More Adventures in Leasing: Persistent Apartment Flooding Edition

Here is a good case for illustrating equitable estoppel in a way that students, frequently renters, will probably appreciate: Pinnacle Properties Development Group, LLC v. Daily, Court of Appeals Case No. 10A01-1512-SC-2275, out of Indiana.

You may recognize Pinnacle’s name. I previously blogged about them here. I stated in that blog entry that the case seemed straightforward and not worth the money to appeal, but apparently they have a habit of appealing relatively small (here, $752.37) judgments against them.

In this case, Daily was a tenant at a Pinnacle property. About eight months after moving into his apartment, Daily’s apartment flooded. He reported the flooding using Pinnacle’s emergency telephone number, which Pinnacle told its tenants to use in such circumstances. When no one answered the emergency number, he left a message and then dealt with the flooding himself, borrowing a wet/dry vacuum and removing thirty gallons of water from his unit. 

In the month of July, the apartment flooded three more times. The first two times, Daily again called the Pinnacle emergency number. He was told that someone would be sent out to his apartment, but no one ever came. Daily continued to deal with the flooding himself, removing another fifty-two gallons of water using the borrowed wet/dry vacuum.

The third time in July that the apartment flooded, Daily went personally to the Pinnacle office, rather than calling the number. Pinnacle submitted a work order into the system but still no one came out to Daily’s apartment. Daily bought himself his own wet/dry vacuum and continued to remove gallons of water from his apartment. A week later, he filed a complaint against Pinnacle and was awarded his rent for the month of July, the cost of the wet/dry vacuum he purchased, and some costs and interest. (The amount he was awarded was considerably less than the three-thousand-plus dollars he was originally seeking.)

Pinnacle’s main argument on appeal was that the lease required Daily to give Pinnacle written notice of the flooding, which he never did. The court wasn’t sure written notice was required under the lease but it stated that, even if that was true, Pinnacle was equitably estopped from asserting the written notice requirement because it was undisputed that Pinnacle had actual notice of Daily’s flooding issue. It would be unjust under these circumstances to force Daily to pay rent for an apartment that was partially uninhabitable, where Pinnacle knew that Daily was suffering this problem and provided Daily with false assurances that it would deal with the problem, on which Daily relied, justifiably, to his detriment. As the court says, “We can hardly imagine a more appropriate application of the equitable estoppel doctrine.” The court affirmed the award of the July rent, plus the cost of the wet/dry vacuum as a consequential damage.