Everything nice I've ever said on here about property managers, I take back. Long story short: Our tenants did about $10k worth of damage to our house and our property manager insists it isn't the fault of the tenant or the property manager for failing to catch it.

Long story long:

We've been out-of-state since 2009, when we spent $6k in upgrades to convert our residence into a rental. We signed a contract with a property manager (we'll call her Jill) because there wasn't a lot of management we could do from a thousand miles away. Jill had some health issues we didn't know about which led to her leaving the firm she was at and joining another, so we've had the same person managing the property through two property management companies.

We've been through probably five tenants or so. We knew we were coming back this year, and told Jill in June. It worked out for us to come back in October sometime, and fortuitously, our tenants' lease expired October 16. We asked Jill if she could offer our tenants early termination (Sept 30) so they could get back on a normal schedule and so that we could bail out of our place on a reasonable timeframe. This was June, mind you... we gave our tenants six months' notice that their 1-year lease would not be renewed (after we bought them a new hot water heater). We also mentioned that we'd like to refinish our hardwood floors (which we were unable to do for the current tenant because they wanted to move in October 16 instead of Nov 1!), do we need to handle that or can she arrange it and send us the bill?

Communication wasn't great. Jill mentioned in June that she'd replace the windows before she'd refinish the floor if it were her and we said that's fine, but we can replace windows with furniture in while the floor is pretty much an "empty house" scenario. Jill would not answer the phone and leave cryptic messages but we were assured that our tenants would be there until the bitter end, so no time to refinish the floors. Okay, too bad, so sad. Then about September 25th, long after we'd booked movers and arranged our schedule, Jill told us that our tenants were taking us up on our offer to leave Sept 30. Yay! Let's refinish the floors! Jill's on it. Jill also mentioned that the carpet was due to be replaced. Okay, let's take care of that, too. How 'bout the windows? No Jill, we got the windows. Thanks for your years of service.

So we loaded up the moving van, got in the car, had us a little roadtrip and tried to check with Jill. No answer. No answer for three days. No answer for four days. No answer for five days. Finally we get ahold of Jill.

Yeah, she never did get around to refinishing the floors.

Okay, what about the carpet?

Well, she was going to do that when the floors were done.

Uhh, okay, did you at least clean?

Well, she was going to do that when there was new carpet...

So we arrived to this.

• There was dog pee halfway up the wall in two places. After knifing out about 8 square feet of carpet and going through two gallons of Urine Destroyer the place no longer smelled like dog pee, unless you went away and came back, in which case hoo boy.

• There had been no remediation done for the water from the hot water heater, so the subfloor was destroyed under the HWH and furnace.

Meanwhile, Jill's in the hospital with a bacterial infection around her heart, and she's done a great job of not catching everyone else at the firm up on our property. We finally get ahold of her and she tells us that it'll all be taken care of, she hasn't given the deposit back to our tenants yet, just send her a bill.

This being Seattle, our contractor takes his sweet time to get anything done. We moved back in October 17. Two weeks later, they strip the room down to the linoleum and inform us that the hot water heater and furnace will have to come out to fix the subfloor... and the furnace isn't likely to survive. Two weeks after that, they pull the furnace and hot water heater and fix the subfloor. Three days after that, a new furnace goes in. Two days after that, we have hot water again. We had carpet three days ago. So I send Jill the bills - I can't hit our property manager for $4500 for a new furnace, but I've got $385(!) for cleaning, $900 for carpet and $5200 for a new subfloor and the bullshit necessary to put it in.

Jill's response:

• "You need to take that up with your insurance. None of this is on us." And she hangs up on me.

So I talk to her boss. Their position is "how were they supposed to know that a leaky hot water heater might damage the floor" (they installed it without a pan or expansion tank, which I needed to get retrofitted) and "it was clean when they left it, so we must be imagining the pet damage" and "why should we pay for carpet when you were going to change it out anyway?"

I'm limited to $5k for small claims court, but I think I'll go small claims court for the simple reason that they won't have a lawyer either. We do have insurance, but it's a $2500 deductible (and they're balking over our contractor's opaque invoice - another issue). My thinking right now is to give the insurance company and contractor a chance to hash out what's going to be covered, and if I can get everything but the deductible, go after the property manager for the deductible. But then, I've never done this before so anyone who has...

...well, lemme know what you know.

Thanks.