FLA Rent has horrible customer service. In the fall of 2010, I was billed $55 for lawn service. The lease states that landlords are obligated to send a certified letter stating any noncompliance with the lease, which includes lawn maintenance. We should have received a letter that allowed us 7 days to rectify the problem before we were obligated to pay any fees. However, the property manager, Kenny, admitted he did not send a letter. Ha had called us, giving us less than 24 hours before a lawn service was sent out. When I asked for a refund of the money, & pointed out that FLA Rent did not comply with their own lease, my request for refund was denied.
Also, in January of 2011, we noticed that the carpet in the master bedroom was soaked & notified Kenny. He gave minimal effort to identify the source of the leak. Three months later, a roofer easily identified a leak, finding that water was running down inside the walls from the roof. I had to call for several days to find out the owner agreed to replace the roof. But nobody could tell me a projected date. When I asked that a tarp be placed over the leak to prevent further water intrusion, I was refused. The property manager, Kenny, asked why I was giving him such grief. I was finally able to get Kenny to agree to a tarp & he also said the roof would be done before it rained. I questioned that, as Florida has such unpredictable weather. At this point I asked for a mold test as well. He refused. I called the owner of the house after finding contact information in public property records. He had only been aware for a couple days of the problems, but said he would look into mold testing. Ten minutes later Kenny called me, screaming into the phone that he was going to evict me for contacting the owner. I stated that the lease does not outline that I can't contact the owner, & asked him to stop shouting. He didn't & hung up on me. A few days later we were able to get a maintenance man to come out, & when he cut into the walls there was mold inside. FLA Rent told us that we would have to move out & I requested paperwork to say our legal obligations to the lease would be nullified & that we would be refunded for rent that we had paid in full for April but were not using. We vacated on April 20 & the next day I was notified that an inspection had been done & the security deposit was able to be picked up. I went to the FLA Rent office & agreed to the claims of $85 that were made upon the deposit. A week after receiving the deposit, Kenny called me to say that they would be withholding a portion of the rent that was to be refunded, as they didn't think the carpets were steam cleaned. However, I steamed them a day before we moved out. The refunded rent was coming via check from the owner. I told him that they couldn't make a claim upon the security deposit after it had been refunded & the president of FLA Rent told me that the security deposit & rent were interchangeable. However, this isn't the case, as their lease states that you can't use the security deposit as last month's rent. So it can't work the other way either. They told me to hire an attorney because they were taking that money out regardless.
This entire process with FLA Rent has been us, as the tenants, doing everything we were supposed to do. It has been an uphill battle. Kenny is extremely unprofessional. Of the 8 times I visited the office after we discovered water intrusion, Kenny was there twice. One of the times I had spoken to him 4 days prior, & when I dropped the rent off at the office & asked to speak with him, I was told he was on vacation for 2 weeks. He didn't mention to me that any efforts to fix the leak would be weeks in the future due to his vacation. Also, I called him one morning & told him I'd be stopping by the office that day to get our termination addendum signed, & he agreed. Then when I made a specific trip across town to the office just for that I was told nobody knew where he was.
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