In March I sent Roanne Flora, landlady, an email asking what the rent would be if I decided to stay another year in her apartment building in Berkeley Springs. Her answer and other things in my life made me decide to leave, so in April I gave her 30 days' notice as my one-year lease was up at the end of May.
I did everything according to the lease as I really needed as much of the $800 deposit refund as possible.
45 days after I left, I got her letter with no deposit, because she claims our emails in March constituted renewal of my lease. So not only is she keeping my entire deposit, but she claims I owe her $12-17000 or another eleven months rent for "breaking the lease after one month." She had written a 3-page single spaced fake-legalese letter, as if she took some kind of sick glee in the entire transaction. I had moved to another state, so could not file a complaint in the local Magistrate Court. The $800 amount in question was not enough to hire an attorney to represent me from a thousand miles away.
Never in my communications with Roanne Flora, Landlady, did she tell me she thought I had renewed my lease in March, in fact, after I gave 30 days notice in April, she eerily avoided any conversation with me at all. Why would I renew a lease 2 months early and then leave? There is no proof anywhere of anything she she said in her letter. But she still has my $800.00.
From the beginning, she had decided to make up a lie to keep my deposit. She did not even show up for the exit-interview, and I had to catch a plane, so had to leave without ever speaking with her.
Apparently, she did not want her plans to cheat me to leak out in a conversation as I was moving away.
I should have known this landlady is a predator from the start and next time I will just not pay my last month's rent, as after this experience, I will never trust a landlord to be fair with me about returning a deposit again.
Roanne Flora appears to be this sweet-faced Bible-quoting woman, so I thought if I did everything exactly by the lease, that she would be decent and refund me a reasonable amount of my deposit.
But no, she's a predatory landlady.in May when I moved in, I was prepared to pay $625 deposit as discussed, but the lease she handed me to sign said the deposit was $800. And she wanted it now.
She was setting me up from day one.
I did file a report with the West Virginia state attorney's office about this predatory landlord, the consumer affairs division. Nothing ever resulted. They served her with papers, she never replied, and that was that.
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