Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Life, Having a Lobby

The Wiener Mietervereinigung saved my day! After several months of exhausting correspondence with the property management company that manages the house I live in, the weight of having to deal with those people has been taken off my shoulders by a cigar-smoking gentleman of the Vienniese Mietervereinung ("tenant association") ... a lobby for people troubled by their landlord.
And I am. It starts with the fact that in the little over three years I live in this apartment, the company I have/had to deal with is the THIRD property management to run business for the same owner here.
And the trouble begins, where the second of them, the one that took over from the management I originally rented from, seemed to have virtually no information on anything, but soon thought they had found out I had to pay more money.

Along with my modest apartment on first (american 2nd) floor I am renting a tiny basement which was in quite a bad shape when I moved in and still has some structural deficiencies and was offered to me for 30,- all inclusive on top of the rent of the apartment.
So I disagreed with the manager who thought he read in my contract I would actually have to pay way more, referring to how I remembered the arrangement should be about what I have and have not to pay, but visiting me at home and kind of telling me the other tenants had to pay for me, he got me to agreeing to paying a fraction of the originally demanded amount.

Now the current management think they found out something new, ignoring the fact that I already pay a certain sum in accordance to an agreement to their predecessor and want to add €€€ on top again ...
And these people have been annoying by not sending me papers I requested to be able to speak with Mietervereinigung in the first place, by replying to my 4 letters and a fax with messages that indicate, they're either morons or not reading my letters or - and by now I have to suspect it's this - they know I don't really have to pay more and want to prevent me from finding out.

So I had a whole lot of paper with me when I showed up at Mietervereinigung and somehow I think it helped that my new guardian was smoking a cigar as he pondered my case (Columbo-effect) ... concluding that after clearing out those mysterious shifts in squaremeters taking place in the house in the end the will of the parties was manifest in the contract as follows: Magnus shall not have to pay an obscene amount of money like was never the deal!

Columbo my new guardian will now be fighting this out with the bad guys for me ...
Ah, those suits are going to regret this!

2 comments:

bereweber said...

good luck with your housing problem magnus
good that you find you cigarette-smoking ala Columbo guardian angel :)

magnus said...

thx, to have to write a letter to non-cooperative folks every other week, was really buggin' me ..