Legal opinion on whether attachments to a lease are binding

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am asking for a generic opinion on a situation. You are not my lawyer. If I need to take legal action I will get a lawyer rather than anonymous opinions from random people on the Internet. But for now random people are fine.

My son has moved out of a house that was leased for a year. He received a notice that some part of the security deposit would be withheld due to things like failing to install new HVAC filters on move-out.

I have a package that includes the lease, the last page of which has signatures of tenants. There is an attachment for disclosure of lead paint hazard, which is also signed.

Following that is a sheet of rules and regulations, and a move-out checklist, neither of which are signed. To continue the example, the move-out checklist mentions that they are supposed to install new filters on move-out, but there is no such mention in the lease.

Are the rules and regulations and move-out checklist a binding part of the lease even if there is no evidence that they were reviewed and agreed to by the tenants at the time of lease signing? I do not know if these attachments were presented to the tenants at the time of lease signing; I received the package from the landlord after everything was executed, because I co-signed it.

2

If they are neither signed, not referred to in the signed documents, I’d have a hard time imagining how they would be enforceable.

3

What Dinsdale said. I’ll note that it’s pretty short sighted of the property owner to depend on tenants to perform HVAC maintenance. If I were some poor college student, I would remove the new filter that the previous tenant installed, run the system without a filter the entire time I was there, and install the still new filter when I moved out. Sure, it is bad for the equipment, but what do I care? No, periodic HVAC maintenance is on the owner as normal wear and tear.