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# Santa Monica real estate firm told to refund tenants’ security deposit
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/santa-monica-real-estate-firm-told-to-refund-tenants-security-deposit/
- Published: 2003-01-16T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T01:19:34.000Z
- Author: Andrew Fixmer
- Tags: Real Estate & Housing, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*A violent neighborhood nullifies lease, judge says*

A property management company should have told three young women the apartment they were about to rent wasn’t exactly in the safest of neighborhoods, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Santa Monica-based Wellman Property Management Inc., located at 1415 Stanford St., acted as the landlord when it rented an apartment last fall to Erica Sullivan, Andrea Hopkins and Kiran Multvent in Silver Lake.

When the young women asked if the neighborhood was safe, Wellman representatives indicated it was. Shortly after moving into the apartment, there was a shooting on Nov. 6, 2002, directly outside the apartment building.

The three women obtained a quarterly crime report the next day from the Los Angeles Police Department that indicated the neighborhood was a high-crime area with a history of violent crime.

They immediately moved, but Wellman wouldn’t refund the security deposit because the women broke the one-year lease they had signed.

So the women — all of whom are in their early 20s — took the local property management company to Santa Monica Small Claims Court. The women, who dressed in business suits, laid out a barrage of documents and case law to support their arguments. After 15 minutes of testimony, they successfully convinced Judge Pro Tem Donna Greenstein that they should get their money back.

Greenstein ruled that the lease was void because Wellman had not disclosed the true criminal nature of the neighborhood and it must refund the $1,300 security deposit. However, Wellman can keep the $1,000 rent for November, the month the women moved out.

The company also cannot collect $1,766 in back rent, which company representatives argued was owed since the apartment remained vacant from Nov. 11 to Jan. 8.

“I’m going to call it a wash,” Greenstein said. “While you can’t guarantee a neighborhood’s safety, you must disclose it.”

Under California state law, if a tenant inquires about the criminal statistics of the neighborhood, a landlord must reveal them. If that’s not done, then the lease becomes null and void, according to Greenstein.

But Vanessa Tineve and Christina McKay of Wellman Property Management said it’s impossible for them to guarantee the safety of a neighborhood.

“Safety is a very subjective thing,” Tineve argued. “People think if they live on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica then they’re safe, but I can’t guarantee that.”

However, the women weren’t asking for a guarantee, just some information about their prospective neighborhood.

“We asked her if it was a safe area because we are three single young women living together,” Sullivan said. “So we feel we are entitled because Ms. McKay downplayed the safety of the area.”

Sullivan also argued that while a landlord can’t be expected to answer for a lone incident, they should know about any ongoing criminal activity in the neighborhood where they are renting apartments.

“You can’t guarantee against a single incident,” she said. “But you can take into consideration past events and make an educated prediction about what’s likely to happen in the future. And in this neighborhood, it was very likely there were going to be future incidents.”

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 16, 2003.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/011603.pdf?ref=smdp.com)