Landlord Problems after leaving MY

why did you have to pay 12000 deposit for rented apartment, i thought its 2 months deposit? Unless the rental was 6000/month. You should talk to lawyer, i know that might cost you. I don't think police would favor you, from experience, they always prefer or help out the locals.

Sorry to say I really think you are in a bad position. Your mistake was to have left your valuables in the apartment when you left in February.

Using a lawyer is expensive although I think charging MYR20k to go to court is too much, so if you want to pursue this matter perhaps find a less expensive law firm. The way it often works is three letters followed by a court summons. At one trial where our condominium sued someone for not paying their management fees, we took an expensive law firm (Tan & Tan) and after initially winning and several appeals, at the end of a year of court trials the bill came to around MYR20k. I cannot imagine your bill being so high.

The landlord has the right to keep the security deposit (2 months rent) or a part of it, and also part of the utilities deposit to pay off any outstanding bills at the time you leave. If there are no damages then he shouldn't really keep much except cleaning cost of the apartment, curtains, bedding etc and for things like that.

If you have everything agreed with your landlord documented and if you have followed the terms of ending your Tenancy Agreement early (usually 3 months notice is required) then he should not be insisting to keep all the deposit. For certain, he has no rights to asked for more than the deposits you have paid him.

Back in 2012 I had a British tenant who was paying me MYR6k per month rent. He had lived in my apartment for around 5 years. Then one day he called to tell me he had fallen for a local woman and wanted to move out at the end of the month so he could move in with her. All this time he had insisted to have extension agreements and they always stipulated that either party needed to give 3 months notice by registered letter. Well at the end of that month he asked me for his deposits back. Unfortunately, he didn't give me notice by registered letter and any written notice at all, and he only gave one months notice by way of a phone call. That meant I was not given enough time to find a replacement tenant. So, he should have forfeited his 2 months security deposit. Furthermore, he had installed an electric fan on the balcony, and several items were missing when I made the final inspection. When I asked him where certain things were he just told me "gone". But worse of all, he tried to say that it was me that had asked him to leave at the end of the month when actually I preferred him to stay and continue paying the rent. So finally I kept all the deposits (which was my right). He was a great tenant but tried to lie at the end and I wasn't happy about it.

Point is, you need everything documented and you also need to have followed the Tenancy Agreement otherwise he can pretty much say anything. He could easily say at court that you wrecked the place and provide some photos as proof and you'd probably lose. We don't know the terms of your Tenancy Agreement so it's difficult to comment, but even if you followed everything the landlord is probably in a much stronger position than you.

If I were in your shoes, I would ask your lawyer to negotiate with the landlord. I mean to get back your belongings and to forfeit your deposits. Landlords are always in a strong position and remember he is a local and you are not. I don;t think your should pay the additional MYR20k, that seems to be the landlord trying to take advantage of you since you are overseas. Also, since these days it is far more difficult for landlords to find tenants due to the pandemic, he probably is also trying to reduce his losses.

I don;t think making a police report in the UK and then sending it to Malaysia will achieve anything. Even if that were possible your lawyer should have advised you on that. So my advice is to get your lawyer in Malaysia to try and get back your personal belongings. Family photos, laptop, personal documents are every important.

Hi All,

Many thanks for your feedback.

I've followed my contract - notice period was given in proper way  - I had 60 days notice period but on renewal of contract it was 30 days so I've kept to this in my comms with it. During this period when I was not in the country I was keep paying eletricity and water bills and even just in case I missed something landlord has as you mentioned separate utility deposit. Regarding my rent it was 3500 MYR per month and apologies for a mistake together (2 months + utility) it was around 8 000 MYR.

What I've said to landlord (also via my solicitor) is that he can kept both of deposits even if I think it's unfair (if I don't have debt on utilities money should be mine) but I simply want my things back - laptops, family photos etc. My solicitor send him 5 letters (paid 5 000 myr for it) and turns out none of addresses I have for him (contract or renewal) is up2date so we not even sure if he received it on the paper. He for sure received it on the WH but then (2 months already) he stop talking to me - I not even sure is he not removed my items (sold) and rent flat to somebody else. No way to check this.

Kind of because of this COVID times next expense of 15 000 MYR that my solicitor asked me for filling court summoning to breach of entry (so we can enter flat by force to get my thigns) is little bit much for me. I considering surrender my items but from the other side I really don't want some stupid guy won like that.

I have prove of everything on WH chats - me notify him of going out, he agree to leaving my flat if I will still pay rent and then myself asking him few times for things like: house inspection report, utility deposit refund or access for my friend to get items back. Once I said him I will not pay him extra 12 000 MYR that he asked for (he said flat is in terrible state without providing any proof) he simply stop talking to me. Just that.

Let's  see how it goes - asking my Company who relocatted me to help in these expenses and going to last stage of HR protocol to get their help on it.

However I never imagined that landlord can act unprofessional in that way, it's terrible. From my perspective please correct me if I'm wrong - I'm responsible UP TO AMOUNT OF MY DEPOSIT you cannot just ask somebody to pay any random number to get back your items. I understand he may be unhappy with state of flat (not sure why) but he cannot play like that. I don't believe in MY law there is a line that says 'landlord can ask randomly without any proof for any amount of money'

Thanks
Dariusz

If you have agreement on your personal belongings then he has no right to keep them as that is theft. You could contact the management of the condo although they also don't have any obligation to help you since it is a personal matter between you and the landlord. But they will know his contact details. By the way, which condo building is this? From what I remember, a court summons doesn't cost a lot, I seem to remember Rm3,500 but I might be completely wrong, It's only if the landlord appeals then it will cause more costs.

Seems your landlord is unscrupulous and trying to make money out of you based on your weak position. Sounds like a major headache and not sure what you can do if you want your stuff back other than go to court.

Do you still have the keys? Presumably since you are paid up, send the keys to either your friend or the lawyer to pick up your things. If he's changed the locks then he is in violation of the lease.

I suspect he's received the messages, just not responded to them.  As well, how did he communicate with your earlier? If he hasn't sent you contact information then how could you pay rent or communicate. This is likely a violation of the lease agreement on his part.

Obviously  he is scamming you, as he can't  get a new tenant as expats  are yhin on the ground now. Could you ask your  employer  to get involved? A large local company could unsettle the landlord.

Do you have contents insurance? You might be able to report  the stuff as stolen by the landlord  and claim. Making a police report overseas though?

That's the thing. If your tenancy agreement was still valid then the landlord has no rights to even enter the apartment. Under the law he has no rights to change the locks or chain the grill door or even to cut the electricity or water supply. He only has the right to block any access cards for non payment of rent. To prevent you from entering the apartment he'd need to sue you, something that could take around 8 months or so since tenants have rights and cannot easily be evicted. However, if the tenancy agreement or any extensions to the agreement have expired then of course it's a different story.

I agree with Nemadot. You could try to get your company involved if they are willing. But I also agree that probably you'd need to make a police report in Malaysia for theft in order to make a home contents claim. You just need to go to any police station and make a statement and give all the details. By not only keeping your deposits but asking an additional MYR12,000 does sound like extortion to me and the police would probably agree unless you totally wrecked his apartment. You might as well use the police to mediate the return of your belongings with the landlord. The big problem is that you are no longer in Malaysia.

IMHO quit while you are ahead and don't throw good money after bad.

preferably you should have moved everything out of the apartment and left it with a freight mover before leaving Malaysia.

so many horror stories have been shared in this forum in the past regarding how unscrupulous landlords can be.

Many angles to this sad story, it might be the worst Ive ever heard.

I know its past tense now but in case there are current tenants reading i'll offer some advice.

Landlords have direct experience with foreigners and also have plenty of their own friends to ask for advice and a common thing between them is to become nasty at time of the tenant leaving and to fully take advantage of someone who has left the country. They know the foreigner has much less power after leaving.

1) I would never tell a soul im leaving anywhere.
2) If I knew I needed 6 months after leaving to finish things, I would continue paying rent as usual.
3) At the the two month notice deadline, I would inform the landlord that I am leaving in two months AND....AND...that I will no longer be paying rent, forcing the use of the deposit because its never coming back to you. The idea that you pay to the end and get a refund of all the deposit has seldomed or never happened. The landlord will go in, inspect, find huge amounts of work to be done and charge you. It is tantamount to a tenant paying to renovate and update the place on expenses that are solely the landlords. One reason the deposit isnt coming back is because the landlord hasnt got it, they spent it long ago on their personal life. Dont believe they opened a special bank account just to hold the deposit. What would a tenant do when the landlord lets you go at the end, no repairs needed but the landlord tells you he doesnt have the money to refund you, can he send you RM50 a month? And then never pays and disappears?
4) During the final two months, the landlord wont show up but will threaten to sue under the terms of the lease which will clearly state that deposits cant be used for rent. Of course they can! Deposits are to ensure your performance under the lease so what happens if you dont perform? The deposits are taken as liquidated damages! So ignore those threats because they will not spend out the deposit on a lawyer knowing that it will be quite some time to get to court anyway and you will be long gone. Malaysians are very averse to suing, it gives cash to lawyers instead of to them.
5) At the beginning of the 6 months, stop paying any utilities or any other agreed expense like management fees or anything.
6) Plan for the landlord to take back a very clean, tidy place with everything working and proper. When I leave, I hire cleaners to scour the place into perfect condition with no rubbish or articles left behind.
7) Take dated videos of the whole place at time of move-in and move-out. Very important!

A foreigner who wants to do the right thing expects the world to be the same and it is not. Foreigners enjoy no special rights here and must include warfare tactics in their dealings. Its NOT to hurt people but to balance the weights in disputes. Because I am so prone to "the right thing" and believe the other guy isnt, I have to keep the advantage on my side, fully with the idea that the transaction WILL end balanced and correct for all parties. I have no intention of hurting anyone, just protecting myself from being hurt. The landlord will get every dollar owed to them but nothing more.  Whoever has the deposit has the upper hand. I want to be that person and then we negotiate.

I may have told this story before but just briefly i'll repeat and say that, using the tactics in this post, I moved out of a condo in KL. Then I got a call from the landlord that everything was OK but there was a little problem. The condo had lovely stone floors and the landlord asked me to give them back RM7,000 to help pay to tear out the floors and put new because Mrs. Landlord was tired of the color. I balked and this led to a terrible fight. They claimed I rightfully owed the money because I had walked on the floors for 3 years, producing wear and tear. STONE! I laughed so hard in the phone im sure it was heard in other countries.  Imagine how this case would have gone if THEY had the deposit. The punchline of the story is that they screamed at me, "Well, you have to give us SOMETHING to charge you for!!" Next thing they heard from me was CLICK. An honest person, wanting to maintain an honest transaction must keep the advantage on their own side.

Back on the posters case, as expected the landlord doesnt have the RM12,000 to return, its gone, but desires to renovate. How to do it? Charge the rich foreigner and let him pound sand with overpriced lawyers who will charge him more than the deposit. Here we go again! Lawyers are the hot potatoes, nobody wants to touch them so they bounce from person to person! Me, I couldnt afford to take a RM12K loss and walk away so you will have to fight in the courts. A major problem is that the landlord KNOWS that if he can lay low and not be served with a court complaint, nothing is going to happen in this case, and even if there is a judgment in the plaintiff's favor, how to chase him and collect it? Extremely hard or impossible. In other words, if the 5 letters have not resulted in the landlord coming forward to negotiate, I regret to say the money is lost. Again, I wish to stress that this case is not about how the apartment was left as to condition, its solely about the normal case of a landlord not having the deposit to return and treats it like a debt instead of the landlord being the custodian of someone elses money.

I also understand that the RM12K is less important than the possessions. Since the landlord appears to have already entered the place, possessions left behind will be understood as abandoned and my guess is that he took what he wanted, gave the laptop to his daughter and threw away the rest. Unless I am missing some detail, the way I read your case is that this is finished, there is no case and nothing to pursue now. The landlord knows he has no footing so he runs. His phantom claims of charges are just that, phony. He isnt going to renovate or repair. Transactions only work when people want to do them. Your only last hope is to have someone watch the place and when someone moves in, try to get new contact information and harass him, including your need to make a police report to have a record and possibly some help from the police to locate him.

CVCO That's some really good advice. I never rented so I am not familiar but this is good info. for if/when we decide to retire in MY. I also would do the same thing. Stop making payments for the last 2 months. Let them cry and whine. But in the end they got exactly what they were supposed to get.

Pay for wear and tear on stone floors that's hialrious.

I like your idea, our contract will be finished by Aug. this year and we can no longer afford being scammed after what happen to me last year. I don't know why some Malaysian landlords are like this my parents are also landlords in the Philippines but when they said its a security deposit whatever happens they make sure to return it to their tenants even after the whole pandemic situation. They don't even charge for wear and tear that the tenant had caused that's how kind they are. I really salute my parents even both of them are high school grads they're good with money and very professional in handling their rental business.

Even if your case goes to court and even if you, as a foreigner, remotely located, win your case, the landlord will have already sold your stuff and disappeared. Or he will simply ignore the court order to repay you. What will you do then? Burn more money to try and get the order enforced, only to find out that he can simply declare he has no funds (or assets) to pay you. That apartment he rented you will magically belong to his brother's, girlfriend's, father's dead aunt and was never really his in the first place. And the stuff you left? "What stuff?" he will say.

A lawyer, especially in this instance, has only his own best interest at heart. Not yours. He will try and stiff you with as much legal process and string you along, for as long as he possibly can, just to rack up the hours and letters and paperwork that he does for you. He is just playing the game. Paying his bills.

Long story short, if you rely on the legal system here to try and get recompense for a relatively petty injustice like this, the stakes are high in terms of cost and the chances of success are very, very slim.

It isn't just Malaysia where the system fails people like this - I know folks who have been in similar situations in Switzerland and Australia which are both countries where one might expect that the "righting of wrongs" is a little easier. Not so, in fact. But here, in Malaysia, you stand no chance.

Walk away.

Not sure that I agree with cvco about stopping to pay utility bills for the last six months and the rent for the last two months. I am a landlord and an honest one, and having someone do that to me would probably cause me a considerable loss of money. I would normally charge for cleaning and replacement of a few things and it might only be a few hundred ringgit if there is nothing major damaged or missing (my sister had a TV and microwave stolen from her apartment in Bukit Bintang and the tenant stopped paying rent, so she incurred a considerable loss). I managed her apartment for her since she worked in other countries and it totally stressed me out. Thankfully she eventually sold it.

For landlords it is actually a bit of a nightmare having tenants who stop paying the rent towards the end of the contract because there is little we can do. It's very stressful for us. In such cases the best a landlord can do is to block all the access cards of that tenant. That means for entry to the apartment building and also entry to the carpark. If you live in the city then secured parking is very important. If the landlord has a good relationship with the management they might also arrange to cut the water supply or even electricity supply although that is illegal. But a tenant who has stopped paying will usually start paying again when there is no water to the unit. It's drastic measures but it works. Landlords cannot prevent a non-paying tenant from entering the apartment by padlocking the grill door to the apartment though. As mentioned above, it's basically a waste of time taking the tenant to court as it usually takes many months to get solved by which time the tenant would have moved on.

I don't think the majority of landlords are dishonest or unfair. By by not paying rent or utilities makes you the bad guy instead of the landlord which also isn't good.

The way I do things these days is that I only sign contracts with companies, preferably Japanese companies. That guarantees me punctual rent payments and utility bills paid. I also let my agent, who has a good reputation, handle everything including repairs and deductions at the end of the contract. I also am very picky about who I rent my apartment out to. It's because I have a lot of experience in renting out apartments in Malaysia and I don't want to have tenants who would potentially do the kind of things that have been suggested above.

So I really hope tenants don't start trying to get the upper hand by doing illegal stuff such as stopping payments.

Really makes me leery about renting. Security deposits seem just like throwing money out the window. I for one would leave the apartment in the same condition it was when I rent it. If break something I'll repair or replace it to as good as new. Then again I've been a contractor my whole life. I'd hate to stop making payments, but from what I am reading its more than
Likely you'll lose a few months rent when the
Land lords makes excuses for not giving the deposit money back. Ie he spent that the frost 2 days he got it.
I don't know but I'll insist only 1 month deposit. Or I go find 1 of the hundreds of other vacant apartments that are begging someone to rent them.

You can't generalize on landlords and how they behave. How many landlords have you had experience with? I've been both tenant and landlord as well as being Chairman and Council member on the committees of several condominiums in Kuala Lumpur, so I get to hear all sides of an awful lots of situations regarding both tenants and landlords.

Sure, I agree with your last suggestion. Try to find an apartment where the landlord agrees to accept just one months security deposit. That would certainly give you the advantage over the landlord. I've been offered that, I've also been offered six months advanced payment with no security deposit, which of course I rejected. So yes trying to bargain down the deposit might work or it might also scare off the landlord who might foresee problems in the future. Perhaps being an expat I am just a nicer landlord than many others 

I also just wish there was an easier and faster way to settle problems between tenants and landlords. I am sure though that there are as many if not more dishonest tenants than dishonest landlords. That's why landlords also have to protect themselves with adequate security deposits.

I know it's not easy finding good tenants. I know
More tenants will be worse than the landlord. I've never rented and or been a renter. H I did plenty of work on rental units seen the damage from tenants. Anyway scares me to rent. Rather own if I like the area. But will rent for a period before marking any final decision. Rather rent then be tied to one location.

Yes it's much better owning an apartment. My first one in KL was a rental and apart from there being no grill door and having a break-in where I lost many valuable items, the landlord was very good, fair, even allowed late payment and also returned me the full security deposit. He was a local.

After that I started buying apartments and you can't beat living in your own place, but at the same time you need to deal with tenants who occasionally were dishonest. But taking care of my sister's apartment really did it in for me. Stress every month when rent time came. Now I only accept sign tenancy agreements with companies.

Cvco, are you actually telling people to break the law? A tenancy agreement spells out the minimum contract duration and the deposits are for damages, not paying rent. By telling people not to pay their rent, well that's illegal. Be fair to landlords, they also have bank repayments and maintenance fees in addition to agent fees. When i rented, i always got my full deposit back because i left the place in better condition than when i moved in. And as a landlord i WILL sue for damages and unpaid rental to make sure a runaway expat stays out of malaysia for good.

A lot of Malaysian landlords are cheating scumbags though.

So all landlords deserve to be conned of their rental in return? Everyone should pay what they owe. Owe rent? Pay it. Those who like to shortchange others will never have abundance.

I came to Malaysia last year. I rented a BNB for two months. The landlord was excellent! No issue with the full deposit returned. Then I rented a bigger place from another landlord. It was ok. The only issue I had the AC bill was 400 and they needed a refund even though the AC was included in the rent and the unit ACs were clunkers. The rent for the BNB was three times higher than a typical long-term rent for a similar unit understandable for BNB.
So my experience was good.
Landlords get bad rap because for many (based on my US experience) even though the normal wear and tear is included in the rent, they still take part of the deposit for regular wear and tear and that is not fair.
3 Months before I came to Malaysia, I sold my house in US and I rented an apartment. They just put a new carpet. After three months I left, and they tool most of the deposit indicating they need to replace the carpet.  That carpet was as new as the day I moved in. Yet they found a way to take the money!
Wear and tear should not be taken from the deposit!

Absolutely... you're right 👍🏻