Those are some interesting top 3 complaints. Wasn't expecting those. My top 3 would be:

1. That I rent and don't own.
2. Space.
3. Apartment implies urban and I'd rather be rural.

I am going through the worst rental situation ever right now. One day I'm going to write a book. I wasn't feeling well and finally the discovery of mold was found on my A/C Blower. Whats worse... my landlord is an atty and didn't care. It's sad. I had to solve this LARGE QUESTION MARK of a problem and disect it. All I can say is while checking out rentals make sure you pull out the filter and even ask the landlord if you could look inside the air return.. Pay an attorney to look over your rental contract, too. Landlord's get away with way too much. There are probably thousands of people who gave up in my situation. But I'm still kicking and will not allow this to happen to the next person... Know your rights & never second guess your intitution..

I was also confused by this article - isn't one of the top renter complaints that your crappy landlord won't let you make changes that you want? At my former apartment, my landlord would not allow us to do anything, including insulating the windows or other things on this list!

I have just sold my condo and moved to a rental. I am in a lovely part of town now and although my building is less than well maintained other than in my own suite I am finally stress-free.
When I see that the promised renovation of the seedy lobby, entrance and elevator is not being done it doesn't bother me! Not my responsibility!
Whereas in the condo, the completely inactive strata council was so plagued with political issues nothing got done, thereby devaluing my property causing me stress.
My experience is that a majority of condo owners have what I term "rental mentality"... (as I am a renter now I hope not to offend anyone)... in that they will let someone else be responsible.
Stratas cannot operate that way and the microcosm of society which this portrays is disfunctional. (wish it HAD worked)
So look at the positive side of renting!! ha ha

I think BUGS should be number one. When you live close to filthy neighbors, it matters not one bit how tidy you keep your place. Ugh!

@ispellknofusion: I agree entirely. The NUMBER ONE complaint. I recently moved primarily for the reason that my place was spotless (in a really, truly spotless way -- I used to do housekeeping for a living), and yet I'd still find bugs in my kitchen. Too bad for them there was nothing for them to eat, but even the fact that they were wandering in told me about my neighbors' cleaniliness habits, or rather the lack thereof. *shudder*

Second complaint? Mice.

Third complaint? Neighbors who don't control their children, which has been my number one noise issue.

My number one complaint - LANDLORDS!

Odors, noise, and temperature, while all annoying, are fixable. Having a crap landlord who is unwilling to help you out is NOT.

Also, I'd add that my biggest complaint with renting is the condition of the buildings; you have NO CONTROL over whether or not your landlord gives a rip about maintaining the property if the general perception is that renters will just tear stuff up anyway.

A couple of our screen windows are "fixed" aka duct taped and the appliances are old and janky.

I'd like to see AT writers offer suggestions on how to cope with a landlord that will duct tape your screen windows to "fix" them but will screw you out of a deposit for putting brads in the walls to hang photos (and spackling over them).

I should clarify: if you have a very limited budget when it comes to apartment hunting, THEN you have to worry about the condition of the building. Obviously, if you are the kind of person who can afford to pay very expensive rent for a sweet pad, this won't be an issue.

yeah my complaint is the messy things all the other renters do. I'm clean but the smell of whatever is going on downstairs affects me. And I can smell their mold, and every nasty thing they cook. Then the noise. Between the noise of the outside world, and the renters near by... its enough to drive a girl mad some days!

I agree with Trish and Ispell. Number one complaint messy neighbors that lead to bugs. Fortunately I complain to my landlord and has the exterminator there in 24 hours. That helps with the problem for about a month. It's sad too, because my apartment is a great deal for the size and price... stupid dirty boys below me.

A little flip side: I am a landlord. We are responsible or semi-responsible for 84 rental units in 5 buildings and our personal townhouse that we can"t afford to live in.

When someone would come in and ask to see inside the filter of a heater or AC unit, I'd do everything possible to have you not live there. I rarely get asked about mold, but my answer is always the same, "i don't think so, but the building is 50 years old. If you are highly allergic, don't move here." So they move into the building next door that was built in the same year ;)

We tend to look for tenants that are low on the "wingy" scale. You'll spot winginess by the questions asked and the way people present themselves. With 84 tenants, I try to minimize the amount of calls I get, and I do that by weeding out the people that are going to call me with ridiculous complaints, and not like the place because I won't let them change it. I had an apartment that was painted bright blue and fuscia the last time we said they can paint. That will never happen again.

@Dominion, sounds like you don't enjoy your job as a landlord, and you want people to have and be ok with unacceptable living conditions due to the fact that you are too lazy to tend to that many units. If you can't tend to keeping up with 84 units, you shouldn't have 84 units, or you should get a maintenance company to do the work for you. I live in a building that was built in 1902, my landlord lives downstairs, and there are 4 units in the building. As soon as we have a complaint, they are on it right away, and in some cases do things for us that we don't even ask for (like painting our ceilings). I whole-heartedly think that having a great relationship with a landlord overrules having mice, a leaky roof, broken appliances, and having a broken toilet (all things we've encountered in the last year).

Enough ranting. Needless to say, by biggest complaint is bad landlords, and the most awesome thing about my apartment now is my awesome landlords.

Dominion, are you aware that your post reads: I want to do as little as possible and I don't care?

Do you clean ducts/ filters?

Do you really want people who don't care enough to ask?

And next time they want to paint, have a contract with a new deposit that reads they take the wall back to neutral upon moving out...before the last day of occupancy.

Wow, for a second I thought Dominion was MY landlord! LOL!

Yes, "Dominion", your name says it all!!! You represent the crappy landlords- the ones who see us renters as merely money in your pockets, putting as little effort as possible into dealing those "ridiculous complaints" until the ceiling collapses on my head (actually once happened to me because the landlord refused to deal with the "little leak" until the entire dining room ceiling fell on my head. Should have see the judge's face in the court when my lawyer presented 20 lb. chunks of my ceiling as evidence during the lawsuit!).

Yeah, we annoy you with those "ridiculous complaints"- like the other neighbors throwing their cigarettes off their balcony onto mine & you tell me to "get over it & not be such a whiner". ""Ridiculous complaints" that the dryer (which I pay for in my rent) doesn't work & you tell me to lug my stuff to the laundrette & to deduct the cost from my rent- for 6 looong months! If I had wanted to be going to a laundrette on my days off I wouldn't have looked for an apartment that included a washer & drier in the first place! Or how about the time my foot went through the floor because I discovered the landlord had covered over the hole with cardboard & a wall to wall carpet!

We ask you questions before moving in because we want to make sure that we are not only getting what we are paying for (if the rent includes heat & hot water then, damn it, there had better be heat & hot water!), but that YOU aren't going to be the type of landlord who allows the place to fall down around our heads & that you rent to crack addicts! If prospective tenants DON'T ask questions you can be fairly sure they will be they type of tenants that will stiff you on rent, while keeping me awake all night with their blaring stereos & "customers" coming & going all day & night.

If YOU can run a credit check/background check on US then WE should be allowed to run a check on the person we are forking our hard earned money over to!

And shut up about someone painting the place blue! THAT is why you keep security deposits! At least you had a tenant who made the effort to liven the place up a little- since all you paint the entire place with is "generic renter's white" paint that you pick up on sale or found left over in the basement of your brother in law's house. And I hate it when you paint the windows shut because you are too cheap & lazy to tape them first. I had a landlord who was a former merchant marine. The entire house was painted in "Battleship Grey". No lie. That was exactly what was printed on the 5 gallon paint buckets he had stashed in the barn. Must have "borrowed" them from his job. I painted over the entire place with a nice soft sky blue with white trim work. When I moved out the landlord kept my deposit. When by coincidence the person who moved in after me started dating a friend of mine a year later I got a chance to go visit my old apartment. My mouth hit the floor when I saw that the landlord had left my paint job on the walls- but kept my deposit!!! The current tenant said "The landlord doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would have such nice taste in painting. It is such a beautiful paint job. he said he did it himself." Oh, yeah, I was gob smacked!!!

Landlords are only as good as the effort they put into maintaining the property. And when they bold face lie about the work they put in... whoa.

amen, ecuadoriana1.

although, here in canada we have sane, humane laws that don't allow for "security" deposits. (landlords can ask us to paint places back to white or pay them the cost.)

i hear europe also has sane rental laws. i feel badly for you guys in the US.

Dominion's comments make me sad - listen up landlords. you're in a service industry. you chose it. if you can't provide a quality service, you have no right to complain about less than stellar tenants. you wouldn't serve roachy chicken wings on dirty plates at a restaurant you own ... why expect people to live in roach infested / dirty / not maintained places?

I had loud street noise, and loud neighbors, but one hot summer, I thought I was going to lose my mind when my upstairs neighbor started hoarding her trash in her hallway downstairs. Since it was one big house, all these flies were coming in my windows, and invading my tiny apartment. I tried everything but nothing stopped them. I also had pet birds, so I had to use non toxic sprays. Finally the smell got so bad, my landlord figured it out, and forced her to clean the hall out. These flies were everywhere, and I couldn't stop them. It was the worst summer of my life. These were little flies similar to fruit flies, but bigger, and harder to kill. I don't wish these flies on anyone.

@monkeylizard just a question out of curiosity, where do you live in Canada that they don't have security deposits? I've been a renter in Vancouver for 10 years and have never found a place that doesn't ask for a damage deposit of 1/2 a month's rent ...

I've been thinking of how nice it would be if AT would create a sister site similar to Angie's List but for apartments! How helpful it would have been to know that the apartment I was about to sign onto was incredibly hot (thanks for the helpful related articles here!) and mold. Someone make this site! We'd all be interested to read threads of past tenants. Plus, I feel this would put the power back in our hands. I'm tired of landlords having the upper hand.

@monkeylizard & traceyj - Landlord Tenant Acts are provincial, and vary by province. In BC, security deposits are allowed. In Ontario they aren't.

my hubs and i are renters again after years of home ownership...and we are just not use to the noise of inconsiderate neighbors, lack of parking at our complex, and having no yard.
i'd kill to own a home again!

@Dominion, I think you give it all away in the second sentence "We are responsible or semi-responsible for 84 rental units in 5 buildings and our personal townhouse that we can't afford to live in."

You don't like to do repairs, you don't want tenants who want their apartment to be a home and you can't afford any of it. It sounds like not only are you unhappy with your choice of careers, you're bad at it.

Do yourself and all the renters in the world a favor and quit your job/sell your complexes.

Dominion sounds like a slumlord.

Should throw this out there for everyone's chuckle of the day: At this very moment my fridge that died is still sitting out on the back lawn where the landlord moved it "temporarily"- back in June!

The fridge he replaced mine with came from a vacant apartment. The guy who just moved in there was told he would need to wait for a fridge as "the former tenant stole the fridge". Uh, wonder how the landlord didn't think that maybe a casual hallway conversation would take place & the tenant would find out he was lied to!?! What a joke this guy is!

Meanwhile the other tenants have turned the fridge on it's back, filled it with ice & beer, & are having a bar-b-q. When I asked them about all the water after the ice melts their collective answer was: "Koi fishing pond!".

Yeah. Didn't know it was such a high class place when I signed the lease. LOL!

I whole-heartedly agree with the plea for an angie's list for renters. A few apartments ago, the landlord kept showing our place unannounced and we let the prospective tenants in even though it was an inconvenience, just so we could let them in on how bad the landlord was, how awful the neighbors were, and how broken half the place was. It took a long time to get that place re-rented, and we are glad for our hand in that.

I just bought my first house last week. I have a landlord like Dominion and couldn't handle it anymore.

The floor under my toilet is rotted and the toilet is literally falling through the floor and I've been complaining about this for a year now. I can feel the toilet move every time I sit and it's sitting about 1.5inches below the floor level. There's a leak in my bedroom ceiling. My upstairs neighbors are a bunch of bratty kids. Thanks to them my apartment sounds like a nightclub until 5am. It smells like a bread factory and cat urine from all the open beers they leave laying around and the intact cat they let roam the house. They collect their trash in the common area. There are clothes and trash piled to the ceiling in the basement, which I've moved from laying on the furnace several times (talk about a fire hazard!!). Oh, and they are raising LIVE CHICKENS in hall outside my apartment. The landlord has done nothing about any of this.

Needless to say I cannot wait to be done renting.

@Dominion: Speaking as someone who worked as a landlord for 5 years ... Shut the $*&^ UP, dude! You're making the rest of us look bad, and you really don't sound as though you like the gig, so maybe you ought to move on.

@Fellow ATers: I promise, not all of us are like that or subscribe to Dominion's callous point of view, and I'd like to apologize for his comments on behalf of all the other conscientious, honest landlords out there. We may not be in the majority, but we exist, and we value you!! I have always found design-conscious, clean, thoughtful tenants to be the very best kind. Please, keep it up.

Aren't landlords usually responsible for insect control?

Both families occupying this duplex have had repeated ant issues in the kitchen (suspecting they may be coming in through pourly-sealed sliding glass door). Thankfully they aren't in the cabinets. This house/duplex sits on a slab. It was really bad this spring with all the rain in the midwest. Yet our landlord says insect control inside the units are not his/their responsibility. He said he would apply an external barrior (don't know if he ever did). Meanwhile, we've tried diatomaceous (sp?) earth, borax, ant traps trying to avoid spraying ... none worked for long. Now they're back again. I'm about to hire an insect control company to spray (EPA approved) inside ... at my expense.

I haven't rented in ages (sold our house). But, friends that have rented said their landlords take immediate action as soon as they report seeing an ant. And, yes, we do keep our unit clean regularly. What's been your experience?

When I was reading Dominion's comment I kept re-reading the sentences because I thought I was reading it wrong. Why would you say something like that, even if that is what you think??

definitely a slumlord.

Dominion, are you my previous landlord?

This guy was just amazing. And not in a good way. At first I couldn't believe my good fortune to find a cute, if a bit quirky, duplex a very affordable price. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that if something seems to good to be true, it probably is.

When I moved in there was a dead rat behind the water heater and the smell of death was unbelievable. I asked him to send a plumber out to move the heater so I could get to the carcass but he said there was nothing he could do about it. Similarly, when I plugged in the fridge for the first time I was assaulted with the stench of dead rat yet again. One of the little buggers had died on top of the heating coil and became fused to the mechanism. Again, I was left to deal with it myself.

A live critter took up residence in the wall between the laundry room and the kitchen. When I asked if he could send out pest control or an exterminator he said he didn't have the resources to keep checking traps all the time. My cats were endlessly fascinated by the scratching sounds in the ceiling and the wall but I was less than amused by the urine stains that were starting to show on the ceiling towards the end of my tenancy there. I'm just happy the thing didn't die in the walls. I'm not sure I could take the trauma of smelling that again.

There was serious mold under the kitchen cabinet, which was constructed of unfinished plywood that had actually rotted away in one corner. Squirrels used it to climb into the cabinets and store pecans there. I used expandable foam to patch up the hole and then shelf-papered over "the evil" and tried not to think about it too much.

He claimed to have installed R-30 insulation in the attic but neglected to insulate the walls, patch the large air gaps in the windows and under the doors and there was no sub-floor. A single plank of wood resting on joists was all that separated me from the ground below. When I went into his office to pay rent one month in the middle of winter, he actually had the audacity to ask me how I was liking the insulation he'd installed. I told him it did absolutely no good as the freezing cold air just seeped in through the floor and walls and my heating bill was almost as much as the rent.

I feel sorry for whoever moves in there next. There were other things, like duct tape used to repair window frames, a bathroom door that didn't close all the way when it was humid and uninsulated pipes that had a tendency to burst in the winter. The landlord told me he was planning to raise the rent by $100 for the next tenants. It wasn't even worth the small amount I was paying for it.

I've since moved into a large building professionally managed by a wonderful company. They are responsive, keep the grounds impeccably maintained and I've not seen a single bug or rodent. I just couldn't be happier with my current home. And I only pay 3x the amount of rent as I did at the duplex.

@ katethemonty- thank you for your comments. Ya know, you are right. Not ALL landlords are like Dominion. And I needed to be reminded of that fact. People do focus on the negatives that they sometimes forget the positives. Guilty as charged! Unfortunately the bad ones do outweigh the good ones.

I DID have a landlord who let me slide on not paying rent for 2 months after I had been hospitalized from a car accident. He said "Hey, you're in the hospital. Don't stress the rent. Everyone is just glad you're alive." Later he & his wife refused to take the money. Told me to put it in my daughter's college savings as their gift to us. Another landlord sent a huge bouquet of flowers with chocolates, wine, and tickets to a show (I mentioned I wanted to go see with my boyfriend) for my 30th birthday. Another landlord never raised the rent even after 5 years because she said I was such a good & trustworthy tenant who took such good care of the place that she didn't want to risk raising the rent & losing me to a undesirable tenant because I wouldn't be able to afford to stay (single working moms have the hardest time finding affordable housing that aren't slums). Other landlords have been conscientious about making repairs, or if they truly don't have the time, will have me arrange the repairs (since I'd need to be home anyway) & just deduct it from the rent. Some even went so far as to reimburse me for lost wages from having to miss time from work.

So, maybe we should take the time to remember that not every landlord is a slumlord & some are just downright regular people, too.

And I will never live in a Battleship Grey apartment ever again!

WOW! You guys really took my comments way out of line.

My apartments are among the best in my neighborhood. Every unit that comes empty in this building gets a full reno done by myself and my renovation company. We are not slumlords by any stretch of the definition.

However, I can certainly see where my comments could be misconstrued.

First, my desire to minimize complaints makes our days manageable. I'm not sorry about that, I'm being honest. There are people that present themselves as the type that are prone to complaining. I'm not adverse to fixing any legitimate problems that anyone has. I am adverse to the people that want me to cut down trees because they think they are allergic to them...true story. Or that the lights in the garden are too bright-they contribute to light pollution. Yet another true story.

I seek great tenants for great apartments. We could honestly charge more for the units we offer. Complete reno's...not "let's paint the walls and call it reno'd" apartments. We consider it to be more important to find great people.

My comments about mold are actually to be positive. I honestly don't know, and can't know until I'm in the walls. Anyone that says otherwise would be lying to you unless they have pulled the drywall and replaced. So for people to hear my honest answer and then be happy to move next door where obviously the rental agent lied in their answer-who's being the bad landlord?

I'm being honest in my assessment. My tenants get the same level of honesty, and isn't that something you'd look for? You may not always get the answer you are looking for, but at least you know it to be true.

And on my final point, we spend on average about $6-7k per apartment when they come available, including quite a bit on paint. No I don't want you to re-paint it when you move in. I just spent a significant portion of my time doing this.

Seriously guys, you can put away the pitchforks.

Right now my only complaint is the annoying and very creepy building manger... the guy just won't stop nagging me for the apartment's key since my landlord gave him the wrong one. He even told me to go and get a cut for him!!! Creepy old man...

I've been a lucky tenant who had a couple of great landlords and didn't appreciate the situation at the time as much as I should have. Two people come together, establish a business relationship and treat each other well...who knew that was so rare and wonderful?
Having been a lanlord as well, I can appreciate some of Dominion's comments. Trust me, you'll never understand until you meet the endless complainers, those who love to nit-pick and squabble. Blech, we sold the income property and all the headaches that went with it. Tenants have all the rights in the world. They should expect to be treated well and fairly, but some people you cannot please. Here, in Canada, it's almost impossible to evict someone, but they can scream bloody murder if you are outside the house on the public sidewalk meeting with a contractor about new shingles, because they did not receive twenty four hours notice. Public sidewalk.
If Dominion feels (s)he has a formula to weed out difficult tenants before they sign the lease and make life Hell for a year, more power to him. The landlord and tenant difficulties go both ways. Sometimes nice people get stuck with crazy people...in both directions.