True-life Account: Our Landlord Kept Our Deposit and We Took Her to Court – Part 1 - Three sessions with the assistant magistrate

​After a harrowing three-hour handover at the end of the lease [insert link], Stuart* (my partner) and I were not surprised when Catherine*, our former landlord (who is also a real estate agent) refused to return our deposit.
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We had no choice but to file a claim in the Small Claims Tribunal. The earliest date in the system was more than a month away.

First In-Person Attendance at State Courts

The first thing to note is that we had to “serve” the order to appear in court for this claim via mail. Since we knew the address listed in her identity card was that of the house that we had rented, we had to drop that letter in the letterbox of the house.

Returning there felt weird as we had thought after moving out we would be rid of that place. Little did we know this was just the beginning of the hell that was the Small Claims Tribunal with this unhinged individual.
September 30 finally came and we turned up at court with trepidation. Would she turn up? Did she receive the order in the letterbox?

We unfortunately didn’t understand the instructions given, because we waited for a while before realising people who arrived after us went into the hearing room before us. I decided to take a closer look at the service kiosk and realised we had to take a queue number.
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Going back to wait with Stuart, I realised Catherine was also there. We breathed a sigh of relief. After another 30 minutes, our number was called and we all went in. We had not exchanged any words thus far.

​She Was Always Going to Fight This

Sitting in front of the young assistant magistrate (we’ll call him AM; he didn’t introduce himself; no one knew what to call him), we soon realized there would be no quick resolution, as Catherine only had one response to everything – “I will respond to that later”. She produced no evidence whatsoever.

Given this situation, the AM scheduled another session via Zoom for more evidence to be produced by Catherine.
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We were bewildered. It felt like she knew exactly what to do in this situation, while we had naively thought this case would be resolved on this date. 

​An Avalanche of Documents

rior to the Zoom call with the AM on October 21, Catherine had uploaded hundreds of documents of what she called “evidence” against us. We had also received a CD containing videos of the property she handed over to us when we started the lease, and voice recordings of her and her husband speaking to the aircon servicing company and the auto-gate company.
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Unbeknownst to us, she had taken lots of photos of the house during the lease. But these photos were not in the CD, so we could not verify the metadata on them. She simply pasted the photos in powerpoint documents.

Some we presumed she took when she visited the house to collect her mail [insert link]. Some she took when she requested to bring a bank officer to value the house. Others she took when she was showing the house for potential tenants.

She had been quietly gathering “evidence” against us, documenting things she felt we’d done wrong. Why would she do this?

Was this her modus operandi? Did she anticipate us not renewing the lease? Was she always going to keep our deposit and knew she needed ammunition to threaten us with?

We felt completely overwhelmed. The photos were of things big and small, from lizard poop on the wall to a large scratch on the marble floor that we didn’t recognise. Every weekend from now till the first court date with the judge would be spent mounting a defence to these insane allegations.

October 21 was spent with the AM running through the uploaded documents by Catherine. When asked if she could upload the receipts for work done based on her allegations of damage, she said yes, but ultimately never did, and said she would mount a counter claim.

If she indeed has receipts for work done, why was it so difficult for her to upload them?

She had already uploaded hundreds of ridiculous allegations.
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The AM scheduled a next hearing date for November 25 via Zoom again, and said all documents must be uploaded before he can schedule an actual court date with the judge. We requested for her to put in another CD all the original JPGs with metadata so we could verify the validity of her claims. ​

​Outrageous Allegations Abound

The allegations were so unhinged that each time we opened a document our jaws dropped, and we asked ourselves, is this actually happening? Are we in Twilight Zone?

For the sake of brevity, we have to pick the “greatest hits”.

Allegation: The tree is a safety hazard
We didn’t plant the tree. It was already as tall as the house when we started the lease.

Catherine accused us of “letting the tree grow so tall that it was a lightning risk”. Yes, the tree continued to grow, as plants do. We were never told to maintain it at a certain height. It was never a condition in the tenancy agreement (TA). There was no hint from Catherine that anything was wrong with the tree, until the moment we declined to renew the lease.

There were also plenty of very tall trees along the streets in the neighbourhood. Were they also a safety risk? Why hasn’t NParks cut them down?

Allegation: I am married and Stuart cuckolded my husband
4 days before the handover at the end of the lease, Catherine had gone into the Registry of Marriages portal to look for my marriage certificate. She found it because I used to be married.

Why did she do that 4 days before the handover? Was she also hoping to use this as ammunition since we’d declined to renew the lease?

She said in her submission to the court, “It is well known that people who are cuckolded will destroy the house”, and that Stuart and I were “living in moral sin”. She would never have rented the house to us if she had known that Stuart and I were not married. We never claimed to be.

It’s peculiar that she did not check our marriage status before renting to us. You would think that a person of such prudish orientation would take great pains to vet the people she rented to.

The fact that I am divorced didn’t matter. The whole point was to cast aspersions on our characters in front of the judge.

Interestingly, absolute strangers can get together and rent in Singapore.

Allegation: She claimed to have reported to the police that the dog bit her and a contractor – 2 months into the 2-year lease
That’s ancient history, you might think, but you’d be wrong, because she claimed to have made a police report about incidents that allegedly happened very early in the lease. Well, recollections may vary.

We do recall the dog trying to lunge at the contractor that was going to fix the door knob. However, there wasn’t an injury because the dog never made contact as she was on a leash.

Any responsible dog owner would be horrified that their dog had bitten someone. We certainly would have tried to dress any wound had a bite occurred. Catherine and her husband claimed that they had “settled” with the contractor by paying them off.

No receipt or other evidence for this was ever produced when we requested for them.

I also recall the dog trying to nip Catherine’s hand as she was standing very close to the dog. I didn’t notice any wound that time either, and she pretended nothing happened. She took a fuzzy photo of her hand later that didn’t show any wound that she presented to the court.

What’s strange is that these alleged incidents only became complaints after we declined to renew the lease.
Till today, no police have ever visited us, nor have we seen any of the reports. Are the police slackers? Or were these “police reports” meant to intimidate us into not pursuing the return of our deposit?

Allegation: The $5 Ikea blinds caused the failure of the electric wiring of the whole house
We had stuck two pieces of $5 Ikea paper blinds using the double sided tape attached to the product to the ceiling of the porch to shield us from the morning sun while we had our morning tea. Within days, they had blown off due to strong winds and rain. Some paint came off.

Apparently, according to Catherine, these blinds caused the failure of the entire electric wiring of the house.
I will allow you, the reader, a moment to try to make sense of this.

During the bizarre handover [insert link], the electricity was working just fine. This allegation only emerged in several of the hundreds of documents Catherine uploaded for the case.
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Related to this allegation is another one alleging that the Singapore flag we hung on the gate during the National Day celebrations caused the auto-gate to malfunction. There were numerous problems with the auto-gate as the system was more than 20 years old, but a flimsy piece of flag was certainly not the problem. ​​​

Busy and Virtuous Months Ahead

On the last Zoom session with the AM on November 25, not a lot went on, other than verifying that Catherine had lodged a counter claim against us. He also noted that the deadline had come and gone for her to upload any receipts. She insisted that she had them, but of course intentionally missed this deadline issued by the court for some reason.

The AM then tried to schedule a first hearing with the judge, asking us for dates when we would not be available. Catherine proceeded to tell the AM that she was busy for the next few months. Luckily, the AM was insistent about telling a date, undaunted by her delaying tactics, asking for specific dates, rather than writing off an entire month with her blanket statement.

Her excuses included Christmas celebrations, Christmas holiday camp, a few philanthropic charity events, company training for two weeks, Chinese New Year celebrations, etc. Not only was she busy, she was also apparently very virtuous.

The AM managed to pin her down to January 16, which was two days before our own holiday.

Given how these Zoom session have transpired, we had little faith that the case would be over in the first session with the judge.
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In part 2, we will detail the three sessions with judge.
 
*Names have been changed to protect their identity.