Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: Apartment charges after move out.

The notice of the disposition of the repairs and the cost must be provided within 20 days after you vacate the apartment. The state of California has a tenants handbook available on line at the official state website. Go to the search location on the upper right of the home page. Search for the tenant handbook. As I recall after three or 4 years the tenant cannot be charged for repainting the apartment. Check this handbook for information regarding costs after vacating the property. Send a letter to the landlord with a copy of appropriate pages of the hand book, or a copy of the entire handbook on a cd to the landlord with a demand for a refund of your deposit, less the reasonable costs of cleaning the apartment. If the land lord does not respond then sue in small claims court.

Re: Apartment charges after move out.

The postmark on the envelope may be the deciding factor if you are sued in Small Claims. If this happened to me, I would write back immediately, informing the former landlord that it was tardy in accounting for your security deposit, and that in your opinion all the charges (or all the charges except $300 for cleaing) are disputed as relating to normal wear and tear and not tenant-fault repairs.

The distinction between normal wear and tear and tenant-responsibility damage is often litigated, and I can't assure you that a small-claims judge will side with you (small-claims judges are notoriously capricious and under-experienced), but the late accounting is favorable to you, as is the fact that you lived there a fairly long time.

There are some downside risks to toughing it out - negative credit reports, time and hassle of learning about how small claims works, and the possibility that you may lose of some of the money issues while winning others. Still, I think you have the upper hand and I would not cave in.

By the way, LawGuru has a category for landlord-tenant issues which is separate and distinct from the real estate and real property category under which you asked your question, and while I was happy to respond, we real estate/real property lawyers are not as up on landlord-tenant issues as the specialists that field the landlord-tenant questions.