Often LL (landlords) will try to bully and bluff their way through an issue. Let’s hear from Board member Angela Garvin on her experience:
I will share this because I was so shocked that about the following legal advice given to me by our knowledgable facility attorney when my landlord was threatening to refuse to allow our contractor-of-choice to enter the marina parking lot to work on our home because we refused to sign 100 new “construction rules” prior to beginning some work on our home. Some of the invalid rules we were being asked to sign were rules we could not afford to agree to without being bankrupted (one was “if at any time management deems your project too disruptive, you will be required to relocate your home off the property within 10 days.”).
Because we refused to sign these new rules for the landlord to “approve” our construction (which they legally didn’t have the right to do), the landlord was now threatening to call the police and have our contractor arrested for trespassing on private property and violating the property owner’s written restriction of that contractor on their property, IF our contractor tried to enter the parking lot on the first scheduled day of work.
When faced with the predicament of what to do about the scheduled start time for our contractor to enter the marina on Day One, we were faced with a decision….allow our contractor to attempt entry and get themselves into a possible legal issue of trespassing on private property or confronted by the police, which would of course, most surely, put us in a predicament to lose our contractor on our project and further delay our work, causing us to have to start all over to find a new contractor, OR call off the contractor ourselves.
Our attorney said, the only real way to fight this is to force the landlord to do or not do the thing that the landlord was threatening to do. He said, if WE cancelled the appointment, then that was our choice to do so. But if we maintained the appointment with the contractor, and the landlord acted illegally, then we would have something to fight. It’s tough to fight just a threat of something. He also said that, in his decades of experience with facility landlords is that they threaten often because they usually get away with it.
The day of the scheduled work, our contractor entered the parking lot and the landlord had sent their minimum wage office part-time retired employee to enforce their wishes, and we were there to use our gate key to let our contractor in….the office employee threatened us the whole drive to our home. But that was the end of it. We never heard from the landlord again about our contractor’s “trespassing” and our refusal to sign the illegal construction rules.
What lessons can you take away from this and apply to your own situations?
A. Garvin, OSTA President Emeritus
