As many of you know, I work for a couple of vacation rental companies out here in Sunriver. I’ve mentioned several times in the past about all the damage from parties and other weirdness from guests. The biggest problems have been from college students renting our houses for huge parties, and then when we inspect for damage, they deny anything ever happened and that we’re not doing our job, that we’re picking on them, etc… .
Generally, we don’t even rent to folks who sound too young, or have an obvious university address and we have a good feeling they’re going to trash the place. But occasionally a new reservationist will let it slide or won’t be paying attention, and the homes get booked. Then, after they depart, we inspect the home, and find it totally damaged and trashed, they deny it ever happened, we’re picking on them, and that it was like that when they got there, but generally their actions speak for themselves.
This last weekend (the three-day Memorial Day weekend), it happened again. Since I don’t work front desk hardly at all any more like I used to, I didn’t catch the booking. But anybody who knows Eugene knows that if the address is within two blocks of Campus (address slightly changed to just some random house number, but that’s the same general location), then it’s probably a college student, and if they’re renting more than one house, there’s going to be a party. There was a party indeed, and based on the fact that there were kegs, beer cans, wine stains in the carpet, puke next to the now green-watered hot tub, excrement, and each of the houses had about 25 bags of garbage, they were obviously big parties.
So the front desk manager has to make the calls, telling the woman who booked the property, who signed the paperwork saying they’d pay for damages, that there was serious damage to the house, her reply was basically “Well how was I supposed to keep track of everybody?” And she’s balking at payment.
I don’t have a problem with parties, but I do have a problem with people who don’t own up to what they did wrong. Everybody’s done something crazy in college, but I have NO respect whatsoever for people who don’t own up to it. If they would just admit their wrongdoing and pay up, they’d probably be welcomed back next time (when they’ve graduated, of course).
What gets me, too, is the people acted like it was totally out of their control. But as an alumni of the University of Oregon, I can get into Facebook, and looking through there, this was obviously pre-planned (you need a Facebook login to check this out).
As it stands right now, according to our front desk, there is about $1000 worth of time, labor, and repairs between the three houses they rented, and we haven’t gotten the bills back from the carpet cleaner yet. They had to be fully deep cleaned, all the carpets totally professionally cleaned, and many little repairs had to be done to each house.
It just bugs the living crap out of me when people totally trash a rental home like this. I know it happens all over the place, and certainly isn’t a Sunriver-exclusive thing, but what this people don’t seem to realize is that they’re trashing somebody’s home. How would they like it if we came to their house, trashed it, threw garbage all over, and then puked, peed, and crapped all over their floors after we spilled our booze? Yeah, that’s what I thought…
Am I the only person who went to college and didn’t get himself drunk and stupid?
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