> The worst the landlord can do without a ton of headache and hassle is ask the tenant to pay, then evict them and perhaps keep the security deposit.

Or variations on that. I had a leaking water main. Got letters from the utility warning me. By the end of the saga my water bill was $400/mo.

Landlord / PM refused to do anything, or anything meaningful. Would not return calls. After I cornered them in person, they sent a "maintenance guy" who found nothing. It continued. All the while I'm paying this. After another month of harassment, they send a plumber who is "only authorized to do a visual inspection", not to go under the house, not to dig anywhere.

Unsurprisingly he finds nothing. Eventually it's so bad, as I say, that the utility is writing letters to me, the PM, the homeowner and reluctantly, they do something.

Shock, horror. It's found within two hours of light digging from the meter back. Fixed within another hour. Probably <$500.

Now, I write a nicely worded letter to the PM. Show them my water bills for the equivalent time the previous year, and say that I think I should be reimbursed for the nearly $1900 in utility overpayment caused by this problem and their tardiness in rectifying it.

Big mistake.

They start dodging those calls and letters. But, at the same time have staff drive by and start "fining" me for policy breaches at a rate of $125 per breach, plus $35 for an inspection fee, plus $15 for "delivery of notice", etc.

What kind of policy breaches, you ask? The most egregious? "Failure to maintain lawn". By which they meant that there was in the region of 4-6 dandelion heads a few inches above the grass which had been mowed /that morning/. So outraged by this was I that I took video, took photos, took the invoice from the lawn care company to the owner of the PM company and demanded that they show that this was anything more than retaliation, and that if they wanted to take things to court, to see how well they'd do at claiming I was a negligent tenant.

They still stalled. Called me a deadbeat who was trying to get out of my obligations. Told me that when she pulled up my file, they didn't owe me anything, in fact, I owed them over $3,000 in "fees for late rent"!

This, they said, stemmed from the fact that two or three years earlier, I had paid a partial rent check a week late and they'd tacked on a fee (fair and reasonable), that I didn't realize at the time, but were now claiming that because "they process fees, penalties and then rent, in that order" to any payment received, I had in fact been late all 40 or so months I had lived there, so had been fined $75/month every month since I moved in.

Bear in mind, this is the first I'd heard of this, at this point when I was trying to recover my money paid. In fact they'd renewed my lease twice, despite me "being a deadbeat", as they were now claiming.

After a couple of hours of calm discussion (a challenge at times), reviewing the "coincidence" that the PM had just "discovered" this discrepancy, along with my "failures to maintain", only at the time when I had asked to be reimbursed, the company owner finally acquiesced, and agreed that I did not owe any money, and that they would waive my next months rent.

Oh, and that she would instruct the PM to NOT, as she had been planning to do, report that three years plus delinquency to a credit agency.

So there are plenty of things landlords can do to make life painful. Categorizing it as "oh well, I can ask for money, and you can or cannot pay it, and maybe I'll get your deposit" is a little generous.