People’s Republic of Tung Chung – 东涌人民共和国

Getting a deposit on an apartment refunded should be pretty easy, no? Once the landlords have checked that you haven’t stolen the air-conditioner or smeared faeces over the walls, they just need to subtract some routine costs and send you a cheque. You’d think.

I have been trying to recover the deposit from Emily’s apartment (see this posting) for a ridiculously long time. I allowed the statutory fifteen days to pass and then contacted the landlords to ask how much was forthcoming and what deductions there would be. Oh no, said the landlords, you’re not getting any deposit back, because you didn’t pay all the rent.

“Did so.”

“Didn’t.”

“I’ll show you the receipts.”

“You have receipts?”

The fact that I had every single payment documented changed their attitude entirely. I know from conversations I had with them last year before we signed the lease that they were resigned to the fact that nearly all tenants break the lease and run off with rent unpaid. It seems this is so routine that refunding a deposit is something they’ve never done before.

Moreover, it turned out they hadn’t even been keeping track of the incoming rental payments. “We need to see the receipts,” they told me, “so we know which payments were yours.”

“You mean, you don’t already know?”

Well. If I’d known that, I’d have stopped paying the rent eight months ago and just sacrificed the deposit money. What kind of a way is that to run a business? I’m glad I’m not their accountants! “We received a lot of money this year, but we don’t know where from. Then we spent most of it, but we don’t know why. Did we pass the audit?”

Having established that I wanted money from them, they deducted a massive amount for unpaid utility bills. By pure luck, in the detritus that Emily left behind in her apartment, I found a bank receipt showing that she’d paid a big slab of money to the landlords for precisely this reason. Yes, you guessed it, they hadn’t kept a record of that either. I sent them a copy of the receipt. They scolded me for keeping this information from them, and then revised their estimate to a more reasonable level.

Then they told me, “now we need originals of all these receipts before we can pay you.”

“Show me where it says that in the lease,” I suggested.

“We need proof that we’re refunding the money to the person who paid it in the first place.”

“I have an ID card. Or, you could pay it back into the same bank account that paid it to you. Oh wait, that would assume some degree of record keeping on your part. Silly me.”

In the end, though, despite the hoops that must be jumped through, it all worked out. The final deductions were small and reasonable. Now we just wait and see if the cheque bounces…