My friends and I made the mistake of renting an apartment directly from the landlord in order to be close to an area for a period. It was a 6 months contract with the option of extending.
He has been extremely dodgy at every step of the way, including at the start where he tried to overcharge us with rent and claimed he had just made a mistake with calculations. In hindsight that should have been a big red flag. The landlord owns the entire floor of the apartment and thus rented out to couple of other people. They all ran away because of the bs they had to deal with - just as a reference and we were the only tenants he had left.
Since our move we have been trying to organize a time to meet with him, to discuss a few things - contract and the finalisation of bond, as well as few issues we had however he kept bailing on us literally last minute (we would wait for him to show up at 6pm for example, and he would text 5 minutes before he's due that he can't make it, this happened few times and resulted in several missed plans, needless to say we didn't care much after that).
We didn't want to stay any longer either and told the landlord we'd be moving out once our contract was over, the landlord tried to reduce the rent and we thought about it but the reduction wasn't much and we hadn't been staying at the apartment since the lockdowns so over a month at that point and was only at apartment sporadically even before than so it didn't make sense. We told him we would move out regardless. He however wants full months notice from the date we told him we would be moving regardless. And is not accepting our contracts end date to be the actual end of lease.
The second issue is with electricity bills. Now our Electricity is under his name so he gets the bills for the entire floor and we have to pay him directly. He claimed he had issues with previous tenants and thus electricity was kept in his name. However in the last bill, he wanted almost $300 for a 28 days of electricity use. During this period two of us was at the apartment for 6-10 days only and it was at night only (so we slept rather than spent much time at apartment) and the other was at apartment only on weekends but again isn't crazy using anything to rack up such a bill. No one uses electricity that much and usually my electricity bills are max $30-50/month of bill. We asked the landlord several times to provide us with the actual bill to prove this was accurate however he's refusing to do so. he sent a screenshot which looks like is an image on paint that is incredibly blurry and could barely be read, but that was it.
We contacted Consumer Affairs, and even Legal Aid however they kept providing mixed information. While chatting with them they informed us our bond wasn't even declared by him and they requested that we request him to provide us with proof.
Our landlord being the amazing person that he is said he hadn't reported it because he was waiting to resolve the rest of the bond before he did that (something he never asked for even though he had many chances to, and he had over $1k in bond payments between us, which apparently he needs to report even if it is just partial bond report)
Legal Aid advised us to just leave when our contract date is over and that he'd be the one to go through reporting etc which would result in him getting fined for not reporting the bond. However consumer affairs is advising that we just do as he's asking and pay for the extra months to ensure we don't do anything wrong.
So just want to ask others that may have more experience on this on what we should be doing. This guy literally cut off one of the tenants internet off and verbally abused the poor girl after she told him she wanted to move out, forcing her to move out overnight as she didn't feel safe in her own home, and she had to continue paying him for another month in a house that she couldn't stay in!. So we don't really want him to get away with putting the tenants through this crap and taking advantage of people.
the word is lodged not declared the bond.