The Karma of Craigslist

Posted by: Monica Gagnier on November 06

I grew up as an “Army brat,” moving every two or three years. In other words, I’m hard-wired to hit the road.

Four years ago, when my husband decided to get out of the restaurant business and work in the golf industry, we left New York City for Beacon, N.Y., an old mill town on the Hudson with a population of about 12,000.

Even if you’re not familiar with Beacon, you can probably guess that it’s not possible to teach golf 12 months a year in our part of the country. This has led us to some interesting winter excursions, where Jim has worked or studied in places ranging from Cordoba, Argentina, to the Catskill Mountains of New York.

I manage to tag along by using my vacation time and and by telecommuting at the discretion of my bosses. What allows Jim and me to pursue a nomadic lifestyle on a shoestring? Craigslist.org, the free online classifieds site.

Now, most people would cringe at the thought of renting their primary residence to strangers while they are out of town, but this is the only way we can make ends meet as “snowbirds.”

Overall, we've been very lucky. The first time we put our house up for rent, in February, 2006, we were ready to go study Spanish (both of us), golf (him), and tango (me) in Argentina for six weeks. (We didn't learn that many Spanish speakers make fun of the Argentinian accent, which earned Marxist revolutionary Ernesto Guevara his nickname "Che," until later.)

I wasn't hopeful that we would find someone to rent in Beacon from Valentine's Day to Apr. 1, but we did. That's the power of the Internet for you!

The first folks to respond to our Craigslist ad were Ben and Gina Babbage, who were moving to the Beacon-Newburgh area from Long Island. They weren't sure which side of the Hudson River they wanted to live on, so they rented our two-bedroom cottage for six weeks while they looked for a house.

As fate would have it, Ben was also in the golf industry. He was taking over as the supervisor at the Storm King Country Club in Cornwall, N.Y., an 11-hole golf course near the Storm King Art Center.

We didn't sign a contract with Ben and Gina, nor did we run a credit check on them. After we got back from Argentina and saw that our house was cleaner than when we left it, I returned the security deposit by leaving cash under a rock in the yard. Ben drove by and got it one night while we were in the city. Not exactly high finance.

Our second adventure on Craigslist was more open-ended. I persuaded Jim to take a job at Belleayre Mountain in the Catskills beginning in December 2006. Through Craigslist, we found an apartment in Margaretville, N.Y., overlooking, you guessed it, a golf course, at the Hanah Resort & Country Club. The converted garage apartment was nothing fancy, but we didn't plan to spend a lot of time there.

Jim would be working as a ski lift operator or skiing, and I'd either be skiing or spending time in New York working in the office. This scheme involved a lot of what my actress friend Anney Giobbe calls "couch-surfing" -- imposing on the hospitality of friends in the five boroughs.

The tenants we found for our house in Beacon were Patrick Pummill and Rebecca Pitcher, a couple who earn their living in the theater. Patrick was a production sound engineer at Les Miserables on Broadway, while Rebecca was recovering from an injury before heading off to Singapore to play the female lead in Phantom of the Opera. Despite their star-studded credentials, they were surprisingly down-to-earth.

Patrick and Rebecca had been commuting from Delaware Water Gap, Pa., to New York City as they waited for the renovation of their Hoboken (N.J.) condo to be completed. As construction dragged on longer than expected, they wanted a base closer to the city where they could entertain Patrick's family from Texas over the holidays.

They moved in Dec. 15 and planned to stay a month, but they ended up leaving at the end of February. Now, some of my friends refer to Patrick and Rebecca as the "tenants who wouldn't leave," but that's not fair. I encouraged them to stay as long as they wanted.

We had a cooperative relationship. I would drive the 1 hour and 40 minutes from our sublet in Margaretville to Beacon on Saturdays, to pick up our mail and check up on things. Sometimes, I would walk Patrick and Rebecca's dog or feed their cat. (I didn't want to put a forward on our mail because I didn't know how long we'd be away from home.)

Once again, there were were no disagreements about the house in Beacon even though no one signed a lease. However, my husband refers to the place we rented in the Catskills as "the dump."

The winter we were in Margaretville, the temperature averaged 55 degrees Fahrenheit in January, instead of the norm of about 32. When it didn't snow, Jim didn't work -- or get paid. He ended up spending a lot more time in "the dump" than we had planned.

A word to the wise: If you're ever looking on Craigslist and there aren't any pictures of the inside of the apartment or house, it's probably because it's not worth showing.

Fast-forward to the present. I left my home in Beacon a week ago, having rented it to an affable fellow named Mike, who needed a place in a hurry. A construction project on his home in the next town had hit a snag when the zoning board didn't show up for a scheduled meeting. The temperatures were dropping, and Mike's house had no heat.

When I met with him on Oct. 25, Mike's wife and two small children were due to return from a trip to Florida a few days later. He gave me a check that included one month's rent and a security deposit. I packed up the car on Oct. 30 and headed toward Bennington, Vt., where a friend had generously lent me her home.

On my way out of town, I took our cat Bogey to the vet to get a rabies shot in case I have to take him on a plane during the next few weeks. My husband is working in Palm Springs, Calif., at the Westin Mission Hills golf resort, and he's missing Bogey, named for the golf score, not the actor.

While I was at the vet, I learned that Bogey had fleas. This was news to me. I hadn't noticed any fleas in the house. The vet treated Bogey for his itchy ailment and sold me a can of flea repellent that I sprayed all over the furniture and rugs while Bogey waited in the car. I vacuumed, threw the vacuum-cleaner bag away as instructed by the vet, and began the drive to Vermont.

What I did not do was inform my tenants that they might be facing fleas. Not exactly ethical behavior, I'll admit, but I didn't think there would be a problem.

On Sunday, Nov. 2, I got an e-mail from Mike. He and his wife were being eaten alive. He was going to call an exterminator, and I agreed to deduct the cost from next month's rent, as well as the cost of a motel where they would stay overnight after the fumigation.

The morning after Election Day, I received another e-mail from Mike, with the subject line "we're moving." He said he and his wife were still noticing flea bites on their sons even after the $350 fumigation.

I felt conflicted. I was truly sorry that the flea problem caused my tenants and their two small boys discomfort, but I was annoyed that my Recession in America road trip would have to be delayed.

Mike wants me to refund the entire month's rent. The $350 he paid the exterminator equals one week of rent under our agreement, which isn't written down. That was the length of time his family was in our house.

Mike said he wasn't asking me to reimburse him for a $90 fee for a professional cleaning service that he hired. I thought I had cleaned up pretty well before I left, but I'm not the world's greatest housekeeper, I'll admit. Mike's offer was a generous one, but I said I would foot the bill if he came up with a receipt that I could use for my taxes.

So after all that fumigating and cleaning, why did they leave? I think the real reason is that Mike rented the house while his wife was in Florida and she didn't like it. Perhaps Beacon, which is not as upscale as the town my tenants are from, is too gritty for Mike's wife.

Interesting that his e-mail arrived at 9 a.m. on Nov. 5, the morning after America elected its first African-American President. Were the Barack Obama celebrations in Beacon too raucous for my tenants? I asked about that, but I didn't get an answer.

But you know what? It doesn't matter. I wouldn't want Mike and his family to stay someplace where they don't feel comfortable. And they've certainly faced a lot of aggravation from Bogey's fleas.

For Craigslist to work, we all have to be accommodating. No, Craigslist doesn't have a customer-satisfaction rating system like eBay. (Mmm, I wonder how that would work for personals.) Still, what goes around comes around. I've had good karma with Craigslist, so I'm not going to give Mike a hard time.

I'll go home to Beacon and try to find another tenant.