A followup to my previous thread, but no supernatural aspect in this one. Purely hypothetical.
Say I buy a house. A few months later, someone shows up at my front door, saying he’s my tenant. He’s got a lease signed by the previous owner, dated a few months before I bought the house, saying this person is renting the basement room/the guest room/the guest house, etc. for one year, starting today. The first month’s rent & security deposit has already been paid to the previous owner. The previous owner made no indication to me that he had already rented part of the house. I, under no circumstances, want to let the tenant in - I’m already using that space/I don’t need the money/I have no intention of sharing the house with someone I’ve never met.
What happens next? Is the lease null & void because the property changed hands before the tenant took possession? Could he legally force me to let him live there during the terms of the lease? Would either of us have grounds to sue the previous owner?
Obviously the law would depend on location, but I’m interested in the law in any jurisdiction.
I(Sure As Hell)ANAL, so this is a knee-jerk reaction and best guess.
The putative tenant may have paper, but does not have possession of the space when you moved in, and there is a significant amount of time passing between your occupancy and the start of his, so he can’t claim that he has possession, adverse or not. Therefore, you don’t have to let him in.
He DOES have a hell of a fraud case against the previous owner, however.
If there’s no survivorship provision in his lease (that the terms and conditions of the lease shall survive the transfer of ownership of the property), he’s out of luck. Also, if your purchase and sale agreement didn’t address the tenancy, he’s out of luck. When you bought the house, you bought free and clear of any and all prior liens- you wouldn’t have been able to get a standard homeowner’s policy otherwise.
Least/owner/tenant situations are on daytime TV judge shows almost daily. Every answer almost exception is dependent upon the state and local governments laws. Chances are the tenant sues you and you sue the seller unless you waved something.
I don’t do property law, so this is speculation. However, if the lease was recorded, it should have been discovered in the title search done by the buyer/bank prior to the sale closing. If it was not recorded, and you had no knowledge of it or reasonable way to discover it, it probably isn’t enforcable against you.
You’d also have a dandy case of fraud against the previous owner. Unless stated otherwise in the contract, the property is to be delivered “brom clean and vacant” as closing.
Bingo. It is called a purchaser for value and without notice. Plus, you always have a claim against your seller for breach of the warranty contained in the deed (assuming you did not take title by a quit-claim conveyance or a special warranty that exempted hidden tenants you weren’t warned of). This assumes you can find your seller and he’s solvent.
As a self-serving asside, this sort of stuff is one reason it is a bad idea to abandon the abstract and examination system in favor of title insurance.
Are leases for tenants renting an apartment or part of a building normally filed? Looking at my local registry of deeds website, it appears they aren’t (in MA at least) - I see commercial leases for entire buildings, but no “Apartment 3F” type leases.
I looked up “purchaser for value” and found this article. It mentions that the property can’t be a gift - would things be different if you inherited the house? In that case, you can’t really fault the “seller” for not notifying you that there was an upcoming lease on the property. Would the tenant then be able to force the new owner to give him room to live in as specified in the lease?
As an aside, my brother was in a slightly similar situation several years ago. He bought a house that had a guest cottage on the property. He closed in December. In June, he got a phone call from someone who had rented the guest cottage each summer for the past 15 years - a point the seller neglected to tell him. There was no written lease (ever) - it was just a verbal agreement. The caller said he was an attorney and tried to claim that he had a “right” to the cottage since he had rented it for so many years and had arranged with the previous owner to rent it again this year, and he would be arriving in a week. My brother laughed and told him he’d be trespassing if he did, and gave him the phone number of his lawyer if he wanted to argue about it. He never heard back from the guy.
The guy had an easement to enter upon the land and use the cottage. Since an easement is essentially an interest in the land, it requires a written instrument, signed by the grantor, to make it valid. Otherwise, it is just a license, which is revocable at the will of the licensor. Your brother became the licensor when he bought the land.
You say he paid the first months rent, but it was signed several months ago. If he hasn’t been paying the rent, then the lease is broken and he can be evicted. There is no obligation to accept any attempts to pay the back rent.
If he has been paying rent to the previous owner, then the previous owner is committing fraud by accepting payment for a property he doesn’t own.
The lease was signed several months ago. The rental period starts today. First month’s rent has been paid. Nothing more is owed so far. There is no back rent owed.
I meant in the hypothetical that even though the lease wasn’t supposed to begin until now, the tenant paid a month’s rent ahead of time. The terms of the lease run June 2009 - June 2010. He signed the lease in January 2009, because he was going to be in darkest Peru for the intervening months and didn’t want to deal with finding a place to live while he was there. When he signed the lease, he paid a months rent to hold the rooms.