Early Termination and Inspections in Ireland, Is this normal?
Hi everyone, recently I had a very unpleasant situation in Ireland.
My boyfriend and I live together, we are both 19 years old. We are students under the Erasmus+ program. We had been living with our landlords for 4 months, and a couple of days ago they texted us saying they needed to talk to us and asked when we would be home. I said at 7 pm. We arrived at 6 pm, and they came about 30 minutes later, at 6:30 pm.
They came in and told us that they were evicting us because the house was not clean. They said that food was left out in the kitchen, the dishes were not washed, there was mold in the house (although it had been there from the beginning), and that the oven had not been cleaned. In our contract, it was stated that we could be evicted for property damage, noise, or unauthorized occupants. None of this applied to us, the only issue was that the house was not clean. Yes, it really wasn’t very tidy, but they only gave us 4 hours’ notice before their visit.
Later, they sent us a notice of early termination of the tenancy. There were two points in it that we didn’t agree with.
The first is that there will be a preliminary inspection on a certain date, and then a final inspection within 7 days after the tenants leave. We don’t understand this at all, why would they do another inspection 7 days later? Is this normal practice? We don’t want this.
The second is a “No Waiver” clause stating that during or after the final inspection, they can report missing or damaged items. We also disagree with this, as we want everything to be checked in our presence and properly documented while we are there.
Could you please tell us if this is normal practice? Does this actually happen, or can we stand our ground and insist on having one inspection in our presence and documenting everything together?