James D Owens & Associates Inc — Local services in Houston

Jim Owens is a liar and a slumlord. We signed a lease with him for a lovely house in the Garden Oaks area. A month later, the garage conversion flooded up to my ankles. I told him that the house had a strong mildew smell and we were worried about mold. His response was to tell us to rub bleach on the baseboards. He refused to send anyone to inspect the property for mold.

Shortly after this flood, our toilet stopped flushing. Jim sent a plumber to inspect it, and the plumber said it was a city problem. When the city said we needed an access point to our sewage line, the plumber dug into our pipe and cracked it open without putting a proper seal on the opening. Because of this, raw sewage would spill out into our yard every time it rained. The smell was overpowering the second you stepped out of the house in the front yard or the back. Despite us repeatedly calling, it took weeks before the SAME plumber who screwed up was sent to close the opening. In the middle of all this, I called Jim to talk to him about options regarding these problems. His rental secretary was rude and terse with me before transferring me to Jim. I respectfully told Jim that he was in violation of the lease, because a moldy house with no working toilet and a sewage filled yard is not a livable environment. After a few minutes of deflecting, he hung up on me.

When he spoke to my roommate later, he lied and said that I called screaming and made his rental secretary cry. This was an obvious ploy to turn us against each other, so that I would no longer be in charge of holding him responsible for his neglect. From that point on, he never accepted my calls and would only speak to my roommate.

I have rented many places, and this stands out as the worst experience I've had with a landlord. Avoid him at all costs!

Let's all hope he crosses the wrong person and gets his license revoked so that he can never exploit...

We were very excited about one of the rental properties Mr. Owens was managing. Mr. Owens seemed nice enough and assured us that he managed hundreds of properties all over the city and that he had been in the business for 30 years.

We were actually sitting in his office, our deposit in hand, reading over the lease and ready to sign it when we began to feel uneasy. The lease had numerous tenant responsibilities that we had not seen on any of our previous leases. For example, the tenant was solely responsible for paying to fix the pipes in the event of their breaking in a freeze. And the tenant was required to pay $60 out of every repair, regardless of whether or not the damage had been the tenant's fault. And the pet deposit was twice what it had been in our other leases. And so on.

When we asked Mr. Owens about the tenant responsibilities for pipes and repairs, he told us that this was standard for his company and that we could take it or leave it.

(Thoughts: I bet that he manages enough properties that losing one pair of renters won't set him back too much. But I doubt that the actual property owners who are paying him to find them renters would have been quite so dismissive of our concerns and of our steady rent check.)

After our conversation with him, we saw enough red flags that we decided not to sign the lease at that moment.

When I went home to do some research, I found lots of mixed reviews about Mr. Owens. When I looked in the "not recommended" reviews on Yelp (hidden in a link at the bottom), that's where I found the stuff that truly alarmed me. Though the property was awesome, I believe we dodged a bullet by not...

RUN. Please see my Yelp review. Spent 3 1/2 years in a property we left pristine and were completely screwed out of over $3k in deposits...all after him telling us during final walkthrough that everything looked good and nothing for us to do to get full deposits back. Let the owner, Linda Starr, run roughshod over us during our tenancy. Had no issues with us living with active mold for the last 11 mos., nor with Starr having the entire roof replaced with no notice at all. He'll treat you well right up to the point you sign the lease. And to address a previous reviewer, we are not "emotional" in the least. We are merely trying to save others from what we...