I had a great chat with Phil from DevCo, the parent company that owns Heatherwood Apartments. When I tried civilly to ask him about why I was being charged $220 for a cursory cleaning of my apartment, he conceded that no matter what, they have to send in someone to do a final clean and sanitization. But it doesn’t mean anything, does it?
The final scrub on my apartment couldn’t have been more than an hour, and I’ll see them in court or at the gates of hell for them to defend it otherwise. Phil says you get 2-hours of cleaning included automatically, so if it’s 2-hours PLUS $220 to clean a toiled, wipe the fridge and clean the pink around the bathtub drain, the guy has to be earning about $500 per hour, and work very, very slow.
The tidbit here is that you DO NOT have to give them back the apartment 100% ready to rent out again. You’re entitled, according to Phil at DevCo, to two-hours of complimentary cleaning, even though you may notice there’s nothing about it listed in your lease agreement.
Strange discrepancy, don’t you think?
None of it means anything though, because obviously the cleaning hours mean nothing, and you’ll still get stuck for whatever they want to charge you either way. You’ll have no recourse but to take them to court to get your money back. You can do it, and you’ll almost surely win, but they’re banking on the fact that you won’t go to such lengths, and statistically speaking, they’re right.
Think about the economy of scale. This company manages thousands of apartment units, and surely fewer than 3% contest usury move-out fees like these. If we’re talking about $100 per unit, and they turn a thousand a year, that’s $10,000 per year they make just by a standing policy of jerking past tenants around. The few that go to court cost them nothing, because they just send site managers, and even if they had 20% contesting them, it’s still just pennies on the dollar, and we’re talking about some damn big bucks.
Tags: cleaning, costs, court, defensible, exorbitant, legal, legit, ripoff, scam, small claims, usury