RAWBangkok

In my last blog (going to the cop shop) I described an altercation that took place on a Saturday night/Sunday morning at my apartment building.

During the incident, my landlord showed up, and I was verbally aggressive with him about the behaviour of the security guard at the building. I yelled loudly at the landlord and used foul language – primarily driven to his seeming indifference to what had happened.

On Monday evening I returned from work to find a letter that had been put under the door of my room. Here’s what it said:

Zee Lux Holding Company Limited
576/1 Asoke-Dindaeng Road, District Dindaeng
Bangkok 10400, Thailand.

TEL: 02-2461189-99 FAX: 02-2461200

3rd November 2008

NOTICE OF EVICTION

Dear Tenant,
You are requested to gather your belongings by 5:00 p.m. the 10th of November 2008, and vacate the premises of Sitara Place under the jurisdiction of Zee Lux Holding Co. Ltd., 576/1 Asoke Dindaeng Road Dindaeng District, Bangkok 10400.
Under the terms of your lease, the security deposit will be confiscated due to lack of due procedure on your part to follow the rules and regulations set down by the management under the lease agreement governing use of rental premises.
Kindly note that litigation proceedings will begin immediately if you do not comply with the intent of this notification.

The Management
Sitara Place
(Zee Lux holding Co., Ltd.,)

Note: You will see from the letter that I have re-printed above that my landlord is actually a corporation. For ease of reference and readability, I will refer to the landlord throughout the blog as “he” although my dealing with the landlord have been via several different representatives of the company – some male and some female. It seems tedious to try to continually define who was involved in each conversation, but it is a small company that I believe is family-owned and operated.

Well, where to begin?

I really didn’t like the landlord – I’d thought he was a prick since I moved into the apartment in March – and I’d planned on moving out of the apartment at the end of my lease, so the idea of leaving wasn’t all that terrible. But I was a bit offended by the idea that he thought he could put me out and steal my deposit while he was doing it.

So, initially I spent some time thinking about how I could fight him or damage him in some way.

But then I started thinking about it.

I wanted to get out of the apartment, and here I had the chance to leave nearly 4 months ahead of schedule. So, that was a positive.

I already knew where I wanted to move to, and the rent was gonna be cheaper by about 3,500 baht per month, so that was a good thing. I started thinking about how to best deal with the situation.

Aside from my anger and pride, and the “principle” of the thing, there were two issues that bothered me:

1. The son of a bitch wanted to steal my deposit, which was around 21,000 baht
2. He was telling me I had to move in 7 days, and it was gonna be tough to locate a place to live, pack and organize a move while I was working.

I did a little quick math. By saving 3,500 baht per month for December, January and February I would realize a savings of 13,500 baht versus staying in my apartment to the end of my rental contract.

He hadn’t mentioned the November rent in the letter. I was paid in full, so if I got the 20 unused days returned it would amount to about 6,500 baht. As it turned out, a friend of mine offered to let me stay at his place for free for those 20 days, so I was able to add that to my rent savings.

13,500 + 6,500 = 20,000 baht.

The total amount of my deposit that the landlord planned to keep was about 21,000 baht. There would be some normal deductions for cleaning and the like anyway, so I figured that by moving out, I was just about breaking even against the money he was stealing from me.

When I did a little research to find out my options for recovering the deposit, I learned that I would have to fight to get it back – a process that would probably involve time, lawyers and money.

It took a day or so to come to peace with it, but I decided to let go of the deposit, stay with my friend for three weeks, and then move to the new apartment when it became available on 1 December.

Of course, I still had to get my rent money back.

So, by Wednesday night I had figured out what I wanted to do. I spent Wednesday to Sunday packing my meager belongings into a dozen boxes and a half dozen small suitcases and storing them with two friends. On Monday morning I left the building to go to work, with no plan to ever return.

It was a stressful week in which I used a lot of mental and emotional energy and spent a lot of time taking care of details. I let nine days go by without posting a blog… probably the longest stretch I’d ever gone since beginning to write Werewolf’s Lair a couple of years ago.

So now I’m living on a sofa in a friend’s room. I have been here for 8 days, though I did both of us a favor by spending two nights in Koh Samed over the weekend. There’s about 12 days left until I’m out of his hair. So far it seems like we’ll survive it with our friendship still intact and without killing each other. Of course, I’m not having any long-time sessions with any of my favorite bar girls, but I guess I can just add that to the financial savings that flow out of the situation.

In a nutshell, then, those are the facts of the situation.

But I wanted to also describe some of the things I learned about being a tenant in Thailand through this process –primarily to try to offer some information that may be useful to someone else in the future.

By way of offering some bona fides, I will say that in Australia I was a licensed real estate agent, with several certificate sales people working in my business. I have more than a passing understanding of real estate law in Australia, and a good understanding of Contract Law in Oz and the US. I believe that I can offer fairly concise explanations of the issues – though I must stress that I am NOT a lawyer, and my knowledge of Thai law is limited to internet research and some brief conversations with lawyers and real estate professionals.

The information below will be a synthesis of my detailed understanding of real estate law in Oz, general understanding of contract law in two countries, and basic knowledge of relevant Thai law gleaned from a day and a half of quick research.

I’ll try to identify what I believe to be facts, and what is pure opinion on my part as I go, so that it can be a more reliable guide.

Tenancy Laws

In America and Australia there are special tenancy laws. In effect they modify or override normal contract law, and they specifically define what tenants and landlords can and cannot do.

They exist because lawmakers believe that consumers (tenants) require legal protection due to the typical power imbalance in the landlord-tenant relationship. Most tenancy laws create and protect rights of tenants.

I learned that, for the most part, Thailand doesn’t have such laws. Rental or lease agreements in Thailand are covered under general contract law. The agreements are legal and binding, but enforcement of the contract and it’s terms is something that requires legal processes that will involve police or the courts, as opposed to regulatory bodies or commissions that are more common in the US and Oz.

The “Notice of Eviction”

I have reprinted the text from the “Notice of Eviction” above.

It’s a letter with absolutely no legal power. Simply sliding this letter under my door was not an eviction. The Landlord was simply expressing his wishes. He could not use this notice to force me out of the building, and that’s a fact.

My rent was paid, and as far as I know, until the courts said otherwise I had a legally binding contract that gave me the right to occupy the room until the 28th of February 2009. Essentially, the landlord was simply “requesting” that I leave, not demanding.

Note that he all but says so with the last sentence which says that legal proceedings will begin (they haven’t begun yet) if I don’t comply with the letter. So, I have the choice to comply or not.

This letter was NOT a notice of eviction. It was a request for me to leave, and a notification of intent to evict, though as I will show below, I believe the threat to begin eviction proceedings was a hollow one.

The Power of a Written Contract

People often believe that if something is written in a contract, it is enforceable.

Not true.

All sorts of shit is written into contracts that may be illegal, or, which may be unenforceable for a variety of reasons. Often the court will simply see that one party to the contract gains an unfair advantage if the provision is enforced, and strikes it on the basis of fairness. This is especially true if there is a wide disparity in the ‘power position’ of the two parties to the contract.

Rental or Lease agreements are very good examples of the type of contract where one party (the landlord) is seen to have a great deal more power than the other party (the tenant). It is not at all unusual for courts in most countries to refuse to enforce unfair provisions, especially if they enrich the stronger party at the expense of the weaker one.

So, just because something is written in a contract, a notice, a letter or other document doesn’t make it true, right or enforceable. It may be, but you often won’t know until you test it in court, or at least consult with a knowledgeable attorney.

Grounds for Eviction

You will notice that the landlord cited as his grounds for eviction that I failed “to follow the rules and regulations set down by the management under the lease agreement governing use of rental premises.”

Basically, I made a lot of noise, got angry, and cursed at the security guard and the landlord when the security guard tried to crack my head open with a baton.

Here are things I didn’t do: physically assault someone, threaten someone, damage any property in the building.

Also, this was the only incident that had occurred in the 8 months or so that I’d lived in the building. The landlord and I had been through fiery arguments before but they’d been in his office and revolved around service failures more mundane in nature, such as the faulty internet service in the building, the landlords frequent forgetfulness and failure to live up to commitments – nothing like the angry and public argument following the assault by the security guard.

So, though he doesn’t say specifically why he wants to evict me, it seems to be because I made a lot of noise one time.

My opinion is that, as grounds for eviction, this simply wouldn’t stand up to a test in court of law. A single incident – not a repeated pattern of behaviour – needs to be extremely serious to get a tenant evicted.
I know my landlord; he would argue that it is written into the Lease Agreement, therefore he has grounds to evict.

But as I said earlier, just because it is written in the contract doesn’t make it right, legal or enforceable. In this case, I simply don’t believe he had sufficient grounds to win an eviction fight.

Notice

All contracts will provide notice periods for certain things like terminating a contract.

The notice period will be judged for reasonableness in light of the specific contract and circumstances. For example, it wouldn’t be considered fair in most places for the electric or gas company to notify you that your payment was late and say that your utilities would be cut off in 24 hours if you failed to pay. This would be considered unfair, since the burden on the utility company of a late payment is almost nothing compared to the burden on the customer of being without gas or electricity.

My landlord attempted to give me seven days’ notice to move out.

Is this a “reasonable” notice period?

Not in my opinion. To expect someone to locate a new place to live, then to organize and execute a relocation in seven days is – well – stupid. I can’t believe that any police organization or court would enforce a seven-day notice of eviction.

I don’t know what a reasonable notice period is in Thailand, but I believe that 28 or 30 days would be the minimum that I would expect to be enforceable.

My November Rent

Here’s an interesting point. The landlord didn’t make any mention of my November rent. I had paid my rent two months in advance, so he’d been holding my rent since September. He wanted me to move out on 10 November, so there was a 20 day period for which I wanted to get my rent money back.

I thought for a while about when and how to attempt to get that money.

In the end, I did it on Thursday, three days after receiving the landlord’s letter.

I simply walked into the office, approached the office girl who normally collects my rent from me, showed her the letter I had received, and told her I’d like my 6,500 baht refund now.

She had picked up the phone and started dialing before I got the letter unfolded, and was speaking to the landlord while I was still telling her what I wanted. She told me that the landlord would be over in a few minutes.

I told her it wasn’t necessary to speak to him, I simply wanted my money. She seemed to understand that. She called the bookkeeper from the back to confirm that I had paid the rent already, and they started photocopying things and looking at the computer. I actually thought they were just gonna give me my money.

She asked me to take a seat. I told her truthfully that I was very busy (packing, in fact) and that I’d simply come back. She told me to return in ten minutes.

I went to my room and packed some things. I returned about thirty minutes later, expecting to sign a receipt and get my rent money back.

Instead, as I walked in the office the landlord was standing there. He asked, “What can I do for you?”

I answered that he didn’t need to do anything, I had simply come in to collect my rent refund.

He then asked me if I had already vacated the room.

No, I said, I hadn’t vacated yet. In his letter he had asked me to leave by Monday, and as he well knew, that was several days in the future.

“After you move out, I’ll refund your money” he said to me.

Well, that wasn’t gonna work at all, and I told him so.

We postured for a couple of minutes, with him saying I’d get my money after I moved out and me insisting that I must have it now. Finally he made the mistake… he asked me what I would do if he didn’t give me the money immediately.

“Well, I simply won’t move out” was my reply.

“But you have to move” he said. “The letter says you have to be out by the 10th”

I actually laughed out loud, and told him that he knew as well as I did that the letter had no more legal meaning than if he had slid a pigeon feather under my door. I told him that if he didn’t give me the rent money for the final 20 days of November immediately, then I would simply stay living in the apartment until the 28th of February, and he was welcome to start eviction proceedings against me.

His silence told me that he knew that I was right and that he believed I was serious.

“If I give you the money today, how do I know you’ll actually move out on Monday?” he asked.

“Well” I told him, “I wouldn’t have a legal right to occupy because I wouldn’t have paid rent beyond the tenth.”

Technically this isn’t true. A tenant still has occupation rights even in the face of late rent payments. I guess that I really meant that morally I wouldn’t feel that I had the right to stay.

But I could read in his face that he was dubious. I decided to insult him with the truth.

“Look. I’ve lived up to all my obligations under the lease. I’ve paid my rent at least a month in advance for as long as I’ve lived here, and I’ve never done anything dishonest with you. Even when I’ve been angry with you, I’ve yelled at you honestly.

But you, as my landlord, have lied to me repeatedly about a number of things (which I enumerated for him) and now you’ve given me a letter saying that you intend to steal my deposit for no reason. Why do you think that I’ll trust you?!” I asked.

“If I don’t move out by Monday, you can start legal proceedings to try to evict me, but if I do move out Monday and you don’t give me my rent money back, what can I do? I can’t very well move back in. Having already told me you want to steal my deposit, I believe you want to steal my rent money as well. Basically, I think you’re lying to me, so the only way I move out Monday is if I walk out of this office today with the overpaid rent money in my hand.”

He knew that I was right. He intended to take my deposit money unfairly – he’d put the fact in writing. As long as I lived in the room I had rights, but moving out took away all my leverage.

He was quiet for a while, then asked me if I’d sign a paper saying that I’d move on Monday if he gave me the cash.

This was no burden. I was moving Monday. I wasn’t trying to scam him. I’d already resigned myself to letting him steal the deposit money, I simply wanted to make sure I got my rent back. I agreed to sign the paper.

It took ten minutes to get the whole thing done.

I was fairly stunned that in the circumstances the prick thought that I would trust him. I guess it should have been less surprising that he didn’t trust me. When you make a habit of cheating, lying to and stealing from other people you must think that they behave the same way you do.

In a way, I felt sorry for the little turd.

The Deposit Money

In Australia there is something called the Rental Bond Board (RBB). When a landlord collects a deposit from a tenant, the money is actually sent to the RBB, who holds it. There are rules defining how much deposit can be demanded, and how refunds are to be handled. When the tenant moves out, the landlord completes a form detailing any money that he feels he should collect from the bond, and gives a copy of the paper to the tenant.

The Landlord sends the paper to the RBB. If the Tenant signs the paper without contest, then the deposit money is returned to the tenant (usually via direct deposit) in a few days. Otherwise, if the tenant wants to dispute the landlord’s claims, then he can simply notify the RBB who will investigate and make a decision about the validity of the claims, and will process the bond refund inside of a month.

There’s no similar system to protect tenants in Thailand. When you give your deposit to a landlord in Thailand, the landlord keeps it, and as far as I can tell, tenants rely on the goodwill of the landlord when it comes to getting the money back at the end of the contract.

Here are a few things I learned about deposit money, both from internet research and practical experience.

How much?

It seems to be pretty standard that most landlords ask for two months’ rent as a deposit. In looking at the cheaper rooms that are usually rented by low wage Thai people I learned that the deposit on these cheaper rooms is often equal to only 1 or 1.5 months. The amount is set by the landlord, but will generally follow “industry practice”.

A Month

The first time I finished a rental contract in Thailand was in 2006. I expected to get the deposit money back within a few days of moving out. I was shocked when the lady in the office told me it would be a month.

A month! Are you serious?

She was. She had the good grace to apologize and say that it was simply her company policy.

I have since learned that this is normal practice in Thailand, and that nearly every landlord holds deposit money for 30 days after you move out.

Final Month’s Rent

For much of my life I’ve been a tenant. It has been my habit not to pay my final month’s rent, letting the landlord take it out of the deposit.

There were reasons for this. One was that I usually needed cash to pay deposit on the next place, so I cashflowed it by using the money I should have paid in rent.

A second reason is that it reduces my potential loss if the landlord decides to try to screw me on the deposit return.

I’m actually not sure if, in Australia, the tenant has the right to do this… probably not.

I was surprised to read on the internet that in Thailand a tenant specifically does not have the right to simply not pay the final month’s rent in expectation that the landlord will deduct it from the deposit.

My Landlord, My Deposit

My landlord decided to take my entire deposit (approximately 21,000 baht).

Did he have the right to do so?

I don’t think he did, and I don’t think any court in Thailand would have backed up his claim to it.

What is the intent of deposit money? It is to protect the landlord against financial damage from the tenant. For example, if a tenant puts a hole in the wall that has to be repaired, or leaves a dirty room that needs to be cleaned, the costs can be recovered from the deposit.

The key principle here is that the landlord should not be enriched by deposit money – he should simply be protected against being out of pocket.

My landlord claimed 21,000 baht from me in his letter. What was his basis for this claim? “, the security deposit will be confiscated due to lack of due procedure on your part to follow the rules and regulations set down by the management under the lease agreement governing use of rental premises.”

Doubtless he has copied the wording directly from the lease agreement.

The landlord would point to the Agreement, signed by me and him, and say that it says he can take the deposit if I break the rules. The rules say I can’t make a noisy disturbance. Since I did, he can confiscate my deposit. Because the contract says so.

Again, just because something is written in a contract or other document doesn’t mean that it is legal, right or enforceable.

But the fact is, he’s holding the money.  Basically he’s sticking his tongue out at me, and telling me to come try to get it back.  To do so I would probably need to sue him in court.

I am very confident that if this were brought to a court of law, the judge would ask the landlord to detail his exact damages to justify absconding with my deposit. I am equally confident that the landlord would be unable to justify taking the money.

Sure, there might be a few hundred baht for standard cleaning or touch up paint, or what have you. But we’re talking hundreds or baht here – certainly not 21,000.

I’m confident the landlord knows that he has no legal right to the money. In that respect, I believe he knows he’s a thief.

He has bullied other tenants in the building in the past, and I am guessing that my deposit isn’t the only one he’s stolen along the way. It’s a pretty good scam. Give a tenant a letter of eviction and tell them that you’re taking their deposit.

I’m guessing that he gets away with it for a variety of reasons.

Most of his tenants are foreigners. Some would be ignorant of their rights, and some will simply believe him.

For others, like me, the amount of money involved is simply not enough to get into a legal battle over. Twenty one grand is significant, but not that significant. I can’t imagine the legal fees involved in a fight like this one being any less than that, so there’s zero financial advantage in the fight.

My attitude towards the deposit might be a bit different if I was faced with having to pay a lot more for a new place, but in my case the apartment I was ‘evicted’ from was somewhat overpriced, and by moving to a place that is cheaper, it is easy for me to recover my dough.

In fact, because I’m the kind of person to honor commitments, I never would have broken my contract on my own, but if I’d gotten my calculator out and done the math, I’d have walked out on the contract and surrendered my deposit three months ago when I finally realized what an asshole the landlord was. I’d have been much better off financially to have walked out on the apartment in August when I decided I’d had enough and wanted to move.

The landlord ‘evicted’ the people who lived next door to me just about two weeks before giving me my letter. I’m sure he took their deposit money too.

But in my opinion, he has no right to the money, because he is taking it to punish a tenant, not to keep himself from suffering a financial loss. The landlord is actually profiting by quoting a general and largely undefined clause in the contract, and using it as a basis for stealing from tenants he doesn’t like.

What’s ironic is that I chose to move into this apartment building specifically because of the individual representatives of the landlord that I met when I was looking for apartments. I met two people; they spoke perfect English, they were polite and enthusiastic about the building.

The rent was higher than my budget, but I thought about all the horror stories I’d heard about Bangkok landlords failing to meet commitments, making arbitrary rules, and taking deposit money unfairly.

People like these, I thought when I met them, will be easy to talk to and never cause me problems.

How very wrong that thought was!

This landlord is the ONLY landlord in the US, Australia or Thailand that has ever given me trouble, and is the only one who has ever stolen my money. The native Thais that I have dealt with in the past may have sometimes been a struggle to talk to because of language barriers, but they have been scrupulously honest and have dealt fairly with me in every transaction.

In contrast, the foreigners who represented the landlord in this building had perfect English language skills, but in every other way were frustrating to deal with. I rarely got any satisfaction when I approached the landlord with requests or suggestions, and what little satisfaction I did have came only after a great deal of angst, and usually only if I reached in my pocket and paid a fee. In the end, all the potential problems I was trying to avoid by moving into this building managed by foreigners were visited upon me by Zee Lux Holding Company Limited.

Give me Thais to deal with – language issues and all – any day.

The Eviction Process

Evicting a tenant is not easy, even in Thailand.

A landlord has to start with a 30-day notice, but if the tenant doesn’t move, an entire legal process has to be set in motion. I read different estimates of how much time it takes, but like Australia and the US, it isn’t quick.

I’d guess that 4 months would be a typical amount of time from start of process to actual eviction.

In my case that means that my lease agreement would probably have ended before the landlord could have gotten an enforceable eviction notice from a Thai court – and that’s assuming that he could have gotten an eviction notice at all. I absolutely do not believe he could. He couldn’t show grounds for eviction, and wouldn’t have been able to identify any damages to his building or business that would warrant a breach of contract on my part.

If you are a tenant in Thailand and you want to say – I actually wanted to move – then you can stay put where you are and force the landlord to deal with you.

He may take you to court, or he may send the leg breakers after you, so be sure you know which is his style before you decide to take him on.

The Bottom Line

I’ll be moving into my new apartment on the first of December.

I found out that I have a true friend here in Thailand. I was planning on moving into a serviced apartment for three weeks, but he volunteered to let me stay with him without my ever asking.

I was reminded that rights can be protected and principles upheld, but if it means going to court then those rights and principles can cost a lot of money. Sometimes it is economical to simply let your rights be trampled. It depends on what you value more – your own pride and dignity, or your money and time.

In my case I decided to put the greater value on my money and time.

Several years ago I was in a partnership with several other guys in Sydney. We spent several weeks deciding on a major business decision for the partnership that involved commitment from all partners and a large amount of risk. We were moving to a new office, investing a lot of money in equipment and fit out, and expanding the staff in an effort to grow the business. We were taking out a substantial business loan at the bank as part of the move. We agreed that we would only move forward if we were unanimous in the commitment, since we all had to work hard to make the move work out, and we would all be bearing a financial risk.

We did it.

About three weeks after we moved into the new premises one of the partners got cold feet and backed out. He refused to sign lease papers or loan documents, and he wanted to withdraw from the partnership.

It was a stormy time, and emotions ran high.

For several weeks after he left, we (the remaining partners) sat around complaining about the guy who left, and often plotting how we could get even.

One day a business colleague from outside our company came to visit and witnessed the grumbling and plotting.

“You know” he said “as long as you guys keep spending mental energy and time on this guy, he is controlling you. You are at his mercy. Until you let go of that past event and get focused on your business you will be letting him control your lives.”

That comment hit home. It took just moments for me to see the wisdom, and to adopt it as my own.

The issue with my landlord this month has been much the same in my mind. He was unjustified, unfair, unscrupulous and a dickhead but if I sit around worrying about it and plotting revenge then he is controlling me and my life. By putting him out of my mind and moving on I retain control. There’s just no profit in dwelling on what happened.

I’m excited by my upcoming move. I will be back in Sukhumvit where I was much happier. I will be living near Sukhumvit Road and very close to Soi Cowboy. My rent will be cheaper. I think I’ll be much more satisfied with my life.

If you are a tenant in Thailand, I think it’s important that you realize that there are some things that are easy to control and some that are difficult. Know the difference and be ready for what awaits you.

My experience in Bangkok is that most landlords are professional and honest. But I hope the information above and the way it is presented will help you to be prepared for the ones that aren’t.