Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Massachusetts

Re: Damaged wood floors from dog urine

Hi Kelly. I've heard of cat urine on carpets very often, but this case is a little new for me.

You have the right to sue the tenant for any damage done beyond reasonable wear and tear. The occasional nick on a wall, chip of paint, wear on the carpets, etc. that takes place over the 1 or 2 or even 5 years of a tenancy cannot be recovered from the tenant. But this seems to go beyond that, to you at least. You still have two problems, though.

a) You have several problems with proof. You appear to have already repaired a lot of the damage with the work you did. Did you take before and after photos which clearly show the damage? Unless you take out the floor and bring it to court and ask the judge to sniff it, you're going to have that kind of problem with proof. Also, you'd ideally like to have had pictures showing the stains were not on those floors before the tenancy started, wouldn't you?, but that's extremely unlikely. So all you have is your word plus what the tenants will voluntarily admit.

(If you took a security deposit, you would have / should have given them a signed "statement of condition" at the beginning of the tenancy, but it probably wouldn't have listed floor stains even if they had been there.)

Also, I wonder if the stains you're talking about are from an oft-repeated urination all over the place or just two isolated incidents, one in one room and one on the other. The latter (single pee-ings) would show more clearly in a picture, wouldn't they? (Still, can you prove it was the dog peeing and not someone's drink that got spilled?) But the former, lots of times all over the place is more egregious (worse) behavior by the tenants but won't be as obvious in photos.

Or maybe a picture will show a trail of doggy footprints leading away from the puddle that exactly match their dog's fingerprints!

The tenants might admit to having found Rover lookin' sheepish when they came home from a long day at work and might instead take the defensive tact that his pee really didn't do any permanent damage. I think Judges have heard cat pee on carpet stories enough to doubt them. So you may or may not have a problem with evidence.

And if you sue, sometimes people don't show up and deny anything, and you can win when that happens, but collecting is hard even then. That brings me to my second comment:

CONTINUED ...

Re: Damaged wood floors from dog urine

CONTINUATION OF PRIOR REPLY:

b) Landlord's rarely rarely rarely pursue ex-tenants even for well-established claims like a few months of back rent. Even if they do, they rarely see a cent. They often they can't track down where the tenant has moved to in order to file the suit (but I suspect you don't have that problem) and the tenants (who are not landowners!) often don't have assets available to readily satisfy any judgment. If you know that they own their cars outright and you have their registration information, or if you got their parents to co-sign (and the parents own property in Mass.), you have a better shot, but otherwise ....

Lastly, your ameliatory measures (varnishing) might seem to be enough to a court and they won't likely replace the entire floor on your say-so.

If you use small claims, which is cheaper and easy, just know that if you lose, there's no appeal available to you (but if you win, the losers can appeal).