Is a landlord responsible to cover the costs of spoiled food if the tenant’s refrigerator quits working? The tenant demands he be reimbursed for the full amount of the food content.
Landlords usually provide major appliances such as a refrigerator in rental properties as a benefit and convenience for their tenants. The lease agreement should specify what appliances are provided for the tenant’s use during the tenancy. The lease should further specify appliance maintenance and housekeeping responsibilities for both landlord and tenant. As part of the regular inspection of the rental unit, a landlord should inspect all appliances to ensure they are in good working order. The tenant should have been fully instructed on the appropriate use of appliances including cleaning. Neither landlord nor tenant have control over the useful life of an appliance and can predict when an appliance may break down.
A tenant has the duty to notify the landlord in a timely manner when a major appliance quits working. A landlord has the duty to repair/replace the appliance in a timely and appropriate manner. In the case of the refrigerator breaking down, a landlord is responsible to repair or replace the non-working refrigerator but the food content inside the refrigerator is personal property of the tenant. The tenant should check with his insurance carrier for his renters insurance to determine what coverage the tenant has for personal property loss, in this case, spoiled food. For some insurance carriers, a claim for the loss of the food items can be submitted for reimbursement subject to the tenant’s deductible amount.
When the landlord has acted appropriately, there is no legal reason that the landlord must accept responsibility for personal property loss. In an effort to preserve an amicable landlord-tenant relationship, a landlord could offer to share some of the cost to replace the food items. For most tenant refrigerators as normally stocked, the cost of compensating for food that actually became unusable because of appliance failure would likely be so low that a landlord would be far ahead to negotiate a reasonable settlement with the tenant compared to the cost of litigation, in terms of both time and dollars.