Tenants Breaking Lease
My tenants informed me that they want to break one-year lease after only 3 months citing personal reasons and bad planning. Which would leave me with a vacant apartment in December. I hold one month security deposit but it seems to me that wouldn’t be enough to cover my loses and a headache.
My tenants informed me that they want to break one-year lease after only 3 months citing personal reasons and bad planning. Which would leave me with a vacant apartment in December. I hold one month security deposit but it seems to me that wouldn’t be enough to cover my loses and a headache.
I can say from experience that the litigious route is the worst. The best you can hope from an experience like this is to get them out of there as quickly as possible with as much cooperation as possible. For heavens sake, do NOT rely on them or expect them to find you a tenant. Their fabulous judgement is what caused this mess. You should explain that this is a breaking of the lease, that it is a big problem for you, that this is a bad time of year, etc. and see if you can get them to be cooperative in keeping their apartment both very tidy and neat and available for showing. Immediately. And then while we can’t control everything, to the extent you can, analyze how you can try to avoid a similiar situation in the future, i.e. do a lot of screening up front. I am sympathetic because s**t happens but see what you can learn from this. And stay out of court. I had to go there as a last resort with an inherited tenant from hell and let me tell you about a way to age yourself.
Gale, I had to break my lease a month shy of fulfillment this week because of the downstairs tenants who moved in after me, as well as street noise that was way worse than I had expected. I let my landlady know and posted on Craigslist to find someone to take over my lease and had no trouble finding interest. I’m now completely moved into my new space and my landlady has a new tenant that she likes 🙂
My point being, (a) your tenants should at least help you find a replacement and (b) Craigslist is your friend.
Make sure they move out at the end of their paid up time, keep their deposit and use it to float the month it will take to fix up and re-rent the apartment. You can even be nice and offer to give them back a pro-rata portion of the deposit if someone else moves in sooner than that. That is more than fair and probably sets the stage for an amicable separateion.
Fighting people to pay up on a lease they want out of seems like it will cost more than you will recoup.
no, I believe what folks are saying is that since there is no opt-out clause, they are responsible for the entire term of the lease. You’re thinking of it in reverse.
If they have properties in Florida, they aint got no money!!
It also matters if you live on-site or not. If you don’t, then pushing too hard just might result in a midnight move out and you having an empty apartment on no notice at all.
I saw a lot of these when I lived in Manhattan, the friend’s van or U-Haul pulling up in the middle of the night and people furtively looking around as they carried out their stuff.
If you do live on the premises it’s much less likely (although some people would still have the balls to do it right under your nose!).
There is no clouse in the lease, they are liable for the reminder of the lease. These people have money, the also have couple of properties in Florida.
Sure, a contract is a contract but pressing people to stay when they don’t want to is fruitless. You’ll at least have a rentable apartment if they leave. They could stay and not pay….and then you lose rent and have to pay a lawyer. Then at the end of it, they can leave your place in shambles.
You think you have a headache now…..
You as a landlord have less power than you think. The quicker you realize this the better.
I’d let the tenants help but do the lion’s share myself. And, of course, vet any prospects the tenants came up with.
Legally they are responsible for the release, unless as other people mentioned there is an out clause. There are such clauses on some, but it’s a bit unusual unless someone negotiated for it up front. But in NYC the lease is more about protecting the tenants than it is about protecting the LL. You can try to enforce it…but if the tenants balk you have little recourse. You can go for a long drawn out court fight but you will probably lose money on the deal. And in the meanwhile you’ll have unhappy tenants in possession of your apartment.
You could of course do what JuditH suggests. I’ve known tenants that can be bullied in this way. The upside is they do the legwork for you. The downside is that they might not do it, or they might give you a stream of awful candidates. I guess she’s been successful at it, but I’ve seen situations where it backfires. Badly.
I think the smart landlord would start looking for new tenants now. And do it themselves! The current tenants are almost certainly not going to protest you showing the place if they want to get out so badly.
What you want to avoid is the worst-case scenario of non-paying tenants still in possession of the apartment, or almost as bad, pissed-off tenants who are in possession but not liking you very much. They can do enormous damage while they’re there, and in the meanwhile it will take you months to get them out.