Landlord wants to include a clause where tenant pays rent if property is vacant after leaving. Is this legal/enforceable? I'm asking on behalf of a friend. I don't have the contract to copy in relevant clauses. A landlord proposes to change the rental agreement. The new clause states that when a tenant leaves, they pay rent if the property is unoccupied. This way the landlord does not have a void period. My inclination is that this is not enforceable, because the former-tenant would be paying for a service that they do not benefit from. Also, this website offering tips to mitigate void periods does not list this tactic, implying that it is at least uncommon. My questions are: Is this type of clause legal/enforceable? What is this type of clause called? N.B. I found it hard to conduct my own background research, as I don't know what to search for
Terms in a contract that are not legal or not enforcable are quite capable of causing you trouble and costing you time or money, most likely a generous amount of both. Your friend shouldn't care one bit about whether these terms would be legal and/or enforcable. If he doesn't like them, then he MUST NOT accept the changed contract. Not if these terms are illegal and unenforceable and of course even less if they are legal and enforceable. I would write back "I believe that the suggested change in terms is illegal and would be unenforceable. I also believe that the change is deeply unfair towards me and creates a considerable legal risk that I am not willing to accept under any circumstances. I therefore strongly reject your suggested change. "
Under an assured shorthold tenancy, when the fixed term expires, it automatically becomes a periodic tenancy (also called a rolling or month-to-month tenancy) if no other action is taken. For periodic tenancies, the default requirement is: The notice you give must end on the first or last day of the period of a tenancy, except when your tenancy agreement says something different. The first day of a period of your tenancy is the anniversary date each week or month of when your tenancy began. This is often the same date that your rent is due, but not always. (the above taken from this Shelter guide.) The contract merely restates this. So in other words, yes, this is normal. In this instance, if you give notice on or before 25 Dec, you'll be required to pay rent up to 24 Jan. However, if the landlord finds a new tenant and their tenancy starts after you move out, but before 24 Jan, then you are only liable for rent up to the start of their tenancy.
If the lease ends on 14 August then, unless there is a time in the lease, the tenant must be gone before 0:00:00 15 August. If they leave anytime on the 14th (or earlier) they are in compliance with the lease. If there is no provision for pro-rata rent if they overstay and agreement cannot be reached, if the tenant overstays the landlord can sue for whatever damage (loss) that actually caused. Specific legislation wherever you are may change this.
The key here is the provision "through no fault of his own". A landlord who relies on this provision would need to be able to demonstrate what the cause of the delay was, and that s/he had not been reasonably able to avoid it. Nor could a landlord simply fail to take steps to repair the problem, whatever it might be. If the problem will clearly take more than 30 days to fix (Isay the building burned down), the prospective tenant would have the right to cancel the lease at once. True, in such a case the tenant would be put to the trouble and expense of finding another place at short notice, but then the landlord would have lost his income from the property. The provision allocates the losses between the parties in such a case. If the property is not available at the specified time for the lease to start, but could be available a few days later, the quoted provision would not allow the landlord to just ignore the situation and end the lease. The landlord is allowed only a "reasonable time" to fix the problem, and taking significantly longer than is needed would not be "reasonable".
Can landlord backbill 4.5 years worth of utilities that were never billed to us bimonthly as directed in the lease? Yes, since the bimonthly billing issue appears to be within the LA statute of limitations for claims of breach of contract: 10 years (see here). But you might want to check the actual legislative language of the statute referred therein and the prior or consecutive ones --all pertaining to statutes of limitations-- so as to ascertain the accuracy of information in the first link (navigating through the bunch of LA two- or three-line statutes for this and that gets annoying). They are desperate to get me to move out since it is a rent-controlled unit and I feel like they have done this to cause issues and force me to default on rent. Is this a legal practice? I am not knowledgeable of state legislation particular to rent-controlled units, but I highly doubt it is lawful for them to proceed that way. Other details you describe reflect that the company has been --or is being-- malicious or grossly negligent. If so, strictly speaking, the company's conduct (1) ought to weaken its position or merits in trying to force you out, and (2) tends to contravene the contract law covenant of good faith and fair dealing (see below). If your lease mentions any statutes regarding rent-controlled units, you may want to search for case law at leagle.com to see how the statutes are applied. Without knowing the terms of your lease, I think your priority should at all times be the rent itself so as to avoid eviction. Does the "billing every two months" in the lease have any hold on this issue if they breached their own lease? Maybe not. The repeated, yet sole, failure to send you the bimonthly billings falls short of landlord's breach of contract. For your argument on breach of contract to prevail, you would have to prove that the landlord knowingly/deliberately let the water bills pile up prior to demanding you to pay everything at once. That would prove that the landlord is not meeting the covenant of good faith and fair dealing that is prerequisite in contract law.
I am unfamiliar with a "perpetual contract" and that phase does not appear in any reported appellate court decision of the State of Oklahoma. However, usually unpaid utility bills do constitute a lien against the property that is enforceable against a subsequent purchaser, which has the same practical effect. This kind of obligation is also sometimes described as an "encumbrance". Usually, in an arms length sale of real estate through real estate agents, a title insurance company is hired and is responsible for determining if there are any outstanding liens, pro-rating utility bills, pro-rating property taxes, etc. at closing. If the title company fails to find a lien and there is one, the title company is responsible for paying off the lien that it failed to find (although it can often force the previous owner to indemnify it for the payment it has to make). It could be that since water service was not currently being delivered, that the title company did not search in the manner that it should have to find this lien, or it could be that there was no title company used and so no one ever checked. Also, if the property was conveyed with a "warranty deed" such a deed contains a promise from the seller that there are no liens or encumbrances not listed on the face of the deed that have to be paid, and the seller has liability for breach of the warranty of title. But, if the property was conveyed with a "quitclaim deed" there is no such warranty.
There is certainly no legal problem in asking if the tenants would be agreeable with the landlord discontinuing the security service. Even if it were in the lease, a lease like pretty much any contract can be changed by mutual agreement of all parties (unless there is a law preventing such a change, which is rare and I do not think will apply in this case). A more difficult question would be if the landlord would be within his or her rights to discontinue the service without asking the tenants first, since it is not in the lease. Since the property was advertised as coming with the service, it might be held that the continued service was reasonably expected by the tenants, and thus an implicit term of the lease. But since the landlord does not plan to take such unilateral action, that remains a purely theoretical issue. The landlord could offer the tenants a small rent reduction, perhaps one quarter of the amout that was being paid to the security firm, but there is no legal requirement to do so. As to whether asking for such a change would be &quot;rude&quot;, I don't think so, but that is a matter of opinion, and not really on-topic here.
A "limited license housing agreement" may be an interesting attempt to get around landlord-tenant laws, typically associated with official student housing (e.g. this from Queens College CUNY). This facility near WMU is not overtly related to the university, but might be subcontracting for the university. At any rate, there is no special provision under Michigan law that exempts landlords from the provisions of the law in case they declare the contract to be an agreement as opposed to a lease. It is possible that this is copy-and-paste law that erroneously relies on provisions in landlord-tenant laws that exempt university housing agreements from provisions of a state's landlord-tenancy law. You do not need to be informed that you should / could consult an attorney before signing a legal document: this knowledge is presupposed. It is also assumed that when you sign a document, you read the document. It is reasonably likely that the lease contained language like the following (from the above contract): I have carefully read, fully understand and voluntarily sign this Housing Agreement. Once fully signed, this is a binding contract and is intended to be enforceable under its terms. I have had the opportunity to seek independent legal advice The disclaimer "This Housing Agreement is not a lease and no tenancy, leasehold, possessory or other property interest in any specific apartment or bedroom is created" has dubious legal status. The rights given by the landlord-tenant act cannot be waived, under the Truth in Renting Act, so saying "this is not a lease" does not make the lease not a lease. In Michigan there is a duty on landlords to mitigate loses when a premise is abandoned. The case Fox v. Roethlisberger, 85 N.W.2d 73 mentions such a possible duty in the context of tenancy is often cited on the web as establishing such a duty, but I disagree. Froling v. Bischoff, 252 N.W.2d 832 however establishes that there is such a general duty for any breach of contract (and even applies it to breach of a rental agreement). So whether or not you call it a lease, there is still a duty to mitigate losses. In the scenario where you abandoned the unit and the landlord waited until the end of the year to file an action for breach of contract, they could have failed in their duty to mitigate their losses (but see Fox v. Roethlisberger, where landlord did make an effort to re-rent, and simply was not able to for 9 months).