Selfless Landlord Leaves Property To Loyal Tenant Of Over 20 Years

Not having to pay rent is the ideal situation in life. Who wants to have to work endlessly just to put a roof over their heads? This gets especially tough for families with many children. Needless to say, they need to fork out more money for rent as they need a bigger space to house their offspring. Buying a house is not in everyone’s cards, and often feels like an unreachable pipe dream. However, one woman’s landlord selflessly helped her by taking the stress of paying rent each month away. A godsend for the cancer survivor.

Cancer survivor

Jane Sayner is a 75-year-old cancer survivor. After her diagnosis of bowel cancer, she underwent surgery last year in December. As an elderly woman, the healing process was quite intense, and it rendered her unable to work for most of it. this caused an immense amount of stress, as she was never sure how she would make rent. Even if she wanted to find a more stable income, Jane was aware that she was old. Most people would never dream of hiring her. So, the struggle continued, causing stress which is not ideal for a healing cancer survivor.

Strict landlord

Her landlord, John Perrett, had made a few hints about the house she had been renting. He made it seem as if he wanted to donate the house to charity when he passed. This saddened Jane, but she knew it was out of her hands one way or the other. “For the whole time that he was my landlord, he’d always said that all of his money was going to the Royal Melbourne Hospital,” said Jane to the Daily Mail.

She went on to say how he owned a fair amount of properties and conducted the rentals like a business. “He had a lot of properties, and if something went wrong or needed fixing, it was done straight away,” she said. “I always paid the rent on time. He was a very strict businessman. He had lots of shares as well as properties.”

Jane’s landlord was old-school in the way he conducted business. He preferred to come once a month to his tenants and collect the cash as opposed to them depositing the money into a bank account digitally. ‘It wasn’t until 18 months or two years before he died that I talked him into letting me put the money into a bank account. Up until then, when he was able he would come and collect the rent from here once a month.”

She loved her landlord’s house as if it were her own

Jane added a few homey touches to the house and did some work in the garden. “I treated this place like it was my own. When I first came here there was no garden out the back. Because I was living here, I planted lots of plants and flowers, which are still here today,” she said. “When he saw what I’d done, he brought over some old, big pots that his father had had that he didn’t use, that I could plant things in.”

Eventually, her landlord grew too frail, and his Parkinson’s disease caused a couple of bad falls. So, he was admitted to a nursing home. There, Jane would call in once a week to check up on him. “I used to call in at least once a week on my way home from work. I know what it’s like for people in those places. You don’t get a lot of visitors and it’s not much fun,” Jane said. 

A big surprise from her landlord

One day, Jane received a surprising call from her landlord. He needed some information from her, but she did not expect what. “Then one day he just rang me and said “My solicitor’s here, can you please give me your full name, because I’m leaving you your unit,” she said. “I thought I hadn’t heard it right. Surely not. For the whole time I had known him, (leaving all his money to charity) was always what he was going to do. Everything was going to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. As it finished up, it was $ 18.6 million that they got.”

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