So even being a landlord myself I am occasionally shocked at some of the crazy lease restrictions I’ve seen or heard of and how utterly ridiculous or unfair people can be and often get away with.
One recently I was made aware of was any police visit could get you evicted, even saw one lease specifically mention domestic violence.
Other than some very basic things leases in most places leases are allowed a pretty wide berth.
Very few things can be included in one that will actually violate a statute stating you can’t put that in the lease.
This one happens to be a violation of federal law but I think people are getting away with it.
The ACLU has gotten involved in this in particular and are trying to do what they can. Specifically because this puts victims who are most often women in the position of either keeping quiet , or facing homelessness. Which is insane.
Now landlords put things in leases all the time that aren’t actually valid , for instance I’ve seen leases that say the washer and dryer are a tenants responsibility, this is nitpicky. In my county if you provide it, you must maintain it in working order. The easy fix here is if they are in a unit you simply give them to the tenant. They then own it and you didn’t provide it but they are free to take it with them or do what they wish as they now own them.
I’ve seen others say the A/C is the tenants responsibility, again if it’s provided, you must fix it. In my county if it’s not provided you must at least screen every window.
I’ve also seen leases in my old state that said they would paint every room for $100 per room at the tenants expense if it hadn’t been done in two years when they moved out. Basically just a guarantee they’d never have to give back a deposit since you as the tenant couldn’t prove the last time they painted and weren’t allowed to do it yourself. That county had statutes against such lease terms (spicifically siting need of painting as normal wear and tear a tenant could not be held responsible for) but noone ever called them out on it so they kept every deposit ever given in that apt complex.
Personally I’d never use such terms, since any tenant with half a brain would realize there was no possibility of getting a deposit back and leave however they felt like leaving it.
Anyhow I’m just wondering about some of the craziest (legal or not) things you’ve seen in leases.
I would assume part of it is just creating legal terms to evict someone you don’t like. HR does that, creates a bunch of irrational rules so they can fire any troublemakers and have it look legal.
Probably so in the case of a new lease when the old one is up.
Or in the case of leases designed to keep protected classes out without explicitly saying so.
Unlike HR though here you can’t just change terms on someone anytime.
No nail holes, period. Not even if you plug them up yourself when you go. Of course, the previous tenant’s “nail holes” are now YOUR nail holes (the landlord never plugged them and re-painted) and you’re charged accordingly.
During grad school in the mid-west I rented a trailer from some nice, but super christian folks. The lease said I couldn’t have a person of the opposite sex stay overnight without their permission. I got married, and before my wife could move in we had to show them a marriage certificate. The lawyer provided by the university said this was all 1,000% illegal, obviously.
They also got pissed because when we moved out we had the water turned off. The lease said we had to pay the water bill until somebody else moved in. Turns out that they were using the water from our trailer for all of their horses, and the person renting the other trailer on their land was unknowingly paying the electric bill for the horse barn and lights in the field.
Leased a joint 3 yrs ago and the owners (who unfortunately lived RIGHT NEXT DOOR) kicked up a stink when we smoked (cigarettes) on the open verandah that faced their house.
Sure, their house, their rules* but FFS. As soon as the 12 month lease was up, we moved out. They spent another year trying to fill the vacancy.
We have never smoked inside, and abided by the lease to smoke outside. Except outside wasn’t outside ENOUGH for the landlord. :rolleyes:
My youngest worked as a leasing agent for a high-end apartment complex. They had some draconian rules to keep the place upscale.
In addition to pet deposits and strict limits on breed, any pet owners had to pay for DNA testing of their animal with the results given to the apt complex. Routine “poop patrols” were done, with the offending stuff sent to a lab. If it matched the DNA of your dog, it was an immediate $500.00 fine (not waiting until next rent payment). Two strikes and you’re evicted.
No arrest record at all was allowed for the tenants. If your kid got arrested, you were immediately evicted. (She saw this happen, a mother let her adult kid who was bailed out and awaiting trial move in temporarily. She was evicted within days)
There were several other really strict rules regarding guest stays, but I can’t remember the details now. It was the most authoritarian place I’ve ever encountered, but this might be common now (I haven’t rented in 30 years).
I learned a valuable and expensive lesson from my first apartment - do a walk-thru with the landlord before you move in and note EVERYTHING!!! I had a studio with a murphy bed. I was eager to move in, so I told them they didn’t need to clean - I’d take care of it (the fridge wasn’t that gross…) I noticed, but wasn’t concerned, that there were some rust spots on the mattress. It wasn’t a great apartment, but being my first, it was perfect.
Till the day I moved out. I cleaned the place, and I did a good job, but the first and only thing the landlord did was lower the bed, point to the rust on the mattress, and keep my deposit. I’m pretty sure that mattress lined his pocket many times. Asshole.
No weird lease stuff, but I had one landlady that had some issues. She had signs all over the place. “No running down the stairs” “Close the door gently. Don’t let it swing shut” “After you empty the washer, wipe down the machine inside and out” For that one, a box of wipes was provided. In case she reads these boards, and recognizes herself: Screw you lady. I never wiped down the damn washer, not even once!
This nut would leave bitchy notes under the doors if something displeased her. The one I remember was about a yogurt carton that was thrown down the garbage chute. She went on and on about the health hazards our poor janitor faced with a loose yogurt carton in the garbage.
She had a thing about garbage. She reported on offending items in the trash, or boxes that hadn’t been cut up and flattened. When I moved, she wouldn’t let me use the dumpster to throw out stuff because it would overfill it. Have you ever tried to move without access to a dumpster?
I just took the garbage to the new place and threw it out there, but it was a pain in the ass that I didn’t need at the time.
I guess I could’ve made legal trouble for some of the shit she tried to pull. But it wasn’t worth it.
My old place was similar to this. I rented the basement of a house and the ground floor was a separate rental unit. Police showed up to execute a search warrant for for suspected stolen property (which was found). Tenants were out by the end of the month.
This one doesn’t seem crazy to me, depending on context.
In many place, air conditioning isn’t a thing you’re required to have to make a place habitable, like heat or electricity. It’s a bonus.
I currently have a window air conditioner in my house. We got it last year because my wife was pregnant during a heat wave. Most houses don’t have AC here, and we lived for many years without it. So it’s hardly necessary the way it might be if we lived in Phoenix.
If I were to rent the house out, I can imagine many circumstances in which I’d leave it there (moving to a place that has central air, moving to a place that’s cool enough it doesn’t need A/C, etc.). If so, I might put something like that in a lease. Hey, there’s an AC here, and you’re welcome to use it, but if it breaks, it breaks. I’m not buying another one.
The alternative would be just pulling it because I don’t want to deal with it, and that doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s best interest.
I have some restrictions in the lease for my rental. They seem reasonable to me: pets with permission only. I’m pretty lax with permission, but I want to know that you have a vet, that the vaccinations are current, and that any dogs don’t have aggression issues. I had a tenant who officially only had one cat. There must have been more or that cat was amazingly “productive”. Entire rooms were just soaked in urine. Take care of your cat, people! Litter boxes, cleaning up, all good things. Similarly, they added a chicken coop, which in itself is fine. This chicken coop was used the property fence and the back wall of the coop, however. The entire panel was rotted when they left. Another restriction is that I need to know how many people are living there. If you rent my house and say that 4 people are living there, then I want to know when the next one moves in. When the 5th guy moves in and is a chain smoker, I want to know. If you add 6 people to split the rent, I really want to know.
My lease tries to be clever; instead of saying ‘No pets’ it says ‘No mammals, no birds, no reptiles, no amphibians, no fish, no insects without the landlord’s permission’.
The guy across the street from me bought the house on the corner as a rental property. He’s Mormon; so when he rented it out he had fine print on the rental sign which said, “No Smoking, No Drugs, No Alcohol”.
My last place had no dishwasher or refrigerator. I told the landlord (actually manager) this was a dealbreaker. Instead of installing them, he gave me a break on the rent. The discount was more than enough to pay for both, so I sucked it up.
The dishwasher was an absolute pain though. Sears assured me they could install an under-counter unit on the service porch, NOT under a counter. Then when it showed up, the install guy refused to do it, despite my offering a hefty bribe. I had to send the thing back and it took me months to get a refund. Then I bought a “mobile” dishwasher and MacGyvered the connection…but mobile dishwashers are small and pretty crap.
The lease clearly stated that the washer/dryer was the responsibility of the tenant. Nevertheless when it predictably died, I asked the manager to buy a new one–it’d be an incentive for the next tenant. He declined, so I bought one myself. When we moved, I offered to sell it to him for less than half what I paid (it was less than a year old). He again declined. So I gave it away for free.
I encourage tenants to do a walk through with me at the start of the lease, but only one out of five or six has wanted to. Hey, it’s for their protection, not mine; I’ve already inspected it to make sure the prior tenant didn’t do anything harmful.
The law here (city level, I believe) is that all security deposit deductions must be itemized with proof of expenditure (receipt, etc.) Sure, I guess you could be stuck buying an $800 mattress, but my guess is the mattress was never even replaced. Triple damages is good incentive for landlords to behave. Of course, the trust fund college kids here probably don’t care, and just ask Dad for another deposit for the new place.
Here it is also a city regulation on the number of unrelated people that can live in a single dwelling, based on the number of conforming bedrooms and such. It also includes a time limit on when somebody switches from guest to co-tenant. The particulars for the place I rent out are spelled out in the lease.
Things can get even weirder with commercial leases. A friend’s company was leasing some office space, and there was an old dishwasher in the break room. They bought their own, and installed it, because the landlord of course wasn’t interested in doing an upgrade. When they moved out they offered to sell it to the landlord, but he just said the place came with a dishwasher, so they were required to leave one. Turns out the new place they were moving to also had a busted old dishwasher, so they swapped them.
Back in the early 80s I rented a place, and I had a polaroid camera and 20 packs of film … my then boyfriend and I went with the rental agent to walk through - every hit we found we took 2 pix, and noted on a yellow pad what each pic was of, made a copy of the notes and gave the agent a copy and we kept a copy. When we moved, they tried to keep the deposit, sp we pulled out the paperwork the rental agent had signed along with us complete with descriptions and pictures. We had repaired all the previous tenants dings, dents, nail holes and suchlike when we prepped the walls to paint. I love contractor beige now - that place had come in contractor beige, so we repainted contractor beige [and probably a better quality paint, we used Behr instead of whatever generic crap they bought by the 5 gallon bucket!]
Back in Rochester NY [well, the house was actually in Hilton] the lease gave the landlord the right to just plant someone in to maintain 3 people in the residence … found that out when he moved in a guy that had apparently done prison time. We moved out as soon as the lease was up so we only had 2 months of the asshole there. Heard that the landlord got saddled with him for something like 10 months with only first/last month paid [one of the states where the legal process to get deadbeats out is long and involved] and he had to do major repairs, the guy apparently moved in 2 of his scummy buddies and they really trashed the place.
I had a landlord like that one summer in Ithaca. She allowed pets (I had two cats) for a hefty extra deposit - most landlords wouldn’t allow pets so I agreed to her terms. She would enter the apartment with no notice when my roommate and i weren’t there, and did so one day while I had moved the litter boxes to an atypical spot in order to clean. (We knew she’d been in because she didn’t hide it - she used her visit to complain about something or other.)
I was very good at keeping the litterboxes clean and odorless, and was also only resident for 8 weeks or so. When I left the landlord insisted that a cat urine smell had permeated the floor in the spot where she had seen the litterboxes (but was not where they were ordinarily kept, unbeknownst to her). She said she got to keep the entire extra deposit in order to clean the floor.
There was nothing I could do, but I was pretty pissed. She no doubt made good money renting to Cornell grad students with pets - I had a strong feeling she pulled that stunt with all her tenants.
