admin wrote: ↑Thu Nov 22, 2018 9:39 am
so funny story i just was told.
my wife and i rent an apartment in los condes, near the golf course. we use it perhaps on average 10 days a month depending on the flow of work and other things, or just passing through santiago on the way to somewhere else. we lend it out to friends and family that live in the south when they need to go to Santiago. sort of our own apart hotel in Santiago.
so the owner told us she was going to sell it. she offered it to us at like 140 million pesos. gave it some thought, but just can not bring myself to buy one of those concrete coffins, when i know there is perhaps 10 to 20 million pesos of materials in a 1 bedroom apartment. i also got a bunch of issues with the apartment. fine for few days a month, dont want to buy the problems. we were kicking around the idea of renting something closer to our office anyway. not like we HAVE to have thst apartment because for instance we got kids in school or something.
so she put it on the market. guess how long it lasted?
sold in 2 weeks, to someone looking for investment property.
The new owner was ecstatic to have good renters already in the place (we are hardly there, pay our rent on time, and have made improvements on the place) and has offered us a new contract for as long we want to stay. still debating renting something a bit bigger and closer yo our office. we can make up the difference in taxi rides, but for moment dont want to deal with hassle of moving.
oooo, so this story got juicy out of the blue (I kind of half expected this). It is soooo Santiago real estate market.
Owner and buyer of the apartment are at the notary. My wife get's a call from the current owner, that they are about to sign the buy / sale agreement. The buyer out of the blue says she is going to increase our rent by like 250,000 pesos a month, and basically blackmails the current owner in to paying the difference on our rent until our current contract is up (it is up in like April or something), or she is not going to buy the apartment. Guess the owner paid to get the deal done, not sure what happened there.
My wife did not even bother asking me what I thought. She knew what I was going to say. She just immediately told them, "no way are we paying that, and we are taking this as formal notice".
Honestly, we were only willing to keep that apartment at the current rent, just out of shear laziness / got better things to do right now besides hunting for another apartment.
Classic case of a Chilean misreading the situation, getting greedy, and then overplaying their hand. We know if they do something like that now, it will be something else later. I have one standing rule with all the land lords I have dealt with in Chile over the years: You don't bother me, I won't bother you; and anytime one thinks they can arbitrarily raise rent out of the blue, they get a pleasant, 'good luck with that' and notice of termination of the contract. They can eat that mortgage payment for a few months without a renter.
Probably did us a favor to the tune of several million pesos anyway. Needed something closer to our office, and that apartment had an issue with street noise (4th floor with a busy street in the morning).
However, I could see that working on say a family that was renting, kids are in the local school, or mom and dad are near work, possibly them not having the money to move, etc. We don't play game.
