How to avoid getting ripped off by your landlord

I am going to post an account of what happened between our landlord and the Dimes family, but due to the statute of limitations for declaring damages in Virginia, I won't make the post for a week or so, lest they decide to try and charge us for more damages we did not cause. In the meantime, we've learned many lessons from this experience, which I will gladly share with you in order to help you avoid a similar fate.

• Know your rights. In most states, the Landlord/Tenant Handbook is available online, and you would do well to know the basic guidelines for landlords and tenants in your state, as well as your legal protections under SCRA regarding deployments, evictions, and lease terminations.
• Before you even select an apartment, look it up on a site like apartmentratings.com to see what previous residents have thought. Bear in mind though, that the people who will be posting opinions are generally unsatisfied so don't panic about a 50% approval rate. Read through the comments and try to see if there are any prevailing problems (black mold, management being unreachable, no emergency maintenance, etc). Also, contact the housing office at your new duty station and ask them for specific recommendations. We did that when we moved here and the difference between this complex and the one in VA is night and day.
  
• During your move-in walk through, be super slow and fussy, and document everything, even shadows on the carpet. Make sure the inspector writes EVERYTHING down and follow up with pictures. Open up every cabinet to check for broken shelves, turn on all the faucets to check for leaks, flush the toilets, turn on the dishwasher, the AC, and the furnace. Make sure the hot water works. Check any sliding glass doors and any balconies, storage areas, or garages you may have. Ususally after the move-in inspection you have a couple of days to write down other problems. If you find any, make sure you write them down, give a copy to your landlord and keep a signed copy from them, and also follow up with photos.
• If any problems develop after the window to report them, go ahead and report them anyway. Include photos and retain your own copies. Make sure you date the back of yours and theirs and that you have a picture that has proof of the date they were taken (date on a NewsChannel or a newspaper from the day they were taken).
  
• If there are habitability issues with the apartment (no hot water, broken locks, problems with AC/heating, etc), find out if you have the option of putting your rent in escrow and do that if necessary (rent escrow is where you pay your rent to a third party who holds it until serious maintenance issues are dealt with, so you cannot be evicted for nonpayment, but your landlord won't see the money until the problems have been fixed. Not all states/municipalities have this option but a lot do.).
• Follow the rules in your own lease. If you have a pet, a child, or a girlfriend, make sure this is noted on the lease and that you pay any penalties as required by law. If you keep a dog in your apartment for a year and don't pay pet rent, they will find out, they will probably sue you for more than you would have paid if you'd been forthcoming about your animal, and they will almost certainly win. It undermines your credibility in court when you haven't been following the lease as agreed to.
  
• Leave accurate forwarding contact information and make sure you set up a forwarding address with the US Postal Service. Predatory landlords have no compunction about sending notices to the apartment you just vacated in hopes you won't receive them in time and they can take you to court for more money. Even with leaving accurate forwarding information, my landlord didn't bother to mail us any notices about our outstanding damages until 21 days AFTER our move-out date, and they also required the damages to be settled in full "immediately," as they would be turned over to collections and court after 30 days of their being generated.
  
• Realize that the sub-contractors who work for the landlords (carpet companies, painters, plumbers) are generally under long-term contracts with the landlords and have no reason to be truthful or helpful to you. They make their money from working with the landlords, not from you, and will happily lie to you or to a judge in order to keep their workload and money coming. I have one of these lies on paper which I will include in the post about what happened to us.
  
• Keep in mind that there is a limit of time that varies by state for the length of time that a landlord can charge you for damages. In Virginia, that time frame is 45 days. During those 45 days, don't make any statement that could be construed as admitting to damages, because your landlord might find it and take you to court for it. (This is probably me being paranoid more than anything else, but we already got taken for a ride and I'm not willing to go on another one.)

While I'm not posting the details of our story just yet, I have written a letter and am sending it to the Housing Office in Hampton Roads, naming both the management company and the specific complex where we lived. If they did it to us they can just as easily do it to other tenants, and according to apartmentratings.com more than likely have. Because military personnel get a housing allowance, get money to move, and often move too far away to come back and fight, unscrupulous apartment managers have a field day with ripping them off in order to fatten their bottom lines. It's disgusting, and you have to protect yourself.