Without informing me, my tenant has converted a storeroom into a bathroom. Then the tenant sent me messages saying that there's a seepage problem in some of the walls and paint is coming off. Upon sending the building maintenance engineer to have a look, to my surprise, he told me that seepage/leakage is because of an unauthorised conversion of a storeroom to bathroom. What rights do I have to restore the property to the original condition and how do I communicate with the tenant on this issue? The tenancy contract is a standard Rera contract and is not registered on the Ejari website. HS, Dubai
Your tenant has no right whatsoever to amend, convert or alter your property in any way without your written consent. You yourself may have issues with the developer without a no-objection certificate from them for such alterations.
Politely point this out to your tenant that they must restore the property back to its original state. If without this alteration the property ceases to be fit for the tenant’s purpose then they should not have agreed to live there in the first place. They cannot just unilaterally alter a property that does not belong to them. This also applies if the tenant wishes to redecorate or even hang pictures. They must always get the landlord’s permission to do so and of course the property must always be handed back at the end of the tenancy in the manner that it was given in the first place. I suggest you give them a suitable amount of time to rectify the property back to its original state, but if this deadline is not met you clearly have to explain that they have breached the contract and they will face eviction within 30 days of this predetermined date.
We have been living in our current, rented apartment for three years and are three months into our fourth contract. Ownership has changed several times in that period. The contract is in our employer's name but we pay part of the rent out of our own pockets. We rent a four-bed and when we moved in we discovered extensive mould in one of the bedrooms. It took almost six months to tear out the walls and flooring, so for the first year we lived with only three bedrooms. Since then we have had major leaks in other rooms, which have also taken months to fix. This latest issue was especially bad because the leak was coming from an upstairs apartment that is managed by a different maintenance company. They refused to do the necessary work and once again we have to have ceiling and cabinets replaced because of the extensive water damage. However, they are now claiming that we don't have a "confirmed" maintenance contract. They want us to pay for the final repairs. The responsibility seems like it should be the upstairs landlord or our current landlord, but certainly not us. We have always reported issues immediately and follow up diligently, even taking days off work. I feel they owe us compensation as for many months every year we have not had access to all our rooms. We also keep paying the rent increases as we love the neighbourhood, and moving is more expensive than staying. SS, Dubai
Arrange for a maintenance company to give you an estimate of cost for the remedial work. Make sure the reason for the work is explicitly mentioned and that the fault lies with the apartment above. Armed with this document, organise a meeting initially with the owner of the above apartment. At this meeting you can explain your situation and agree on the solution. Remember the responsibility to pay for the repairs lies with the owner, not the tenant of the affected apartment. I suggest you stay well clear of paying anything yourself even if requested to at the beginning. If you do end up paying, it will become almost impossible to claim your money back. I realise that it must be difficult to live in a property with this going on, but I repeat: if you pay, you might as well forget about any rebate. If the meeting doesn’t go well or how you expected it to be, at this point you have to enlist the help of your landlord because ultimately it’s his property.
Mario Volpi is a real estate professional who has worked in the industry for the past 31 years in London and Dubai. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and they do not reflect in any way those of the institutions to which he is affiliated. It does not constitute legal advice and is provided for information only. Please send any questions to mariovolpi64@gmail.com.
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