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> after that I got wiser, and took pictures of everything before actually moving in. Better yet, with the landlord or representative as witness.

I manage a property in a college town. Most of my tenants are first time renters just moving out of the dorms, so they've never learned these hard lessons before. I try to help them out by telling them about how they can get screwed on deposits, and tell them to take pictures of any damage they find and print it out so I can sign it.

I just hope they take that lesson with them after they leave my place.

Also I remind them that they have a right to a walk through at the end of the lease and never charge an item on a deposit that I haven't discussed with them first. I always give them a chance to fix it first. Usually they just say "bill me" (probably because it's their parents money) but sometimes they will fix it or they will help me fix it. It's a lot more work on my part, but on the flip side I'll have tenants messaging me a decade later thanking me for being honest and kind. So I guess it's all worth it.

> No mater how thorough I'd be on washing out apartment, or how careful I'd be with it, they would always find something - and claim deductions on the deposit.

I sat in a PMs office in a high rise I was moving out, waiting for them to take care of something.

I noticed my move-out inspection report (which we were ABOUT to do), oddly already filled, some. "Blinds - dirty, needed cleaning", "Carpet - stains not removed, needed cleaning", about half a dozen items which according to their "costs incurred" ate up most of my deposit. Oddly, since I knew they hadn't been in the apartment recently, even without my consent, because I'd been packing and cleaning. I'd even brought with me receipts for the carpet cleaning etc.

PM comes in, grabs some papers and a clipboard from her desk, including the form. "Let's go get started".

"Oh, while I was waiting, I apologize, my eyes must have caught that some of the paperwork on your desk was for us, so I looked over at it, and saw it was already filled out for the inspection?"

Umm, ahh, stammer, stammer. "Oh, how strange. I must have, uhh, photocopied a previous form without realizing it wasn't empty."

Didn't make any sense on any level, but whatever. We started with a new form, and I made sure that none of that BS made its way back on.

> It's a disgusting practice, IMO - but what can you do?

Rate the expected value of all insurance services at $0, that's my approach. (I guess you could call that giving up on step zero!) Why bother doing business with people whose profit model consists of taking your money now so they can decline to return it later? The better they are at their jobs, the worse a deal it is for you.

Of COURSE insurance has a negative expectation (not $0) in absolute terms - but this doesn't make it a bad idea! We don't live on expected value - we live on actual, highly variable outcomes. I'm happy to lose expected value to offset catastrophic losses for small-probability events, like early death, car accidents and fires.

I will continue happily paying my insurance premiums, and ardently hope that I never get any of that money back.

Of course, there may be specific types of insurance/warrantee programs that are a bad idea for one reason or another, but that's not an argument against insurance in general.

The expected value of purchasing insurance is always less than $0. You're paying to eliminate a risk and smooth out your cash flow.

> This is to filter out those that simply give up on step 1.

A lot of people must give up here. I had a car totaled by a hit-and-run driver and the insurance company wanted me to settle for $10k less than the car was clearly worth. (I had lots of proof of this.) It took a month of me telling the adjuster "I'm not settling" before I got that $10k. It was the most infuriating customer-company relationship encounter I had ever had. I felt like the person was intentionally misunderstanding me and making false statements. I tried to get to their manager a few times, but they wouldn't. It was clear that the person's manager was in complete agreement with the course this situation was taking.

Yup. When my car was totalled I had a number in mind (high 20s). And got a much lower number. For the record, this was like a 3 year old Audi A4, fully loaded.

So I asked to see comps. Sure enough, all but one of the comps was in that ballpark, from about 3-4 under, to nearly 30.

Except one. Which was about 140 miles away, and listed for $11,500. Clearly a salvage or rebuild or something (water damage, whatever, obviously not accurate). Dragging the average down like a boat anchor.

"The ad doesn't say Salvage Title so it's a valid comp."

They just kept repeating that like a broken record.

My situation was that I had very low miles and all comps had like 3x those miles, in my area. She wouldn't look outside my area for comps with low miles, even though those areas had much lower cost of living. Going from $18k to $28k allowed me to get a new (used) car for no cash. Also, we had a semantic argument about what a "trailer hitch" was that lasted weeks. I had it installed after purchase and had receipts.

I definitely recognize the "broken record" part of your comment!

Five years from now, "Class action against insurance company for colluding with car dealers to create fake listings to limit payout amounts"...

In Australia and other countries rental deposits are held by a government office, at the end of the lease if the landlord wants to keep some for damages they have to prove that there is a problem. I think the office lives off the interest earned. Works great.

> what can you do?

What the author did. Take them to arbitration.

If you were an idiot and opted out of arbitration you’ll need to spend a lot of money going through the courts. If you didn’t, you may be able to get representation on a contingency basis.

> In my experience, lots of companies have more or less automatic denial on requests.

Remember I read that in a novel as a teenager, and since then I've always complained if I get rejected. Almost always work, as they then finally actually look at your situation. And if it doesn't work, I keep going until they realize making me whole will be less costly than the time I make them spend.

Had to look it up, the novel was "The Rainmaker" by John Grisham.

A little known fact is that rental assets depreciate in the eyes of the government. This is why you can deduct depreciation from rental property on tax returns. The corollary to this is that damage to those assets happen against the depreciated value. For instance, if there is a bathtub in the unit and it hasn't been replaced in many years, then the effective value of that tub is 0. It doesn't matter if you actually damaged it or not, the landlord cannot come after you for the full cost of a new tub.