The Foreign Service Journal, May 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2017 41 Here are some hard-won lessons learned in dealing with a common feature of Foreign Service life: property managers. My Legal Battle with the World’s Worst PropertyManager Aaron P. Karnell is a Foreign Service consular officer who joined the Department of State in May 2010. Prior to joining State, he was an FSO for USAID. He has served overseas in Dar es Salaam, Gaborone, Guadala- jara and Matamoros. He passed the California bar examination in May 2014. T wo words from a Virginia judge, and it was over: “Motion granted.” Someone else might have turned to his lawyer at that point and asked, “What does this mean?” But I was acting as my own lawyer. I already knew what the verdict meant: after an eight-month legal battle with my property manager, I’d lost my case. As I left the courtroom, my opponent was grinning. Who, What, Where, When Sometime in 2014, while I was in Mexico, three people moved into my Alexandria condo without my permission. My Virginia- based property management company didn’t vet them or run a credit check on them, but the company did cash rent checks from the three, none of whom had ever applied to live in the property. Evidently, they had swapped places with the original tenants. The property manager later claimed not to know they were there. The three paid rent to the property manager for awhile, then decided paying real money for housing was passé, and FS KNOW-HOW stopped. I had to request the property manager to threaten them with eviction. They finally left the condo, and during the resulting turnover period, I lost two months’ rent. (The month they didn’t pay before leaving was covered by the security deposit, which the property manager did not return to me until after I had filed the lawsuit!) I wrote a demand letter to the property manager clearly stating my claim. Don’t I pay your management fee, I asked, for you to know what is going on with my property, including who actually lives there? No response. I am a lawyer by training, and the lawsuit started to form in my head. I checked off the elements of negligence. Was there personal injury or property loss caused by the defendant’s breach of a legal duty? Check. What about the duty of an agent, such as a property manager, to the owner, to look after his affairs as if they were his own, and to act in his best interest? He definitely didn’t do that. Check. Then I looked at the contract I had signed with the property manager. Hmm. There wasn’t much in there about his duties, but there was an awful lot about mine. Still, I was confident in victory. I was going to be the consumer who fought back. I may be an inexperienced lawyer, but I had two grand legal pillars holding up my case: the law of agency and the law of negligence. BY AARON P. KARNE L L