The tenant upstairs had reported the leak in 2022 and again in 2023, and she still had both emails saved. The property manager never opened a work order, and when the ceiling finally collapsed in November, the restoration company said the damage had clearly been happening for at least two years. My insurance denied the claim as “long-term and preventable,” leaving me with a thirty-one-thousand-dollar repair bill. I asked the board to help, but the president said it was a private matter between me and the owner upstairs. The owner lives in Florida and told me he’d never received either complaint, so my lawyer subpoenaed the management company’s work-order system.
The two reports were both there, and both had been opened and closed on the exact same day with the note “no action required, resident to contact owner.” They had the same user stamp, but it wasn’t the property manager I normally dealt with. It belonged to an assistant who had left the company in 2023. When my lawyer tracked down the former employee, she said she hadn’t closed those reports and didn’t even have access to the building after she left. Then she remembered something else: the last instruction she received before leaving was to forward every maintenance complaint from that building to one specific person, and that person wasn’t her manager.
My lawyer requested the internal emails showing who had given that instruction. The management company fought the request, then produced a handful of messages after being threatened with sanctions. The first email was from the HOA president, sent directly to the assistant, telling her that “upstairs water complaints” were not to be escalated without his approval because the owner was “sensitive about unnecessary expenses.” I asked why the HOA president was directing a management employee on maintenance requests when the association didn’t own the unit. Then we found the payment records. The upstairs owner’s company had been paying the HOA president’s private consulting company every month since 2022 — and the first payment was made one week before the tenant submitted her first leak complaint.
