Roommates Want Deposit Back Without Helping to Clean

[jddesign]

My question involves landlord-tenant law in the State of: Oregon

Hi there,

This question involves two of our three roommates who neglected to clean despite the lease stating it was necessary. Throughout the course of my last year, I lived in a room with my girlfriend and shared a house with other roommates; two who literally did dishes five times over the course of the year. They never swept, mopped, or cleaned anything once and even went over a week without toilet paper on two occasions when I bought my own and had to keep hiding it from them. Our fridge which my girlfriend cleaned multiple times smelled and they left rotting fruit out which led to lots of fruit flies in our house.

They know that they neglected to clean the house and we even have a four page written essay from our third roommate about how my girlfriend and I do all the cleaning which the lazy roommates even signed with their initials saying these were "good suggestions" even though nothing changed.

About four days before our lease ended, my girlfriend and I went on vacation and received an email saying we could stay another year with new roommates. We let our new roommates we expected to move into another house with know we planned to stay another year so that they could begin moving in. After we returned from vacation and the lease ended, we discovered that the previous roommates did not do a single bit of cleaning while we were gone. My girlfriend, our new roommate, and I went to cleaning which took all day (about eight hours between the three of us). Our old roommates returned the evening we cleaned the entire house expecting to clean it before we returned and even told us they didn't know we were already back from vacation yet (This is five days after our lease ended). Can I legally deduct money from their deposit for cleaning?

Our new roommate who helped us clean had to actually remove an old roommate's belongings from the his room then swept and mopped before he could move in. One of the other rooms had holes in the wall the old roommate had spackled but never painted which left large white patches all over the room. We gave her almost a week to paint the room but she never returned and we ended up painting it ourselves.

What are our legal rights to what we can charge them?

[Mr. Knowitall]

These are roommates, not subtenants, with the deposit held by your common landlord? Unless you had an agreement that you would charge them for cleaning, you have no right to claim any portion of their security deposit. If you had an agreement, you can hold them responsible for whatever it is you agreed to pay.

[lawaholic]

I agree with Mr. Knowitall. If you weren't subletting to them, you can't act as their landlord and withhold their security deposits. While it's not fair, given that you obviously did more than your fair share of the cleaning, without a formal, written agreement, you really can't charge them or withhold money from them. If you look at it from the landlord's point of view, regardless of WHO cleaned the house, it WAS in fact clean upon move-out, so there's no reason for any money to be withheld from anyone.