QUESTION
Who is responsible for property water damage
Asked on Jan 27th, 2021 on Landlord and Tenant Law - Florida
More details to this question:
Just got my lease on the 13th of January. My family and I stayed our first night on the 24th of January. Two nights we had water overflowing from the master bedroom toilet and the water drained from the bathroom to somewhere else. We noticed half our bedroom was in water. The room we are in was converted from a garage to a room. We heard that the previous tenant was throwing baby wipes in the toilet. I did a maintenance work order and they sent out a maintenance guy. He did what he could do and he knew about the problem because they had to send rotor rooter out because of the previous tenant. They had to send rotor rooter out to take care the problem again. In all that we lost some clothing, two brand new area room rugs, and a ps4. I reached out to management and they apologize and told me to use my renter insurance. In this case this was not a natural cause but this was already their problem they thought they fixed.
1 ANSWER
Consumer Debt Collector Harassment & Abuse Attorney serving Tampa, FL
Partner at
Tischhauser Law Group
2 Awards
Unless you have the PM admitting that this was "thier fault" and something "they thought they had fixed" the starting point is going to be its your responsibility if you were there for two nights before this happened or it happens after you take possession. That doesn't mean you did anything wrong, BUT, that you claim "you heard" the prior tenant put baby wipes down the drain is not useful. Typically the plumber might have a better idea of the problem if there was a clog. Equally, something is wrong with the volume of water you describe as a clogged toilet will only dump 2 gallons of water onto the floor. Your starting point is a renters insurance claim. A claim against the LL is going to be expensive and not financially productive if they dispute it.
Answered on Feb 09th, 2021 at 12:22 PM
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