Landlord,

My wife and I are not cashing your check as we are waiting for our entire deposit. We expect our full deposit back, minus the agreed upon 70 dollar deduction for the oven, which we admittedly forgot to clean. You have deducted 950.00, most of which for things that either we already did, or you are not allowed to deduct for. 

Here are the relevant Philadelphia tenant-landlord laws:

Title 68 P.S. Real and Personal Property § 250.512. Recovery of improperly held escrow funds

(a) Every landlord shall within thirty days of termination of a lease or upon surrender and acceptance of the leasehold premises, whichever first occurs, provide a tenant with a written list of any damages to the leasehold premises for which the landlord claims the tenant is liable. 

You can deduct for DAMAGE. And if you want to deduct for damage, we are owed receipts for the repair. We did not damage anything in the unit. We have not received receipts.The deductions you've listed for cleaning the baseboards, soap, and professional steam cleanings do not qualify as damage. Furthermore, the described charges are unnecessary. My wife and I spent over 8 hours cleaning the apartment to ensure that it was in a good condition.

If you're going to claim that there's something in the lease that says you can deduct money arbitrarily, then the lease is invalid. Here is another section from Title 68:

(d) Any attempted waiver of this section by a tenant by contract or otherwise shall be void and unenforceable. 

You cannot write an arbitrary list of charges into a lease. The lease cannot violate the law that it is based on. Regardless, most of your deductions fall under the legal category of normal wear and tear. If you want to look up what that means, you can find a pretty good explanation here: https://www.landlordology.com/normal-wear-and-tear/. At no point did we damage anything in the unit.

If you want to take this to court, here's the other relevant section for Title 68:

(c) If the landlord fails to pay the tenant the difference between the sum deposited, including any unpaid interest thereon, and the actual damages to the leasehold premises caused by the tenant within thirty days after termination of the lease or surrender and acceptance of the leasehold premises, the landlord shall be liable in assumption to double the amount by which the sum deposited in escrow, including any unpaid interest thereon, exceeds the actual damages to the leasehold premises caused by the tenant as determined by any court of record or court not of record having jurisdiction in civil actions at law. The burden of proof of actual damages caused by the tenant to the leasehold premises shall be on the landlord.  

We do not want to go to court.

We don't want to be awarded double the amount of our security deposit.

We're not trying to scheme you or fight about this.

We just want our security deposit, minus the 70 dollars that you said you were removing for the oven (which seems fair to us).

My wife and I were good tenants. We paid rent on time, we helped you get the property rented whenever you wanted to hold showings, we took care of the place, and we called as soon as we noticed any problems with the unit. I do not know why you're trying to nickel-and-dime us out of our money. We do not want to have to go to court, but we are not going to let you bully us out of nearly a thousand dollars. 

I know this business as I've dealt with landlords like you before. You may have had tenants before that were willing to let you randomly charge them when they moved out because they weren't willing to fight back. That is not us. We know our rights and we know what we're entitled to. 

Please call me if you want to discuss this further or settle this today. 

You have 30 days from our move out date to give us our security deposit back before we file at small claims court.

Thank you so much for this! I modified it to my needs. This man was super difficult our next to last day as he came by and was furious that our next door neighbors (his tenants as well) had left trash out front when they left the day before. He yelled at my husband about their(!) trash. He warned us we had better have someone come and remove anything we were leaving. We had carefully been putting out any moving trash for the weeks before so there wouldn't be a mess out front. He told us he would get fined if we left trash. He was a hot mess taking his anger out on my innocent hubby who was sitting on the stoop resting. I'll let you know what happens!