A landlord has come under fire after accidentally sending a vile response to a concerned mom-of-three after she asked about the possibility of having her rent reduced amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Per news.com.au, after Violet (who has chosen not to reveal her last name) learned that her husband had lost his job in IT as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, she contacted her landlord about the possibility of a reprieve.
With three children to care for - two of whom are on the autism spectrum - the Brisbane mom was concerned about how her family was going to afford rent purely on her National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) worker's salary.
Speaking to news.com.au, the concerned renter said: "Only having one wage is quite tricky. Especially as I don’t earn heaps in the disability field."
Violet then explained how she decided to contact her landlord asking if the family could be granted a reduction in rent - adding that it was the first time the family had ever been in contact with the homeowner, having always paid rent via her property manager.
She said: "We originally sent the email (asking for a rent reduction) to the property manager – we were just running it past them, to see if it was possible. They must have passed it on to the landlord.
"We didn’t ask them to, it was just an idea at that point."
However, when the mom-of-three opened her unread email, she found what she described as a "heartbreaking realization".
The reply from her landlord read: "These guys can get f**ked. Well what sort of references will they think they will get from you if they behave like this?" he added.
(*Violet’s Twitter account is not her real last name.)
Violet believes the landlord accidentally hit "reply to all" when he came to sending his vulgar response. She said: "We couldn’t believe it to start with – we’d never had any contact with the landlord before that."
Sadly, the family's property manager was also unsympathetic to their problem. Violet told news.com.au that: "The property manager himself just told us to buy a house. He was like: ‘With your children maybe you should just get a property.'
"We decided not to answer at that point – don’t you think we would if we could? It just makes us feel that no-one is on our side."
Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced over the weekend that governments would excuse people or businesses who were unable to pay rent due to financial distress caused by the ongoing global crisis, saying:
"My message to tenants, particularly to commercial tenants and commercial landlords is a very straightforward one - we need you to sit down, talk to each other and work this out."
He also added that there would be consequences for the banks and landlords that failed to help out struggling tenants.
However, Violet is not convinced that her family's problems will be solved, and that deferring rent is simply delaying the inevitable. She said:
"Even if we can’t be evicted, we’ll go on someone’s blacklist because we haven’t paid, and we can't afford to go on someone’s blacklist.
"If all of it is owed at the end of the six months, that’s an impossible burden to put on us. It seems far more geared towards business leases rather than renters."
Real Estate Institute of NSW CEO Tim McKibbin echoed Violet's concerns, telling Sky News how the six-month moratorium on evictions simply "moves the problem from one party to another" as it "transfers financial difficulties from the tenant to the landlord" and does nothing to "solve the actual problem".
