I’d be thinking stinkbomb behind the drywall myself. Gotta match that paint exactly, though. 
Absolutely. I would never rent to a tenant who had a history of landlord-tenant disputes. The prospective tenant could be a nun who was evicted because her landlord was a Satanist who delighted in the suffering of the virtuous and I’d still never rent to her.
There’s just too many available tenants to make it worth the risk. If you have to take a tenant to court for unpaid rent and possession of the property you’re almost guaranteed to make no profit on the unit for the year, due to all the delays the court builds into the system in favor of tenants, and the fact that deadbeat tenants who make you get the courts involved never have any money to collect a judgement against.
Renting to a tenant who went to court over a landlord tenant dispute is like dating a woman who just got out of jail for cutting off her last boyfriend’s penis. There’s just no part of you that’s like “eh, maybe it’s a good idea anyway…”
Is there a reason you do not have a year to year lease? Most professionally managed apartment complexes would prefer annual leases. Maybe I’ not fully grasping your situation, but I get the subtext that you know exactly why you are being told to leave, but want to put your case in front of the owner. Unless the manager is being totally irrational this is not likely to be a good strategy.
IME, the mere fact that your relationship with the manager hasn’t been cordial, would potentially make you a “problem tenant” for certain definitions of “problem tenant”.
Often you limit your rent increases on current tenants to avoid them leaving. So if the market rate in your area supports a general 10% rent increase in a single year (meaning newly available units can be successfully rented out at 10% more than they could in the previous year), you’d probably only hit current tenants with a small rent increase of a few percent.
The reason is, you’re still making money off of those tenants and large sudden rent increases frequently result in tenants leaving. It costs a good bit of money and time to replace a tenant. A tenant is an income stream, a long term tenant is a stable and consistent income stream. You’re wise to protect those as much as you can. Now, if you rented out a townhouse at $600 a month in 1995 and in 2013 all the other townhouses in the development rent for $1300 and the one is still rented at $600 that’s not acceptable either. But you avoid that undesirable situation by gradually increasing rent over time, you may never get your long term tenants to quite the market rate, but you do slowly increase their rent over time so you aren’t ever in a situation where you feel like you “need” to substantially increase their rent all in one go.
That being said, even if you did end up in a scenario where, through mismanagement you had not raised rents in years and years and needed to do a fairly large rent increase it would not make sense to just evict the tenant. I don’t believe that the OP is being evicted because they want to raise his rent. It doesn’t make sense to evict a tenant just because you want to raise rent. If you want to raise rent, you raise rent. if the tenant stays, good. If not, they leave on their own and you have to lease the place out. That is cheaper and far more effective than eviction proceedings.
I too wonder why OP has not gone to the property manager to ask why they are being asked to leave.
As for month-to-month tenancy, to be honest it’s very typical for long term tenants to be month-to-month. A very common practice is signing all new tenants to a fixed term lease (12+ months) and then specifying in the lease that the tenancy converts into an automatic month-to-month tenancy after that. The lease really protects both parties in the beginning where you don’t know anything about one another. After that, there are benefits to month-to-month tenancy (flexibility for both parties ending the tenancy and flexibility for the land lord to modify the rent), and you can typically feel a greater sense of trust that the tenant isn’t just going to disappear some day with no notice since they’ve successfully lived there for a year and paid rent the whole time.
The word eviction is being thrown around a lot. There is a big difference between an eviction and your lease not being renewed. Unless there are specific local housing rules against it you can’t force someone to keep renting to you. An eviction is kicking you out in the middle of the lease because the tenant is not upholding their end of the lease.
Not quite, eviction is going to the courts to get a legal order requiring someone to vacate a residence. Eviction is not tied to there being a lease or not.
The OP is not technically being evicted (yet), instead he has a month-to-month tenancy. In California the standard way to end a month-to-month as a land lord is to send a 60 day notice to vacate. After the 60 days, the tenant should have vacated and the agreement is ended. If the OP left during the 60 days it is correct to say he wasn’t “evicted”, instead his tenancy was terminated by the land lord.
However, at the end of the 60 days if he has not left, the land lord would have to evict him.
Hire an attorney ASAP. There may be something wrong with the notice. There may be a legal way to delay your moving or cancel it.
California law leans heavily in favor of the tenant and an attorney will know how to use it. An attorney can also serve as a go-between with your landlord and/or manager. If the management firm has an attorney on retainer, both attorneys can communicate better than you can as they are on equal level; you are not.
I speak from personal experience under California law, both as a landlord and a tenant.
Perhaps, but at what cost?
So, your advice is to commit fraud. Wouldn’t it be better advice for him to rent another apartment in the same school district?
What they gave you is not an eviction notice. They gave you a legal looking document asking you to leave in 60 days.
There is no legal reason for you to move in 60 days.
An eviction requires cause and needs to be proved in court.
Find a tenants advocacy group or a lawyer who handles tenants rights in Orange County or Anaheim to guide you through this.
This is not true. Without an eviction hearing you can’t physically remove someone (legally) from a property. But that doesn’t mean that if the land lord gives a proper 60 day notice you have no legal reason to move in 60 days. There are several legal and practical reasons to obey it:
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If the notice is proper (and it probably complies with the law), then you’ll lose a quick eviction proceeding. Penalties for this often include having to pay the land lord’s court costs.
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This is now a permanent record than you’ve been evicted from a property by a land lord, the 60 day move out notice is not kept as a public record. It’s just a communication between land lord and tenant.
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Being evicted will make it harder to rent subsequent apartments where they dig into your past.
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Being evicted may bring embarrassment/distress on your family, as the local sheriff will eventually come to escort you out and supervise the land lord’s removal of all belongings and etc from the unit.
On another note, in Virginia if you move outside of a given school’s district during the middle of a school year they do not require you to leave school. If you want to continue bringing your kid to the previous school you can, but they make no promise of bus service as they do for in-district kids.
Virginia also has a system at least in some areas, where you can get a school considered your “home” school and then you have a right to attend there until graduation regardless of where you live.
This stuff is hyper local, but “interdistrict agreements” are fairly common and provide some level of option to attend a school when you don’t reside in its district. And still, typically once the school year has begun even in places where they are very strict about districts you don’t typically have to pull your kid from school just because you’ve moved out of the district, but you wouldn’t be allowed to have her attend there next year. But if she’s a senior, that’s not a concern.
Martin Hyde, I don’t know why the OP is being asked to leave, but that 60 day notice is often used to intimidate tenants they want to evict but have no legal reason to do so.
I agree, it’s all hyper local, that’s why I suggested the OP needs to seek legal help.
And to kaylasdad99, Martin’s post is the kind of fear your property owner wants you to feel, so you’ll just rollover and play dead.
Don’t let them force you to move without a legal reason.
Much better idea. It’s only for a few more months, at any rate. Even if you have to step down your level of living for the time being (you said something about not being able to find a comparable place in the district) and then move again when she graduates, you will have to do it. Or, as some parents have had to do, ask if she can move in with a friend for the rest of the school year. This happens a lot more than you would realize.
He has a month-to-month tenancy, under California law the default is that the land lord has right to terminate a month-to-month tenancy that has been ongoing for more than one year with a 60 day notice.
If you do not have the protection of a lease, then all that is required to end a tenancy is notice. The California State website that explains all of this specifically mentions that some municipalities have further restrictions, but OP has already said he has looked into the restrictions in Anaheim and it does not appear Anaheim is any more restrictive than the State.
I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood what’s going on. The land lord isn’t trying to end the OP’s tenancy early, the tenancy is month to month. There is no lease, the land lord does not need to intimidate or deceive OP in any way–the law only requires they serve 60 days notice to require him to vacate the premises to terminate the month to month tenancy. I noted that you are correct, notice to vacate is not the same as eviction. Eviction is the procedure that gets a court to order someone to physically leave the property, and the police will enforce that order if you do not leave voluntarily. But in cases of eviction, the judge is going to look at the terms of the lease and applicable rental laws to determine if eviction is proper. Since there is no lease, the judge will look to the law on month-to-month tenancies. In California that law only requires a 60 day notice, the judge will note that the 60 day notice was delivered properly or not. If not, then he won’t issue eviction, but all that gives the OP is 60 more days, as you can assume the land lord will then go and make sure their notice is in the correct form and reissue it. If the 60 day notice is correct it’s basically a pro forma eviction, the judge will note “yep, you were given proper notice, you’re evicted, you have 5 days to move out.” Five days is the standard in California. After the 5 days, sheriffs can be sent to physically remove your person from the premises and the land lord can take possession of your property and convey it to you at a later time.
How about starting with a conversation with the building manager before running off to an attorney?
There appears to be a significant subtext here that the OP has warred with the property manager in the past, and the OP knows quite precisely why they are telling him that they want him out. The interaction with the property manager has occurred and is not going to yield relief. As Martin Hyde has quite correctly pointed out good tenants are like gold to a property owner and are not booted on a whim. They are the lifeblood of the investment cash flow. A low hassle reliable pay tenant is a valuable commodity. There’s a big backstory here that’s going unspoken.
The OP is simply asking how to bypass the manager in this scenario and make his appeal directly to the property owner.
I’d be thinking that you would lose your deposit and then subject yourself to a lawsuit.
Speaking as a soon to be landlord, let me explain how it works. You don’t own the property you live in. So it is not up to you whether you never move again. It is up to the people who actually own the property (within the constraints of the law). Sucks, but that’s one reason people buy vs rent.
It sounds like your property might not be owned by some big real estate firm, but by one or more individuals. The management company is just there to fix your sink and perform other routine maintenance and whatnot. It’s the owners/landlord who typically decide matters related to your rent or tenancy.
If you aren’t being evicted for one of the normal reasons people get evicted (noise, property damage, drugs or other illegal activities) and you’ve been there 15 years, chances are the owners probably just want to renovate the place and rent it out for more money or sell it as a condo.
In any event, while you might be able to find out more about the context of the termination of your agreement, I doubt you will change anyone’s mind. My suggestion is to start looking for a new place to live.
The building manager is not your employee and you are not his customer. If your lease is not being renewed, it is because the business owners have decided that is optimal results for the business.
Landlords have to take tenants to court to have them thrown out when tenants don’t respect their landlord’s perfectly legal right to demand possession of their own property according to the terms of their lease and state law. Nothing has been posted to suggest the landlord isn’t completely within their rights.
Talk to the manager, now. You need to understand why your lease is being terminated before moving forward. When you know the “why” you can get a sense of whether or not there’s a chance of making a deal with the owner to stay. Maybe you can get it extended through the school year, maybe you have absolutely no choice.
Talk to the school as well, they may have options for you.