A resident left without notice and the room sat for nine days before anyone found out the manager had already re-rented it verbally to someone else.
The case is worth laying out because the gap in the paper is the whole problem. A 14-room house, manager on a rent-credit arrangement, no written protocol for how a vacancy gets reported to the owner or how a new resident gets approved. The departing resident gave notice to the manager, not the owner. The manager showed the room, agreed on a move-in date three days out, took a cash deposit, and told nobody. The incoming resident arrived, moved two bags in, and the owner found out when she came by for a routine walk-through. No lease had been signed, no background check had run, no one had verified the incoming resident's identity against the license requirements the city placed on approved occupancy. The deposit was sitting in the manager's personal account because there was no written instruction saying it had to go anywhere else. Nine days of lost rent on the gap, a potential occupancy violation if the city had walked in during those two days the new person was sleeping in an unlicensed placement, and a conversation with an attorney about whether the verbal agreement the manager made was binding on the owner. The attorney said the answer depended on how the management arrangement was documented, which turned out to be a one-page handwritten note from two years prior that said nothing about authority to approve residents. The deposit question cost more in professional fees to resolve than the deposit itself. What I want to know from people running rent-credit managers is how you have written the boundary between what the manager can promise and what requires owner sign-off, because that line is the one that disappears first when there is no document behind it.
