warning. *insert eyeroll here* But seriously, if they're going to be that trigger happy, they could at least make sure their computer system works a little more reliably than this.

[thano.livejournal.com]

Good. You NEVER want that happening to you for real. D8 I'm having unpleasant flashbacks~~~

[aphelion-orion.livejournal.com]

*hugs* And it's so hard to calm down, too. If you want to vent or something, you know where to find me. ♥

Well, yeah, but still. Aren't there, like, warning letters for this sort of thing? At least, here there are, most of the time. Certainly in serious matters like housing... And those rules for bank transfers not going through in time sound bordering on illegal. Isn't there a system that says as long as you can prove you paid/the money was withdrawn from your account by date X, then it's perfectly valid and in time?

I know you just had a huge scare, but you still might want to consider drafting up a letter of complaint. Most likely, it won't do much good, but I think they should know that scaring their customers like this is NOT appreciated. I'd hate to see what their policies do to people with fragile nerves...

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

I'm good, really. ^^; When I make that phone call, I was expecting to have to dig out all our rent receipts and drive over there with print outs from my bank account and basically do the whole song and dance to prove we weren't in the wrong *if I was lucky*. Having the first person I spoke to immediately admit the error was such a huge relief that I'm a lot less ragey about this than I would be otherwise.

From talking to other people about it, it sounds like it varies a lot how this stuff is handled from agency to agency. The rental market in this city is so insane lately that it's a regular news item, so I guess they can pretty much set whatever terms they like, and being late with the rent more than a couple of times is apparently enough for eviction even if you do pay up late with these people. It'll all be there in the paperwork we had to sign just to get the house, I'm sure. -_-

And those rules for bank transfers not going through in time sound bordering on illegal. Isn't there a system that says as long as you can prove you paid/the money was withdrawn from your account by date X, then it's perfectly valid and in time?

I'd hope if you had paid a week in advance and the bank had stuffed up big time then you might have some leeway, since that's circumstances way beyond your control. The main point is that it's accepted that most transfers take two or three days to clear, so you're expected to pay at least that much time in advance to allow for it. Pretty strict, but at least they were up front about it.

I don't think there's much point complaining, since they did make it clear how seriously they took the whole rent thing when we signed the lease, and they did apologise afterwards. Our main beef with them is that after they found the error they didn't immediately phone us to explain. They've got two different contact numbers they can reach us on, and making us go through all this stress while we waited for snail mail to reach us was not professional of them at all.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

I can tell you, even though we know none of this was our fault I'm going to be extra paranoid about double checking all our payments and receipts for a good while after this. (And you have my real sympathy for having anything like this to flashback to.)

[thano.livejournal.com]

8Db Thaaaaaat's generally the best thing to do. Also, make sure everyone in the family/household knows about the entire financial situation, or else you'll have one person secretly hiding the mortgage payment until they can't tell anyone that they can't and haven't been actually been paying it aslkdjf;alskjdf;lasjkdfasd;flkj okay sorry it still makes me angry D8

[velithya]

oh jeez :O I'm really glad it was all an error. Nice of them to not even give you a phone call and warn you about the error so you didn't get a heart attack or anything :(

[iambickilometer.livejournal.com]

Augh. I'm glad it turned out to be a false alarm, but yeesh. Scary.

But that icon. It. Is. Beautiful. That was totally the best moment of Season Two. Well. Yes, it was.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

Ah, one of those housemate horror stories, I only wish there weren't so many of them around out there. >< All the more reason for me to be glad the people I'm staying with are family or practically family, and (hopefully) trustworthy enough not to give each other that kind of nasty surprise. So far though, the one who knows about the whole financial situation has been me, and I only wish I could convince the other two to take a bit more interest.

[thano.livejournal.com]

... Yeah, even if it's family. um iiiit was sort of my step-dad who screwed shit up BUT YEAH just be careful. =D