Hi all,
We have our apartment handover soon as we are moving into a new apartment.
We have setup the handover date that will include the rental agency, the next tenant and an agent from MV (Zurich) and a professional cleaning company. We have hired a cleaning company with handover guarantee that has very high reviews.
However, we are still concerned about the following issues:
1) we have some holes in the wall which were filled by a handman earlier. However, they are very obviously visible and we are not sure how it will be perceived by the rental agency.
2) There are some small black marks / loosened paint here and there in a few walls, usually near the holes.
3) a couple of racks in the fridge are broken.
4) there is a small hole in the grout floor in the balcony.
We are trying to understand how we can minimize the possible deficit in caution deposit.
Any recommendations? More specifically we have the following questions:
1) IIUC, a damage should either not be a considered a damage (i.e., normal wear and tear), or considered a damage and hence paid by our household insurance. So, our total expenditure should be only the deductible at most?
Is that true? Or are there any possible exceptions to this?
2) What should I do if there is a disagreement with the rental agency on the day of the handover.
Any suggestions.
best regards.
You have someone from MV and a cleaner with a handover guarantee, that's about as good as it can get.
Hope for a dark and rainy day, so that defects will be less visible - but not so likely in June
What colour/finish are the walls?
When we moved out of our last rental, we had some quite bad stains on the kitchen wall. I got a tin of white paint and painted the wall. Job done.
I have successfully used white wall stain remover spray on some nasty stains.
Complete cover, dries quickly & doesnt require to paint the entire wall.
https://www.hornbach.ch/shop/Maston-...1/artikel.html
The walls in our apartment are an off white stipple effect coating. I was really surprised by that as it was a new build in 2018 and all those Artex type coatings were something from the decorating horror stories of the late 70s and 80s back in Britain (when my sister visited she said "oh this wall stuff is so outdated" - a German friend of hers said the same thing )
The coating is an absolute pain as it picks up things like dust, you can't sponge it clean like you would with a flat surface. It's also very difficult to match in if you need to do a small repair as everything from DIY shops stands out as brilliant white against it. You have to buy a certain type of filler and rough it up.
By the time we leave to retire we'll have been here about 8 years plus, so we'll be paying for damages and redecoration from the deposit anyway. I actually think it's a good system here, given my experience of being a landlord in Scotland for 14 years until recently. Tenants had all the rights and landlords virtually none. My last tenant was a teacher who obviously liked living in a filthy hole, I did not even have the right to tell him to clean the place after I'd seen the inspection reports
Small marks on walls are normally considered wear and tear. Im afraid you will probably have to pay for the refridgerator rack, unless it was already damaged and noted when you moved in. The balcony is probably in the wear and tear category as well.
Damage should be covered by your insurance, but it will be subject to a deductible (in our case, it was CHF250). Each incidence of damage is considered a separate claim, and is subject to the deductible, unless you can demonstrate that the damage is related to a single incident (eg, a fire or flood).
In practical terms, our insurance considered all damage within a single room as "an incident" when we claimed, and apart from the deductible, paid out the full claimed amount without further discussion or investigation.