I’ll try to keep this brief. Our lease ends at the end of this month, APRIL. my wife and I have not signed anything to renew any lease whatsoever. We submitted our notice on April 3rd and our last will be May 31st.
They are telling me that per our “contract” that we have to pay for the full month of JUNE as well. Even though our actual contract ends April 30th. And we are doing a month to month for May (this is what happens when you don’t sign or renew the lease) So we have not signed a new contract or agreed to anything, we gave a move out notice, and they’re telling us no.
I also have all documents and “receipts” to back up this claim.
I’d ask them to show you were in the contract it says you have to pay for June. But, id also talk to a lawyer and start looking for a new place to live.
We already found a new place to live. Hence the move out notice lol.
Call a lawyer. You’re wasting your time here
Look up state laws about deposit timeframes. If they don’t return the deposit, then file a small claims lawsuit. Super easy to do, usually you can do it online. If you’re moving out of the area then you’ll have a hard time doing it because you usually have to appear in person.
A legal question without the information where in the world you live (country, state, province) cannot possibly get reliable answers.
Unless there are some lawyers here, the best advice would be “talk to a lawyer.”
IANAL. It’s the other way around: You do everything as required per your contract. If the company believes you owe them money for June, they will sue you if you don’t pay.
If trouble is on the horizon it is however advisable to contact an actual lawyer in advance to check your paperwork in case you missed anything.
We signed one contract that ends April 30th. I might call a lawyer and see what I could do.
Does that lease agreement mention auto converting to month to month? If so, what does it say about lease termination? I’ve seen some that require 60 days notice.
You should definitely talk to a lawyer, as this is going to depend on your local laws and ordinances.
Reiterating what others have said about talking to an attorney. Most will consult with you for free and you’ll know if you have a case.
Anecdote: my brother is an attorney and I got really sick, spent a month hospitalized and when I got out had to move back to my parents house because I needed help day to day while I got better.
My brother broke my lease on my apartment using ADA rules (I’m in the US) but they tried to keep my deposit for normal wear and tear items.
All it took was a letter to the corporate office on his firm’s legal letterhead, with the relevant statutes that said they couldn’t keep my deposit for the items they listed, and a reminder that if we sued and won they’d owe me double in damages plus all costs and his fee.
Idk what state your in but landlords withholding deposits usually results in triple damages (eg. You get three times your deposit in damages if the court finds in your favor).
Not my state. Here you’re entitled to return of the deposit plus damages up to the amount of the deposit (so double, basically).
For legal questions you need to specify jurisdiction the answer may depend vastly. Typically, you may have a notice period to do when leaving and the lease would renew automatically if nobody denounce it.
But again detail would depend on your specif jurisdiction, if not done yet, join your local tenant union
They may require two months notice.
They received 2 months notice. April and May.
your notice was submitted april third. if they require ‘two months’ notice, the month of april may not ‘count’ towards that.
In theory that should be prorated then, depending on the contract dates. Anywhere I have ever lived we have bridges two places to live for a couple days while moving and cleaning, and I have never been on the hook for an entire month.
This is all going to depend on what exactly the lease says as well as local laws. OP needs to talk to a lawyer.
By this logic, OP should only be on the hook for three days’ worth of June.
Protip: Don’t pay it. It will cost them more to come after you for it than the amount owed is, so they won’t come after you for it.
As a former loan officer, I would caution against leaving unsettled debt even if you’re in the right. They can and will report you to a collection agency because the agency buys that collection amount from the rental company (and hope to get to collect more than they bought the debt for originally).
It doesn’t actually cost the rental company anything, but it will damage your credit (and contrary to popular belief, no collection records just disappear from your credit history). You’ll also then have a harder time finding new housing.
OP, talk to a lawyer.
Actually, how does contested debts work with the US credit system ? People do genuine mistake which may be settled quickly sometimes even without needing to escalate far, but there is also bad faith companies/landlord which charge abusive fee, and would try to go to collections while your still contesting.
As far as I can recall, there will simply be a note on your credit report that the collection is contested. For the small credit union where I worked, contested or not, you were disqualified for all loans and credit.
I haven’t worked in that industry in 15 years now, but I don’t imagine much has changed.
I hate our credit system and I think it needs to be torn down. It’s predatory and we don’t even attempt to educate people about how it works (or we didn’t when I was in school).
There’s a disagreement about what’s owed. That’s what civil courts are for. If they want to go that route, then talk to a lawyer, or if the amount is less than a lawyer would cost, then pay it.
Right, but they can still damage your credit first. Also, lawyers aren’t cheap and your time isn’t free. Better not to take a flippant approach to this.
Personal experience: some apartment we’d been renting gave us back our whole security deposit, which we weren’t expecting, because cat. But yay!
Couple months pass, they get hold of us and are all “Wait a second, you owe us $1200, because we have to replace the carpet.”
I imagine we could have just told them to pound sand at that point, but we’d started thinking about getting a mortgage preapproval, and didn’t want this to be a problem. So we agreed to pay them $50/month.
We paid them like five times over the course of ten months. They’d send us angry letters, and we’d finally send them a check.
The moment we got a mortgage approved, we stopped paying them. They sent a couple more angry letters, which we ignored. Never heard a thing about it again. Nothing happened with credit reports. No civil suit.
As above, if it’s “two months notice,” and OP was shy on that by three days, the most they could possibly owe is three days’ rent.
Nothing will happen if OP does not pay them. Can something happen? Sure, something very very small. But it won’t. And there’s zero harm in finding out. Worst case, old landlord sells the debt to collections for Pennie’s on the dollar, OP clears it with collections for nickels on the dollar, still coming out way ahead.
Those 3 days in April may be counted as less than a month.
April 30 plus 60 days is June 3 which is in the middle of the June lease period.
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This is just small claims court. You can just leave and not pay for a month you aren’t there, I wouldn’t expect the security deposit back though.
Move out first, then if you don’t get the security deposit back, try small claims court. You have to decide if the deposit is worth the fight though. It’s around $250 to file and serve your landlord. Assuming you win, there’s no enforcement of them paying you. You would need to then take that order to another judge and likely provide details on how to get that money back to get an order that should eventually get that money back.
It’s usually worth it because
- You include court costs in the amount you sue for
- You include the highest possible rate for your time in the amount you sue for
- You include all incident expenses
Plus, the landlord has an asset you can put a lien on in case of non-payment, the place you rented. It’s not the same as suing someone with no assets where the debt is uncollectible.
NAL, just a former renter who got screwed over a few times, then stopped getting screwed over after I figured out that court is actually good for tenants and bad for shady landlords.
It would be helpful if have specified the country but since you didn’t, I presume that you are a USian?
Yeah, because in Germany it’s normal to require 3 months’ notice.
Sorry to be Mr Hindsight here, but please join a renters’ association yesterday. If they’re anywhere near as good and cheap as was my experience, it’s money extremely well spent.
No clue what that is, so I shall Google for info. Thank you
My translation was a little off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union
In my experience it’s much less grassroots than the article makes it sound: these are well established organisations, they have specialised lawyers on the payroll, and for a yearly fee you get the right to consult them in cases like this one. And when the case is clear enough they will get active on your behalf.
Again, I hope something like that is an option where you live.
What does your contract say?
I don’t know where you live, but where I live you have to give 60 days’ notice to end a month-to-month tenancy.
If this is the case where you live too, they knew that and are probably intentionally trying to trap you for 60 more days. You may not actually have the right to end your tenancy at the end of May.
Assuming you are in the US, you can sue over anything you want to. But there is a cost to that, and your management company may be banking on that cost being higher than your rent.
Also, if you have all the documents, you should be able to read those and learn what stipulations there are if the lease terminates and you are a month-to-month situation. It could be that you needed to give them more notice. They could have buried it in the fine print. It would suck to pay a lawyer money only to be told “yup, they can do it”, and now you are out more money.
