I am pretty sure I am being unfairly charged by the company I rented with over the last year. Here is the story. Help me understand if I should take this to arbitration.
I moved into an apartment during the first week in August in 2012. I signed a one year lease. My lease explains that every month I would be charged 480 dollars in rent and 41 dollars in water. The company switched apartment managers about half way through my stay there. This is when the problems started. Because of the new property manager, I decided to move out when my lease was up.
When I left my apartment was pristine. It had never been lived in prior to my stay and it looked the same when I left. I moved out at the end of August. The assistant property manager told me there should be no fees. I was never late on my rent.
Fast forward to now. After several weeks of calling, I still had no closing billing statement from them or my deposit back. Which my lease states should have been returned to me if there were no issues with the cleanliness of the apartment.
I finally get in touch with the property manager and she tells me that I owe them fifteen dollars from utility bills not paid. My deposit was 150 dollars. She said this was because I had not been billed yet for water from 5/19 to 8/31. At 41 dollars a month and prorated, my water bill should not equal $165.11. She explained that the water company was always three months behind catching up on billing a new tenant. Keep in mind that nowhere in my lease does it say that the water companies billing would be two to three months behind nor was this ever explained to me when I leased the property.
When I looked back at my checking account, I find that at the most I should only be a month behind in water bill charges. This is being generous because I paid for water the month I moved in with my first months rent and then a prorated amount at the end of September. The prorated amount is because I paid the full 41 dollars the first month even though I did not move in until the 7th of August which left me with an 8 dollar credit.
On my billing statements, it says that my water statements were only two months behind. This is where the problems come in. The apartment complex was required to pay the water company directly not the tenants. We were required to pay the apartment complex with a money order or check that combined the fee for rent and water. So what did the apartment complex do with the $165.11 of my money?
Am I missing anything? Because it looks as though the apartment complex is not only trying to screw me out of my deposit but also rip me off for extra money.
