Landlord asks for new terms, then signs under old terms (apartment, lease)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
We are approaching the end of our 1-year lease on a condo. We spoke with our landlord one month ago and negotiated an extension for 1 year. They drafted the lease, we signed it, and sent it back.
Three days later, she emailed us and said that her personal situation had changed and that they wanted to sell the condo "sooner than later" and wanted to do a lease that was less than 1 year. They did not send a copy of the lease with their signatures.
We have been discussing for a week some potential other options, but it all sounded like they did not want to sign the current lease that we had just signed. We did not want a shorter lease, so we quickly found another place to rent, signed a lease, and informed our current landlord.
She was mad, and sent a message sayin that we were under the year lease we signed and sent a copy with their signatures for the first time. She said that if we do not stay, that we would be forfeiting our last months rent and deposit (which were supposed to carry over in the extension).
So even though we signed, does the email chain saying that they wanted different arrangements still make the arrangement we signed binding? I know this may be a legal question, but just curious if anyone has experienced this.
We are approaching the end of our 1-year lease on a condo.
We spoke with our landlord one month ago and negotiated an extension for 1 year.
The lease didn't have that as the default expectation?
Quote:
They drafted the lease, we signed it, and sent it back.
Three days later, she emailed us and said that her personal situation had changed
and that they wanted to sell the condo "sooner than later" and wanted to do a lease that was less than 1 year.
They did not send a copy of the lease with their signatures.
They're stuck now. Get the name (and business card) for a lawyer.
So even though we signed, does the email chain saying that they wanted different arrangements still make the arrangement we signed binding?
No.
You offered a year. Your offer was not accepted. You withdrew your offer. You have that documented. You do not have a binding contract despite her signature.
However, I suggest you spend a few hundred to have a lawyer write her a scary letter about the lawsuit she'll be facing if she attempts to keep your money.
This is definitely a lawyer question. On one hand, you signed and agreed to the one-year extension. You did not wait to get a changed lease to override that one. On the other hand, she wanted to change that lease to something shorter. It's a question of whether she accepted your signed lease and was then offering you a replacement that you may or may not have accepted or whether her offering new terms was a refusal of the signed lease.
If she wanted a shorter term, do you know how short it would have been? Would it still have been reasonable to rush out and sign a lease somewhere else?
It's way too borderline and technical to listen to someone online and not a lawyer.
Did you not notify the landlord in writing that you were rescinding your offer to rent the condo? You can't just walk out of negotiations without telling anyone after you have already signed the contract.
It seems to me that you signed a lease and you are not saying that the landlord told you that the only way you could stay was with a shorter lease, only that they asked if you would change and use a shorter lease.
I think you are stuck, but the best thing to do (in my opinion) is to sit down with a real estate specialist lawyer and find out what your legal situation is.
I think if you had decided to stay, your old landlord would have been obliged to honor the lease you signed, because even though they didn’t sign it, their giving it to you is indication that they approve of the terms. You would have been on solid ground to insist on them honoring the terms of that lease. Now that you’ve signed a new lease with a different apartment, I would definitely get an attorney involved.
It is true that we were probabaly a little hasty in jumping into a new lease, but she sent the message saying they wanted something other than a year lease 10 days before our current lease was up.
We also never would have done it if we thought they had signed the year lease. The email from her and several other emails from her made it seem like we were negotiating a new lease, and not altering the lease we just signed (such as another email from her saying “if we offered you the one-year instead, would you be willing to do that now?”).
I really think we have a case that she was not going to accept the year lease until we said we were moving out immediately, but we really should have cleared things up first before we did that.
We talked to her again and it sounds like we might be able to come to a middle ground. Otherwise we will be contacting a lawyer.
Why didn't you do this in the first place ? Landlord's and tenants are not mind readers.
We offered to speak to them over the phone during the correspondence over email, but they did not take us up on it.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
