New leases when you buy a property with tenants?

[Wade Sikkink]

We just bought a 14 plex with 1 vacant unit. We made all the tenants sign a new lease with us, but one tenant is pushing back. Apparently he's a lawyer and wants to make a bunch of markup's to the lease, which I'm not crazy about.

Question is, do you really need to put new leases in place? This guy has a lease with the previous owner (no markups and strikingly similar to mine) and that lease was legally assigned to me at the closing by the seller. I'd like to know what everyone else does when they buy a property with tenants in it that they want to keep.

[Michael Seeker]

I agree with @Marc Ramsay - you cannot actually make the tenants sign a new lease. The fact that you got 12 of the 13 tenants to do so is awesome...but if the guy doesn't want a new lease he absolutely doesn't have to sign one and you have to honor the terms of the existing one.

That being said, if the leases are a weird format I will ask the tenants to sign a new lease with me that have the same terms as their existing lease and also sign a release from the existing lease. I prefer this because I know my lease inside and out...I don't want to have to read 5 pages of somebody elses lease to figure out what it does and doesn't cover.