Velladao Rentals - Kelseyville, California

Devon B.

I would not recommend staying here.
Pros:
- The view of the lake is pretty.
- The house is large and well-laid out.
- Both bathrooms have been recently remodeled and are very nice.

Cons:
- We stayed here from January to early June for my work as a traveling medical professional. Dealing with this "company" has been nothing but a struggle. The "property manager" is actually just the daughter of the absent homeowner. She has no experience or training in property management. In addition to neglecting or directly violating many of her obligations as a landlord under the California Civil Code, she has been condescending, unpleasant, or just unreachable in most of our interactions with her, including:
- not completing a walkthrough before renting the house to us, which meant that there was a multitude of broken/nonfunctioning items when we got there, such as a burner that didn't light but instead leaked gas when it turned on, a cat door that was cracked open and unable to be sealed to keep wild animals out and our cat in, a nonworking living room light fixture and ceiling fan, 10+ burnt out lightbulbs or lightbulbs that burnt out as soon as they were turned on, garbage spilled all over the property with no cans/place to clean it up, a kitchen sink that only provided scalding hot water, toilet flushers that did not work or allowed water to continue flowing, and the owners' personal effects in all of the bedroom drawers with no place for our clothing. We contacted her about these issues as soon as we moved in in early January and she did not send a repairman out until late March, despite multiple attempts to contact her.
- we would go days without hearing from her when we contacted her about issues with the house, but anytime she needed something from us we were expected to reply within a few hours.
- after transitioning from Airbnb to a short term lease, she asked us to cover any excess utilities that exceeded the average cost of utilities in the months prior of renting the house out. However, she misled us into thinking this amount was $200, which sounded low to me for a 3 bedroom bi-level house, but I had no reason not to trust her at this point so we agreed. When the first PG&E bill alone came out to over $500, she revealed that the house had never been rented out full time, only as a vacation rental for sporadic days throughout the months and had not been rented the previous January at all. She demanded we still pay the excess despite giving us bad information. She also condescendingly sent us an article on ways to save power and insisted we must've been wasting it. She eventually agreed to raise the amount of covered utilities to $550 a month (with a weird caveat that we needed to leave 11 days before our lease was set to be up, we later suspected she had double-booked the place). Mind you, the rent she was charging was $2400 a month which is much higher than the fair market rent value of $1,330 for a 3 bedroom house in this area. We agreed to this price because it was furnished and all utilities were supposed to be paid, and because due to the nature of my work we were unable to visit the area beforehand to look at other rentals. We did not hear from her about utility overages again, so I assumed there were none after the limit was raised to $550. Until the end of our lease when she stated we should be grateful of her "generosity" in not asking for the utility overage charges (that she never told us about).
- she is attempting to withhold a portion of our security deposit without cause. She is demanding we pay to replace a chair with a single broken wood slat that was in that condition when we arrived, burn marks on the counter that were caused by another guest as she did not do a walkthrough of the house when we moved out until after she had already allowed at least two other parties to stay there, and the fees that PayPal charged her as a business owner, despite this being the payment service she requested we use.

There are much nicer, more comfortable, and hassle-free places to stay here. Avoid this one.