Illegal Sub-let Situation
Good morning group. Here is an interesting situation. I own a brownstone and rent the top 2 floors as a single-unit 3-bedroom apartment. 2 names are on the lease and they asked if they could have one roommate. I agreed. Both primary tenants are out of town for the month and the lease expires the…
Good morning group. Here is an interesting situation. I own a brownstone and rent the top 2 floors as a single-unit 3-bedroom apartment. 2 names are on the lease and they asked if they could have one roommate. I agreed. Both primary tenants are out of town for the month and the lease expires the end of this month. The non-lease-holding roommate has decided that he can make some extra cash by subletting the tenants’ bedrooms to persons for short-term for the rest of the month. He informed me of this only after having lined up his subtenants and taken money from them. When I told him that absolutely no subtenants are allowed he informed me that they are moving in this Friday whether I like it or not.
So group, how would you handle this? If subtenants show up, that is a direct violation of the lease and I could initiate eviction proceedings. Seems futile since the lease is up this month. If “mystery people” show up in my house on Friday do I call the police, the sheriff’s office. Any (legal) ideas?
Sorry, cannot comment at length right now:
1) Immediately contact the tenants who whom you have the signed lease (and keep your fingers crossed that they were not aware of this plan before they left);
2) Drop by Housing Court at very earliest chance and discuss this in detail with their counselors: http://bit.ly/d9g5MZ
3) Drop by your local precinct and discuss the “whether you like it or not” aspect with them, because you’ll be dealing with squatters, not subtenants, and that’s a massive can of worms.
I feel like is a tenant said “whether you like it or not” to my buddy’s father (who was a landlord in Hoboken for many years) he would’ve been upstairs in seconds with a baseball bat and scared this a**hole straight. Very seldom is this a viable, smart solution, but sometimes, it is.
god- it sucks to be those people who gave that person their money! Can you get their names and contact info from your bad subletter and contact them somehow?
If they’re not on the lease wouldn’t this be considered squatting or trespassing?
For one thing, you can demand to know the names and phone numbers for these people. Call them up and explain to them what the situation is. I’ll bet they are not aware.
I would hire a lawyer and start the evicting process already. Here you have an apartment occupied by someone without a lease or any respect for you. Why should he move at the end of the month?
You presumably have this month’s rent and the security deposit, so you are not taking the sub-tenant’s credit risk. Make sure the tenants know what’s going on, and that if anything goes awry they won’t be getting their deposit back and you’ll be taking them to court. They should be able to then manage their roommate appropriately. Keep it in perspective – this is week 49 of the lease, not week 2 – they’ll likely all be gone before you could get anyone to take any action on this. If the roommate was really trying to screw you then he probably wouldn’t have told you what was up.
I don’t know the legal answer to this, but have you contacted the people on the lease? I’m sure they wouldn’t want eviction proceedings on their record (thinking of future renting they may be doing).
WOW. this will not go well. I leave it up to others as to how to prevent this legally from happening but this guy is not on the lease and the lease says no subletting. You want to prevent this from occurring in the first place because, the reality is, that once they are there, they do not have to move out.