Inspections

Meta notes: see end of this for some meta notes.

   Imagine, you live in Australia. The lucky land! Home to beautiful beaches, gorgeous forests, delightfully exotic animals, and best of all affordable healthcare. You find an affordable place to rent just twenty minutes from the famous beaches at Torquay (which is the best you can ever dream of, "affordable place to buy" does not exist anymore)
   You happily settle in. There's just one problem. It turns out, in Australia as a renter, you have to endure the property management invading your home twice a year for a "routine inspection." They say this is "necessary to protect the landlord's property" or some shit, but somehow the millions of property owners in the United States get by fine without this (rules vary state by state but its actually forbidden in California for them to demand entry to just inspect the place, except in the case of low income housing which just proves the intention is to persecute).

   The first time I had to endure such an inspection I put the tea on before they came over (by which I mean actual tea, don't get me started on how "tea" somehow means dinner here) hoping to have a pleasant hospitable interaction. No the officious woman bruskly declined tea with a scowl and somehow ended the same sentence with a complaint about the cobwebs by the ceiling. At that and future inspections she complained about loose change on the floor, long grass in the edges and corners the lawnmower couldn't each, and other such things which could have no concievable impact on the relative protection of the property.
   AND while peering into my bedroom complaining about the change on the floor ::snap:: takes a photo. And of every other part of the house that interests her including the bathroom and shower, so she can later share your private spaces with her colleagues for their amusement or examine them in her own time.
   This is in addition to annual electrical inspections AND an annual smoke alarm inspection even though it often comes a week after the electrical inspection which did test the smoke alarms.

   And, the latina wife goes into absolute cleaning-neurosis overdrive knowing she's about to be judged on the cleanliness of the house. We get notified a month before the inspection, and let me tell you, with 29 days till inspection I'm already getting shanghaied into spending my evenings scrubbing the back corners behind the sofa.

   In the lead up to the inspection six months ago, with some kind of intuition, Cristina set me to work thoroughly scrubbing the shower walls the night before. Then she didn't think I'd done a good enough job so then _she_ thoroughly scrubbed them. Then the lady from the properly management came, a vapid twenty-something girl with fake eyelashes, and of all things, she chose to mention in her email aftwards that we just need to scrub the shower. Which, other than it having been thoroughly scrubbed already, I couldn't think of a more invading-someone's-privacy thing to commenting on than their shower. This most recent time she said we need to scrub the guest shower, you know, the shower that has not been used since her last inspection. I think there's definitely an untoward interest in showers going on here.

   We had our most recent inspection just the other day and I realized something else -- they actually literally tailor their criticisms to most annoy the resident they are dealing with. Usually I'm the one who manages to be home, and they always have some complaint about the garden or lawn for me. They never once even looked in the oven. Well, this time Cristina was the one who could be home to meet them. They didn't even look in the garage. They had no comments about the garden. But she did look in the oven and declare it needed to be cleaned.

   I really think this is a sadistic humiliation ritual that is entirely unnecessary. I lived at my old place for eight years. Even if they wanted to inspect it after six months and a year, what are the odds that between 4.5 and 5 years I'm suddenly going to decide I'm going to --I don't know-- grow mushrooms on the walls of one of the bedrooms or something? I think they just keep up the twice-yearly inspections as something they (Property management companies) can charge the landlords for, and/or an excuse to pruriently invade people's privacy and bully them while doing it.
   Again, most states in the United States don't even allow it and the lack thereof certainly hasn't killed the viability of being a bloodsucking landlord.



Meta-notes: This one I'll run directly here on dreamwidth rather than the reader, just in case anyone's having terminal trouble reaching or commenting from the reader -- if that is the case please let me know? The previous entry did indeed not have a Dreamwidth entry to comment on until just before the poll posted so if you read before that yes there wasn't a dreamwidth commenting option.