They failed to leave the apartment in the same condition as when they moved in.
See, this surprises me. While I know NYC is vastly different than other places, in both my LA lease and in all of my Pittsburgh leases, they’ve all had a clause specifying that both parties must provide a minimum X number of weeks of notice before they leave (the average was two months). Does yours, or does he simply disregard everything he committed to in the lease? What boggles my mind is the judge. That’s just sad. Why he got a second chance is the saddest part of the whole thing to me; that justice wasn’t served.
As always, keep us posted.
Legally we are both required to give 30 days notice. So far our landlord has not done anything legally at all so this doesn’t surprise me. Beyond that, I am sure if we said that we needed 30 days notice he would sigh and say, “Fine, but I can’t promise I will find someone to take the place in 30 days so I might not be able to let you out of your lease at that time.” He knows we want out and he is going out of his way to make it difficult for us. There is a clause in a NYC law that says if your landlord isn’t keeping the apartment habitable you can give 3 days notice and move out so if we don’t hear from him about this we will send an overnight certified letter on the 14th advising that we are leaving according to that law. He can take us to court over it but I don’t think he will because if he takes us to court he will lose and he has someone who wants the space but we would still feel a lot better if we could get something in writing from him saying our lease is terminated so we don’t have to deal with court if we just want to walk away and not deal with it.
make sure to keep that business card so you can prove the landlord was not out any rent as a result of you leaving.
Does your rental agreement have a clause that states that if a replacement tenant is found, you are not required to pay the remainder of your lease?
Are you absolutely certain that the new guy is going to move into your apartment? It’s possible he showed your apartment and then had him sign a lease for another apartment just to screw with you.
If you’re certain, then I’d consider sending the following:
“Given that you have a signed contract for my apartment for occupancy beginning 7/18/10, consider this our notice that we will vacate the premised by 7/17/10.”
Oh, and be sure to take pictures of your apartment on the day you move out to prove what the conditions were. Take a picture of a current newspaper’s date in one of them to prove that it was on the date you claim.
Does that actually prove anything, though? I mean, you could have just pulled the newspaper out of a stack of recyclables.
Yes but the issue would be that they would say the picture was taken earlier, not later. Later someone else will be living in the apartment.
Dancing like snoopy!
Woohoo!
I swear when I posted there was some reason that it made sense that they’d want to prove that the picture had been taken when it was and not later, but now I can’t think of it.
Some people will take pictures of their apartment on the day they move in, when their apartment is undamaged and clean, and claim it was taken on the day they moved out, to “prove” to the judge that they didn’t cause any damage to the place which would cause the landlord to keep their security deposit.
Having a newspaper, with a headline clearly visible in the picture, removes any doubt about WHEN the picture was taken – it had to have been taken on the day of the headline or after. Because, while the average person can easily fake a timestamp on a camera, they can’t fake a newspaper headline because they don’t know what the headline will read in a year+ because it hasn’t been printed yet.
Right. If you scroll down to the rest of the thread, you’ll see that I understand that. It’s a pretty standard trick for when you want to establish that a picture was taken on a date or later. As I said, though, at the time I posted I had some reason in mind that you’d want to prove that the photo hadn’t been taken *later *than it was, which a newspaper inclusion wouldn’t do.
Not if you have handed in the keys and vacated the apartment the same day.
Honestly, would it kill you to read the damned thread? The posts are right fucking there. Look, I’ll even re-post them for you.
Quick update on the horrendousness of our former landlord. We’ve been out of the apartment for months and hadn’t heard a peep from him. We mailed a certified letter in August going over the situation again listing dates, times, etc. and advising that if we did not hear from him again within 5 business days we were considering the matter closed. 5 days came and went and we heard nothing.
Until today.
I got a call from the electric company today advising that yesterday when she contacted the owner of the building to ask about bills for the building and that unit he faxed her a copy of our old lease and told her we were responsible for all of the bills. I explained what happened to her and gave her my old account number and new account number so she could track my information in her system. I also offered to fax her copies of the documents showing we no longer live in that building. She said she didn’t need it and that this isn’t uncommon so she is familiar with sneaky-ass landlords trying to pawn bills off on other people. She said she won’t be charging us and not to worry about the bill.
We called the landlord and every single one of his phone lines has been disconnected. We called the management company and they advised that the landlord would never do anything like that and we must be mistaken, at which point we advised that this is now at a point where it could possibly move from housing court to criminal court because of his fraudulent behavior and we will gladly haul the landlord and the management company through the court system. We also advised that we have all the previously mentioned documentation and would be happy to call the woman from the electric company to court as a witness.
I hope this is the last we hear from him and that he is ripped into tiny pieces by badgers.:mad:
Wow pbbth, that’s so crazy! Would you guys personally go after him in criminal court, or would you join forces with others or how would it work? Or were you simply threatening them so you never heard from him again?
I know it would be a pain for you, but I hope that you *do *take this to criminal court. People like this asshole shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, and you were smart enough to document everything. The next people he fucks over might not be that clever, or might just way too trusting.
Did you get a security deposit back? In some states you’re entitled to 2 or more times the amount of the deposit if it is withheld without reason for over a certain amount of time.
You could check in with the current tenant to see how he’s doing. Chances are he’s probably getting screwed just like you were and might be willing to join forces against this scumball.
It was most certianly not an idle threat. My husband is currently unemployed and would love to use his downtime sticking it to this jerk in court. We don’t want to do it if we can avoid it because he would rather be applying for jobs and cleaning and stuff but if it comes down to it we will make sure he is held accountable.
No one else would work with us in this suit unfortunately. Mostly he rents to illegals so that they are too afraid of deportation to confront him.
We didn’t get the security deposit back but we knew that when we left. They explained we could break the lease but they would keep our deposit to cover the costs associated with ending a lease and moving in a new tenant (even though they didn’t clean or do anything else they were supposed to, but that is another story) and we said that was fine. It got us the paperwork saying we could leave that apartment and that was all we wanted.