I guess due to luck with circumstances, this is often an issue for me. I wonder how normal it is. I was joking about this today with someone and comparing it to the scene from The Simpsons where Mr. Burns wakes up from being shot and randomly starts yelling Homer’s name when asked who shot him. Thirty minutes later someone tried to confront me because I seemed like the most likely candidate for who stole their mail.
We’re currently being threatened with court action by our landlady for using our flat for commercial purposes. It’s obvious bunkum, and we’ve had inspections and everything that prove we don’t do it and sent all kinds of evidence to the lawyer accusing us, but the thing is that we followed a rental commission procedure last year to have the rent tested and so the landlady’s losing money or whatever. It’s all very dramatic but we’re confident because it’s so easy to prove that it’s a load of bollocks.
How do you test rent?
I don’t know about other countries, but in the Netherlands you go to the rental commission for a “rent check”: https://www.huurcommissie.nl/support/huurprijscheck
Are utilities included in your rent? If so maybe the landlady is seeing increased utility usage/costs, and the rental commission decided yep, they’re running a business in there.
They’re excluded, and the rental commission is one of the bodies who’s inspected us on the behest of the landlady. There’s a little sentence at the end of the report saying something like “we realise that we’ve inspected the property based on a fraudulent tip-off”.
The other thing is that the rental commission come down and measure the place as part of the test, so if it was being used for commercial purposes, we would’ve been caught red-handed there and then.