This scenario sounds a little familiar to me. I reckon the LL believes that the occupiers are in Ireland on an expat package (housing,utilities, car, schooling, per diem & salary) sponsored by their employers & see this as a fast cash route, in the belief that the employers will blindly pay any bills sent forward rather than investigate, I've seen this attitude before with landlords & their Expat Clients, although not in Ireland.
stick to your guns OP, what's right is right & best of luck.
Thanks a lot for your input, folks.
I was going to ask - when opening a dispute with the PRTB, will I receive any confirmation of receipt of documents, etc - or will they contact us once the dispute is opened, etc? I plan to phone on Monday morning anyway, but I am not sure whether they contact the parties with a case number or something.
This is what he may be thinking. We are not in an ex-pat package at all, we pay for all our rent/living expenses ourselves, but he may be under the false impression that we will just blindly go and pay for it, or just submit a hefty invoice to a company that would just go and pay - as if companies were that generous nowadays.
We vacated the house on the 1st of January, we cleaned the house ourselves and left it in a cleaner state than it was when we moved in, apart from the much-mentioned walls and chairs
we did plan to get it professionally cleaned but could not get anyone to do it on that day. He said that he knew people who could do it from the 3rd of Jan onwards, but if we decided to go for that, then we would have to pay ANOTHER FULL WEEK of rent so we could find a company to come and clean, and of course, pay for that ourselves.
We sent a letter to his solicitors simply stating that we were not
accepting the costs he is trying to charge and that a dispute had been sent to the PRTB. That was 2 weeks ago and we haven't heard from them since. Oh, and the letter said that if they had to take things further to collect the money (it did sound a bit like "we will pop round and break your legs") all the legal costs incurred etc would be added to the monies demanded.
The house has been advertised to let for the last 2 months - no takers so far.
The photos on the ad are recent and there has not been any furniture replacement, so surely we couldn't have left them in such a bad state, could we?
Just the fact that the guy is losing out on €2100 every month right now makes us feel better.
Will keep you posted ... thanks again for all your insight, it's been very helpful.