So, when you rent a place it’s customary to pay what is called ‘first and last month’ plus often a cleaning/security deposit.
Is that really considered to be your last month’s rent?
My friend is leaving an apartment after renting for about eight years. She only signed a one year lease to start with, and has been (I guess) a month to month tenant since. Her rent has been raised four times since she started there.
She’s going to give her landlord notice by Friday that she’ll be gone by September 1st. Can she just NOT pay the August rent, and it’ll be covered as it is her ‘last’ month? Or does she need to pay the difference between the original and current monthly rents?
First, last, AND security? Hmm…In the two places that I’ve rented, I’ve only had to pay first and security up front.
To clarify, are you asking that since she paid her last month’s rent up front, but her rent has gone up from its original rate, can she live her last month at the original rate? Do you think the owner will ask for the difference? I’m not so sure about “last” procedure.
If your friend will consult her lease agreement, it usually explains the procedure for termination of the lease. In many cases, security is returned within 30 days of the end of the lease term, provided that there are no significant damages to the premises.
If she has a lease that says she paid the first month, last month and deposit. The simple answer is “yes”. Regardless of if she has been on a month to month since “whenever”. She should be able to give proper notice and not have to pay the last month of rent because it was agreed that it was already paid.
Your friend needs to talk to her landlord. However, from my experience, she can probably only apply that “last month’s rent” deposit towards the current monthly rent that is due. She has to make up the difference. BTW she should’ve gotten interest on all of her substantial deposits during her tenancy.
Many municipalities still have no interest bearing requirements towards deposits. Still, in even the most landlord friendly places, the written lease is what matters in court.
Check with your local tenant association if there is one.
In Ontario, IME, what should happen if you pay last month’s rent is that every year the landlord sends you a cheque for the value he/she gained in interest in holding on to your last month’s rent for the past year, and sends a separate request for the difference between the value of the original sum and the value of the current rent, so that at the beginning of every year, your last month’s rent is already topped up to the value it should be at and therefore you don’t have to pay when you leave.
In practice…well, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s not quite what happens! I had a fantastic landlord when I lived there!
It is entirely based on your jurisdiction, though. In Québec, it’s actually illegal to ask for last month’s rent or for a security/pet deposit or any value greater than the equivalent of one month’s rent at the time of lease signing.
Whoa, hold on. She only signed one lease, yet her rent was raised 4 times? That’s majorly wrong. You can’t just arbitrarily raise the rent on someone without getting them to sign a new lease. The lease specifies a rent and as long as it’s in effect (which most leases are in effect indefinitely on a month-to-month basis after the initial term, in this case 1 year, expires) that’s the rent. She could probably sue for all those years she has been overpaying rent, assuming that original lease is still legally in effect.
Really? So someone could simply keep paying the first rent for decades, regardless of inflation or whatever? That hardly seems fair to the landlord.
In my friend’s case, she signed the first lease, and just kept paying the initial rent each month after it expired and the landlord kept depositing the checks and that was all there was to it. Nobody brought up anything about the lease. Then after two years or so she got a letter saying that starting on such-and-such a date the rent would now be $X. more.
She took that as an instruction either to start paying that much or else move out by then, and chose to keep living there. Repeat four more times over the years she was there, except this last time she’s decided to move. (Not because of the rent, she wants to get closer to her becoming frail parents.)
I think both sides were pretty much happy with the situation – she was a ‘good’ tenant, he was a ‘good’ landlord. As in, she paid her rent on time and caused no particular hassles, and he maintained the building properly.
If you have a contract saying that you will pay $X/month for rent, on what planet is it fair for the landlord to suddenly tell you the contract is now for $X + 100 (or whatever) / month when you signed for $X? Unless the lease specifically says the landlord may change the rent at his discretion, then a new lease would need to be signed.
No. What was meant is that the renter doesn’t have to pay an increased rent unless there is a new lease (or the lease specifies rent increases in advance). The renter can choose not to sight the lease if he doesn’t want the rent increase, but then he has to move out.
Don’t know which state/province the OP is in, but in Ontario all leases become month-to-month after the first year unless specifically requested otherwise. This doesn’t negate the possibility of rent increases; the landlord must file the increase with the rental board and advise the tenant (I think) three months in advance. The tenant can contest it with the rental board, pay the new amount, or give in their notice. It’s not really at the landlord’s whim.
I live in Chicago and I’ve seen “First, last and security” (three months rent upfront) quite a lot. So it’s not unusual, but I’ve also seen just first and security.
I think you’re making some assumptions there about the law, given that we don’t know where the OP is located.
It sounds to me like the lease was signed, the initial term ended, and then the landlord said: “Oh, the rent is now $X”. Even if another lease wasn’t signed, if you’ve been living there for months or years, voluntarily paying the increased rent, you have a pretty tough case to make that you didn’t agree to the new rent, or that somehow the original rent listed in the lease is still all you owe when neither you nor the landlord have been acting like it is. If you only owe the original rent, why have you been writing bigger checks all this time?
Depending on the location, there might be laws that require certain actions to change the rent, but they’re not universal. And, in the absence of those requirements “Hey, I’m raising your rent.” “Ok, here’s a check” sounds like a meeting of the minds to me.
First, last, and security due on signing the lease is pretty standard around Boston as well. It’s not uncommon to pay another 1/2 month or whole month’s rent as well as a realtor fee. Though the landlords I’ve dealt have been pretty flexible on last month’s rent, allowing me to pay that off over the first month or two of tennancy, since it’s not trivial to scrape together several thousand dollars for that first check you write.
The OP’s friend’s situation will depend on the lease, local tenancy laws, and whatever the landlord feels like. If I were here I’d ask the landlord first, especially since they’ve been pretty reasonable. The landlord might be happy with whatever the original rent was. If they do want your friend to pay the difference, that’s when she starts pouring over her lease and the local housing commission website to make sure she’s not being taken advantage of.
MO – She owes rent for the last month of her tenancy of the apartment, at the current rate. Against this, though, she paid “last month’s rent” at the original rate. However, that payment, like the security deposit, is technically a guaranty against fraudulent behavior, a deposit belonging to her though held by the landlord until that final month commences – and so, like a security deposit, entitled to interest.
If he were to be a dick and press her for the difference, she would be entitled to press him for the interest, which is likely substantially greater than the difference over that time span. Since in this case they are described as “good landlord and good tenant”, I suspect that simply pointing out that she already paid final month’s rent when she moved in, and that he’s had the use of that money including interest it earned, so it was doing the job it was collected for: ensuring he is not cheated out of the final month’s rent, even though rents have increased, would mean they ought to call it even.
In 2009 we moved out of an apartment which we’d been renting for eight years. Back in 2001 we signed a one-year lease, and per the rental agreement it automatically became month-to-month after that (which is how it remained from 2002-2009).
During that first year, the rent was fixed by the lease. Once we became month-to-month tenants, the relevant portion of the rental agreement stated that the landlord could change the rent at his discretion by giving us 30 days’ advance notice. It did not require signing a new lease; this happened several times over seven years.
The idea, I guess, is that we then had the option to immediately give our own Notice to Vacate if we found the new rent unacceptable. My understanding is that this is a very common arrangement around here, but I’m hardly an expert.
We just had to pay the security deposit when we moved in, and our final month’s rent payment (due as usual on the first of the month) was pro-rated to reflect that we’d only be occupying the unit for about half of the month. (We moved out in mid-August, having given notice back in mid-July. On August 1 we gave the landlord a check for approximately half of the monthly rent.)