There are two main things that control your relationship with your landlord and impact your tenant rights while you are renting. The first is your state’s landlord-tenant law. The other is the lease agreement that you and the landlord sign. For the best rental experience and to make sure that you fully protect your rights as a tenant it is important that you understand your lease and the law. In our new Learn Your Lease series of posts, we’ll tackle various lease provisions that we think are some of the most important. For the next several weeks, on each Tuesday we will share a new entry in this series. The first lease provision we will discuss in detail will be the written notice requirement. Come back on Tuesday to read it and begin to learn your lease.
Why It’s Important To Learn Your Lease
The most important thing you can do protect and enforce your tenant rights is to understand exactly what is contained in the lease agreement you signed. Landlords prepare the leases and you can bet that there is a lot in your lease that protects your landlord. It would also be a solid bet that there’s very little in the lease that actually protects you, the tenant. Landlords often use the lease to shift responsibility for a lot of things from them onto you, the tenant. Many landlords accomplish this by including provisions that serve as roadblocks designed to have tenants waive some of their tenant rights or prevent you from being entitled to certain rights that you have under state landlord-tenant law until only after you have taken certain steps.
Between the work we’ve previously done as property managers for landlords and what we are currently doing as tenant advocates, there are a few things we know with certainty when it comes to landlords, tenants and written leases. First, many tenants do not read the entire lease before signing. If this is you, there’s nothing to be ashamed of here – from what we’ve seen this is true for an overwhelming number of tenants. Second, in the instances that a tenant does read the entire lease agreement, there are often a number of things in it that they don’t understand. Again, no need for shame here. Everyone has areas in which they have some degree of expertise and other areas in which they don’t. Unless you have been a property manager, a real estate broker, an attorney, or just love reading and researching landlord-tenant laws, no one could expect you to be familiar or have a true understanding of some of the things found in a lease agreement, and more importantly, the potential consequences that might result from those provisions. Third, landlords will – if they think there’s a chance that they can get away with it – put things into the lease that are not found in the state landlord-tenant law. Most of the time this is perfectly fine in a legal sense because the lease is a contract between the landlord and the tenant and contracting parties are free to come to whatever terms they find acceptable and can both agree upon. But there are times when landlords will put in something that is contrary to state law and make every effort (sometimes successfully) to enforce that provision against tenants.
There are good landlords and there are bad landlords. With what we do, we only see the bad ones. Bad landlords come in all sizes from an individual who bought a house as an investment property to local property management companies that will do anything to make their landlord clients more money to the national Wall Street-backed corporate giant landlords like American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes. In our opinion, these Wall Street landlords tend to be the worst offenders of tenant rights. It is also our opinion that they are the most dangerous to the long-term protection of tenant rights because their very business models are built on shifting responsibility for the maintenance and upkeep of rental properties from landlords to tenants. In this new series that we are starting to teach you about what’s in your lease, we’ll primarily be using the leases of the Wall Street landlords because each of these companies appear to use the same lease in nearly every state in which they rent homes.
While we won’t necessarily cover every single lease provision, in this series of posts we’ll try to point out the things that can really make a difference in your tenancy. If there are areas or issues that are in your lease that we do not address and you have questions, let us know in the comments section and we’ll do our best to answer.