We have some tenants, they tried putting fire to the house yesterday ...

Background

In Norway one of the most golden investments one can do is to take up a mortgage, buy a house, live in half of the house, and rent out the other half of the house. The reason why this is so golden is mostly due to taxation; one gets a tax deduction on the interests paid on the loan, at the same time one doesn't have to pay any taxes on the income from the tenants.

Of course it's quite much speculation - property prices have generally been growing steadily and a lot over the last decades - and I believe that at least in Oslo there will still be a big demand in the property demand for the foreseeable future. Many people find that they can earn more money by AirBnB than by having permanent tenants - this causes an even bigger pressure on the rental market.

When moving from Tromsø to Oslo, we left most of our life behind - I found a tenant that got to live there for a very low price, hoping she would take care of the property. In the ideal case, renting out is trouble-free income, money coming steadily into the bank account every month, and a tenant taking care of the property may be better than nobody taking care of the property. At the other hand, it doesn't always work like that. Sometimes they don't pay the rent, sometimes they call and demand immediate action from the landlord whenever something is wrong, other times they destroy the property or let things deteoriate without notifying the landlord that something is wrong. At least when the landlord is living in the same house as the tenant, it's easier to come and look at problems, easier to discover that something is wrong, it's easier to ask for an inspection, etc ... and it's also easier to get rid of the tenants (it's generally difficult in Norway, one cannot just throw out tenants without having a good reason. "We need this space for ourselves/our children" is however a good enough reason).

I was ranting a bit in a comment the other day on our tenant in Tromsø; that wasn't the best tenant we had. The monthly houserent was really low - one of the reasons was that I would hope that she would be encouraged to take care of the property and solve problems herself. Unfortunately, she was very quick to call me whenever there was the slightest technical problem. Once she sent me a message that she had gone home to Germany for yule vacation and that she had turned off all the electrics. It was even specified explicitly in the contract that the tenant needs to take care to avoid frozen water pipes. We were going to Tromsø for the holiday, but we arrived there only some few days later - then everything was frozen, except the bathroom tap - since it was dripping, it didn't freeze. However, the outlet did freeze, the sink got filled up with ice, and as the sink was overflowing, the ice had started accumulating on the floor as well. Her attitude was that it was my problem, after all she had told that she turned off the electricity, from that point it was apparently my responsibility to prevent the water tubes from freezing.

At some point I decided that I had enough evidence of mistreatment of the property that I could cancel the contract - but in the end I found nobody else to take over, so I told her she could stay one more year - paying twice as much house rent, but she would pay as much as before to me, and spend the rest of the money (or equivalent value in work hours) on repairs and improvements. At that point she had a boyfriend, so I figured they would manage. Well, that relation didn't last for long. Last time I was there, nearly all water taps leaking, hot water not working ... and many other problems, so that agreement wasn't really worth anything.

She was kind of living in a symbiosis with mice. Her garbage was their food. There were mouse shit everywhere, and the house was really stinking. There were other things as well ... like taking our nice dining chairs outside, well, that's OK as long as one brings them in again. Leaving them out in rain and sunshine for several weeks is not OK. In the end I was happy to sell the remains of my once so beloved home to a property developer that would tear down everything and replace it with ugly houses.

She wanted to take some of our stuff with her to a new house. I was intending to let her have it free or for a cheap price (after all, I spent very much time trying to get rid of as much as possible - but in the end of the day the returns I got from selling stuff wasn't really worth the time I put into it). I don't remember exactly the words she wrote back, but something like ... "since you're getting filthy rich by selling the property while I'm just a poor lady, I would expect to get it for free".

We spent the money (plus took out some mortage) buying an old house in our neighbourhood here in Oslo. Having the house in walking distance from our current home was important for me, to make it easy to solve problems. We do have some plans for this property, but as for now we're just renting it out. We needed more space for ourselves, but so far we've solved it by moving the tenants to the first floor of our new house (unfortunately that means we don't get the tax bonus for renting out from the house we're living in). We found some other people for the second floor. The responsible tenant is the brother of someone we trust. He's living there together with quite some other people.

Yesterdays fire incident

I haven't heard the story from the tenant in the second floor yet - only from the people in the first floor.

In the late Friday night, the people in the second floor was lightning up a grill on the balcony. The grill used was such a single-use barbecue. The tenants in the first floor noticed this and told them to put it out due to the fire hazard. The people in the second floor told they would comply - but apparently they didn't.

At 02:00 in the night, the son downstairs apparently was luckily sleeping very lightly. He heard some noises, went to see, and woke up his parents - it's a fire! The grill upstairs had burnt itself through the wood on the balcony. Tenants in the first floor had quite some stuff stored under the balcony - the fire from the charcoal, balcony planks and stuff stored under the balcony was several meters high. The tenants in the first floor managed to stop the fire, tenants in the second floor was not helping much.

It could have ended quite much worse - right by the fire there was a motorbike parked, with a full petrol tank ...

Seems like nobody was at home in the second floor today when I visited the house, but I took some photos from the outside, from the first floor and from the attics.

Photo taken by tobixen - 2018-08-18 14:53:26 localtime - CC BY-SA 4.0 - full quality

Photo taken by tobixen - 2018-08-18 14:53:53 localtime - CC BY-SA 4.0 - full quality

Photo taken by tobixen - 2018-08-18 14:54:16 localtime - CC BY-SA 4.0 - full quality

Photo taken by tobixen - 2018-08-18 15:00:27 localtime - CC BY-SA 4.0 - full quality

Photo taken by tobixen - 2018-08-18 15:00:36 localtime - CC BY-SA 4.0 - full quality

Photo taken by tobixen - 2018-08-18 15:16:13 localtime - CC BY-SA 4.0 - full quality

As one can see on the photo below, the balcony is quite rotten - so no matter fire or not, it's needed to spend some money on repairing the balcony.

Photo taken by tobixen - 2018-08-18 15:16:18 localtime - CC BY-SA 4.0 - full quality

I guess we should consider getting other tenants in the second floor...

Selected photos available in original quality on IPFS QmctFcb2AQxuBrRAWYgybkDNtEkVyPp4BP7Q4t4SVkGYhN. All photos taken available in original quality on IPFS QmRQyJZBbLLCY5XxJEnhkw2fwjkDnXJ3azr7uxuxAw9dUW. The CC BY-SA 4.0 license applies on both photos and article