Deal all....who remember our story?
Just go on the first post to read what happened, I believe our story will help lots of tenants and landlords not to repeat the same mistakes we did....
Anyway I just thought to let you know how it went at the end...
We made a claim of compensation by taking the landlord (and real estate agent to CTTT (Consumer, Trade and Tenancy Tribunal) in Hurtsville.
The first audience we just sat down in front of each other to explain our reasons and try to negotiate a fair deal. That didn't happen, the landlord wasn't there, only the real estate agent was on his behalf. They counterclaimed us of 20k (our claim was 6k) for having damaged the property. Go back few posts to read the details, however to make it short, we tenants thought to have an agreement to renovate the kitchen, but got kicked out in the middle of the job by the structure being unsafe due to cancer in the cement.
Anyway the first audience was a failure so another audience got set up few months later.
The second time, we sat again at the negotiation table before going to the judge.
This time the Landlord was there (first time we met and spoke to) and another real estate agent was with him....
in this couple of months between the audiences, the previuos real estate agency (John Spence-Hurtsville) has been bought off by another RE agency and the Re Agent who was dealing with us during the troubles got fired....
So in the second audience we finally met with the landlord and the new agency who took over the case. They were very cooperative and willing to make a deal this time, I think they realised, the best thing to do was to negotiate a deal rather than having the judge deciding for us.
By simply facing each other in the same room, and being able to talk and explaining our reasons we discovered so many things we didn't know...
Basically the previous real estate agent has played and fool everyone...
He was referring untrue things to both of us, he told us the landlord approved us to renovate the kitchen when that wasn't true, he told the landlord we were fine, where we actually got evacuated from the house and become homeless with a little 2 months old baby.....he was pretending to speak to him on the phone in front of us when in fact he never did...etc etc.....
You wondered why this RE agent got fired (not sure if the forum policy allows me) but the public should know the names of these dishonest unprofessionals , his name his Sam Milou and as mentioned by the new RE agency , they fired him as he did all sort of dodgy stuff before...the community should be aware of this dishonest people and beware carefully!!
Anyway after few hours of negotiation both parties decided to walk away and withdraw our claims. We basically both won and both lost, since we both had losses but their claims was higher than ours...
At the end of everything, if we would have spoken directly with the landlord all this mess couldn't have happened, this third party dishonest and unreliable RE agent put us and the landlord against each other for months.
We went though a very tough time...can you imagine with a brand new baby, becoming homeless for weeks, having spent our money on emergency accommodations that never got reimbursed despite this infamous RE agent put us in the beginning and promised to ...
Anyway, I thought you may have find our story interesting on how things can get terribly wrong....now we know...communication is the key! without it or "filtered" by third parties, terrible situations can arise
Amen and thanks for reading my long post