Not good!!!

I have had a similar situation with an electrician (which our company doesn’t normally use, though was request by the landlord).

Dec 2010 -The internal glass in an electric over exploded, no fault of the tenant, and was told by the electrician that it mostly likely will be covered by the oven warrant, as it had been a known fault with that make, or if not it shall be under $200. Landlord approved the repairs.

The glass was replaced early Jan (due to the close down of the suppliers over Xmas) tenant was happy with this and was fully understanding.

We never received a invoice and the times I called their office to see if it was covered by warranty I was told that they would get back to me if there was a problem.  – I had no further contact from them so was under the understanding that it would be covered by warranty.

To my surprise we received an invoice for $657-38 in December (2011) 12 months since nearly to the day of the initial work order, for the replacement of the glass in the over and labour…$657-38!!!! I could have bought a brand new oven for that and the tenant not be without a oven for 2 week!!!

On calling their office again I was told that they have had changing staff since Jan (2011) and it was over looked….over looked for 12 months, and it was too late to put a warranty claim in.

NOT MY FAULT!!!!! They have been told that we will not be paying this invoice, once again I was told that someone would get back to me, low and behold we received a statement from them only yesterday stating that the payment is overdue…..Yet another call was made and yet again I haven’t heard anything.

I had a situation a number of years ago with a plumber who had an apprentice working with him and I started getting invoices which had the labour for two people (although the apprentice was significantly cheaper).  This woudn’t have been too much of an issue except when you have two people doing a job that only requires one person.

I’m all for people being taught their trade and being shown the ropes, but I didn;t feel that this should be done at a cost to our owners.

That said, I place an emphasis of having good relationships with our trades people so that I can easily talk to them about this kind of stuff and get it sorted in one phone call.

oh and $657.38 for an oven door glass, WHAT THE?!?!?!?!?!  is this like the Rolls Royce of ovens?  Definately something not right there.

Well my story had a bit of a happy ending.  There were two maintainance requests put in for the property, one for a stove to be installed.  They did not put anything on the invoice to say they did this, and combined the amounts.  Twits.

Kylie

I put in a request to have some gutters cleaned with a local tradey who I was trying to help out with some work.

He didnt attend for some time and the tenant, instead of telling me, spoke to the owner about it, so the owner attended the to gutters himself.

The tradesman put in an invoice for $60 and I paid it normally as the owner had given the go ahead initially.

I received a call about a week after we ran statements from the owner asking about the bill. The date of the invoice was 2 days after the owner had already attended the gutters. I questioned the tenant about the tradesman, she told me that he came and was there for less than 5 minutes, looked in the gutters, seen they were already empty and left.

While it’s not completely his fault as he nor I were not notified, I find it a bit dishonest.

Oh Clint, thats a shocker. I wish, when people ask for maintenance to be organised, and something changes (ie the problem fixes itself, the trady doesn’t show, or the owner completes the work themselves) that they would just TELL THE PM!!! They gripe about PM’s lack of communication, then pull this stunt!

Kylie – glad to see that they didn’t charge over $300 to change lightbulbs!!!