It seems that every day a new and more horrible rental story spawns to remind us of the evils of landlords but nothing I’ve read so far displays as much demonic fuckery as this one: a Brisbane renter was left to piss in her sink for more than a month because her real estate agent refused to get her toilet fixed.
Kara, who understandably did not want to have her last name published given how evil the rental market is, had been living in a granny flat in Brisbane for $230 a week until just a few days ago. You may consider that an incredibly cheap rent in the current economy, but I assure you, it was not worth the assault to both her dignity and her nose.
Kara described the Brisbane rental as a “shoebox” with a multitude of problems, one constant issue being the toilet. In the two years she lived there, she had a plumber over four times for the toilet alone.
“A few months ago, my toilet had an ongoing issue where you’d flush, but the water would rise and nothing would go down,” she told news.com.au.
“I emailed my real estate, and they arranged a plumber. The toilet worked fine for a few days but stopped flushing again.”
In screenshots published on news.com.au, Kara’s emails mention that last time the plumbers came they told her there were roots in the pipes and the landlord would need to pay to fix this or the issue would keep occurring.
The real estate agent claimed that the plumber cleared the roots, but there were more roots further up the pipe which was in a council junction — basically saying it was the council’s problem, not the landlord’s.
“From that point on, she ignored all of my messages and calls for over a month. Meaning for a month, we didn’t have a functioning toilet,” Kara said.
“I called her six times and sent five emails.”
Kara went weeks with no response despite repeated attempts to get her toilet issue solved, and when the real estate agent finally responded, her solution? To use the neighbour’s toilet. AKA the people living in the main house, who Kara doesn’t know and which is rented out completely separately to her own place.
“Therefore there are two toilets on the property and I have not received any notification that the second toilet on the property is not working,” the response from the real estate agent said.
It’s! Not! The! Same! Property!
They are literally rented out separately! You can’t have the tenants forced to co-live! You can’t have your cake and eat it too!
Obviously this was not a fkn solution, because how on earth could Kara just start using a stranger’s toilet multiple times a day when a) she doesn’t know them and b) they literally do not owe her anything and probably don’t want a random using their amenities every day.
So she was back to square one.
loving this Brisbane real estate listing that includes photos of the deck and ONLY the deck, in an apparent warning to prospective tenants to NEVER STEP FOOT ON THIS DECK https://t.co/rhyQD3Wc3s pic.twitter.com/aRbOtIIrBz
— Dave Earley (@earleyedition) January 1, 2023
“We had to pee in a sink,” Kara admitted.
It wasn’t until sewage started overflowing under the main house and INTO KARA’S SHOWER that the real estate actually started to take her even remotely seriously.
“The kitchen in the main house smells like sewage and the whole granny flat smells like sewage. This is unlivable,” Kara wrote in an email.
The real estate agent told her an urgent work order had been put through, but two days later there was still no plumber.
This was in December 2022, and Kara finally got out of this hell house on February 15 this year.
She said that even then, two months after the sewage leak, the issue with the toilet was still not fully resolved.
A word of advice, my Queensland friends: if your real estate agent is being an absolute fuckwit, lodge a complaint to the Office of Fair Trading. Because you absolutely are entitled to a working toilet.
If you need me, I’ll be reading about how to build a guillotine.
