Suppose two people have known each other a while, have a sense of mutual trust, and one is now in the process of renting part of the house (or a room only) to the other. And let’s say a mutually trusted third party is helping structure the discussion.
I mean, I’m sure there are some obvious basic terms for a presented lease or discussion/negotiation for a lease. Such as the fundamental rent amount, whether it includes certain utilities, and whether or not there are any conditional extra charges applied to the tenant.
And whether the rent is due upon the first of the month, or some other agreement.
… Some other ideas I have had so far are:
Whether pets/additional pets are allowed.
Besides use of kitchen and bathroom(s), to what extent does the tenant have “full run” of the house?
Whether a security deposit is required, and how much.
What say you? For future “smooth sailing” what other items are most likely necessary, or at least preferable?
There are sample lease agreements online. I’d start with one of those.
A few more off the top of my head:
Overnight guests
Included amenities. Some things, like heat and electricity and a working oven/refrigerator, may be required by law. Lots of others aren’t, but if they’re not spelled out, then feelings may be hurt. Like, say you have a hot tub in the back yard, and the tenant can use it. If it breaks, are you obligated to repair or replace it? By law, no, but the tenant might reasonably think: “hey, I rented a place with a hot tub.”
Late payment penalties.
Personal property storage if the tenant abandons it.
While I agree with all of Walrus’s post I can’t second the overnight guests part hard enough. It is far, far easier to deal with in advance and set hard limits compared to later when the love bug bites. How many nights in a row can a guest stay over before they are living there and should be paying rent? I’ve seen more roommates get into fights over this issue than any other, easily. Nail that shit down in advance.
Another thing that it really helps to clear up in advance is how you are handling food. Is it a communal kitchen? Do you each have half a fridge and your own food and never the two shall cross? Somewhere in between? Figure that out now. Also, figure out how you want to handle shared household expenses, think things like dish soap and light bulbs.
Quiet hours and general noise levels are good to settle in advance, so are any rules on parties or large gatherings of people. Speaking of parties, best to clear up any rules on pot or tobacco smoke in advance as well.
I’m sure there’s more stuff I’m missing, but those are the ones that jump into my mind at the moment. However, make sure it all gets written down. Memory is not good enough for this stuff, get it in writing and get it signed by all parties involved.
I’d avoid the term lease if it’s a housesharing situation, as there are typically legal implications to a landlord-tenant relationship, and may be various other problems/restrictions. Just title it Housesharing Agreement.
If they know each other, and they’re sharing some of the living space, I’d actually worry more about the social/cooperative living aspects. Like cleaning responsibilities and expectations, who gets to choose what’s on TV, expectations around food (will everyone have their own carefully labeled stick of butter, or is everything in the kitchen fair game for anyone?), sharing of semi-personal objects like cookware, computers or Netflix subscriptions, expectations are responsibilities around company (not just overnight guests; how often will friends be over for dinner or movie night?). I think these all need to be worked out even more carefully in this situation than in a typical shared apartment where everyone should start out with pretty equal say. The house owner and the room renter may have drastically different ideas about what extra leverage the owner should have in various decisions.
Yeah, IME it’s the little things that cause problems, or rather a lot of little things eventually add up to a blowout.
I’ve lived with almost all of my close friends at one point or another and as much as I liked them on a personal level, our preferences for the level and timeliness of messes and cleaning them up, respectively, that always caused the most conflict. For example, lots of people like to just dump their dirty dishes in the sink and “get to it later.” That’s fine if you’re the only person living there and no one else ever needs to use the sink, but it’s a big fucking problem if I can’t cook because all the pots and pans are sitting in the sink “soaking.”
ETA: not that all the minutiae of living together needs to be codified in a lease, but you should at least consider including some official mechanism for conflict resolution, be it in the form of a regular house meeting, or as simple as a dry erase board on the fridge.
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Further, be aware that doing it this way is going to make it pretty easy for one party to take the other to court if things go sideways. Even if nothing gets written down or signed, the ‘mutually trusted third party’ is a witness to a verbal contract.
If stuff is getting written down, make it super clear and simple. And don’t forget to add the terms by which either party can terminate the arrangement. They should be simple and should boil down to “I don’t want to live here anymore, I’ll be gone in x days” and “I don’t want you living here anymore, be gone in x days.”
You’d have to check the local laws to be sure, but in the vast majority of cases, if someone owns property and another person pays them to live there, you have a landlord-tenant relationship whether you like it or not. Labeling the agreement something else isn’t going to change that, or release either of you from your rights and responsibilities as specified by law. It is also true that there are sometimes special cases when the owner and renter share the same house, so maybe “Housesharing Agreement” is a real thing where you live. But you shouldn’t assume that the label you put at the top of your agreement has any value.
Having a written agreement means that you get to use what you agreed on to arbitrate disputes, rather than whatever the default lease that exists in law somewhere says.
OP: There is very often a pretty accessible document intended for non-lawyers published by your state or local legal authority that explains how leases work, and what landlords have to do, and what tenants can expect of them, and so on. Probably a good idea to take a look at that.
Everywhere that I’m familiar with in the US, if one person owns property and another lives there, you have a landlord-tenant relationship whether you make a formal agreement or not, whatever you call the formal agreement, and even if you say that you’re not forming a landlord-tenant relationship. This is always true if there’s rent involved, and generally true even if the tenant doesn’t pay rent (or doesn’t provably pay rent) once they’ve lived there long enough to establish that it’s their residence (typically more than a week and some sign of permanent intent, like getting mail delivered). Yes, in a lot of places if you let someone crash on your couch for a few weeks, they become a tenant and you can’t legally just call the cops on them for trespassing, you have to go through an eviction proceeding.
I would definitely want the thing in writing because it will make things much cleaner if something goes sideways. In particular, I’d want the rent amount and notice requirements written down, so that if I end up with a freeloader (as landlord) or someone jerking me around for cash (as renter) the amount of money in dispute and terms of breaking things off entirely are clear. I don’t expect that to happen very often, but having basic terms in a contract means there’s a whole lot less confusion if it does.
Be aware that whatever you write likely isn’t legally enforceable unless it happens to match local law - in an awful lot of places, there are restrictions on notice periods (usually 30 days is considered normal) and there are things that reset the notice period. As long as things stay good this won’t matter, but if you end up with a freeloader who won’t leave or a jerk landlord suing you for rent after you bailed then you should expect Murphy’s Law to apply to any terms you didn’t get a lawyer to review. (I’m not saying you need a lawyer, I’m just saying that your agreement probably will not hold up verbatim if you end up with a major dispute).