Stefanie beninato    |    Santa Fe    ,    New Mexico 87504    Landlord Complaint 23-2631

A friend and I rent the house from Stephanie Beninato for 3 months,what we thought would be a perfect arrangement due to the fact that one person would be living there and the other just visiting 3 days per week,mrs Beninato had the property for sale so we agreed to let her show it on occasion for a very small reduction in rent.Our mistake was not checking out the history of this landlord before we signed the agreement.Stephanie was ok just making a few requests of us for some very petty things at first,but once all the rent for the term of the lease was paid in full she started a full on harassment program,it became very evident that mrs Beninato has a long reputation of doing this so that she can keep deposits,she hides behind a Law degree and preys on the weak, poor and unfortunate.In fact mrs Beninato has never practiced law.Her requests became more and more unreasonable sending insulting emails and making unfounded complaints.Several times she entered the property without permission,we had to secured a attorney to deal with her and although she was strictly told to communicate with us thru the attorney she still continued her harassment. On communication with people who are mrs Beninatos neighbours we found that they are having problems with her too,some have a restraining order to keep her off there property.It turns out that she makes a full time career out of trying to make people's life's unhappy. In the last 3 weeks of the lease she started to make more and more unfounded claims accompanied by rude,insulting emails.we in fact did not reside at the property for the last 3 weeks of the lease,she complained that the garbage can had not been emptied an oversight on our part,we paid a company to empty it for us as she issued a seven day notice knowing we would be out of town for 2 weeks,she was now grasping at straws to try and prove we had violated the lease in some way,we did not. We have now vacated the property and returned the keys,we expect our deposit back minus any outstanding utility bills.But now mrs Beninato has become completely deranged making lots of false clams to property damage,we have photos of the house as we left it she refused to show proof of damage,there is no damage,I believe that her problem is she has not got the money to repay our deposit. I could go into all the individual issues we had with this landlord,but it would be petty and you can read previous complaints to get the general idea nothing new there.