Tenant gives deposit to hold and pay first months rent 3 days later

[Phil Blair]

After several texts the tenant agrees to give the deposit that same day and pay the first mos rent Friday, so I agreed to that and they agreed to that, well two days later they decide to back out and demanded to have their security deposit.Well I had to turn down several very potential tenants and many other callers literally like 10-20 people. After talking to a lawyer, he told me to keep all of their texts and the texts of where I had to turn down the other potential tenants. He said that I had a really strong case to keep the security deposit, which I am planning on doing, because the story they gave me is very fishy, they told me they needed to take out a loan to buy a house, I'm like you wouldn't be needing the money to do something like that. But anyhow they started to text me and call me and they think they are not liable because they didn't sign anything, I said there was a contract made, so I said talk to a lawyer or take me to court and I am willing to take this to court and then they demanded their money back and gave me guidelines to give me the money back, so to me they are being very forceful and trying to be aggressive with me, to me there has to be some repercussions for people trying to take advantage of you. I am very new to the landlord/tenant business, so I want to know what to expect when I go to court, what records should I have and what things should I record? Also what has been your experiences with these situations as well?

[Sharon Tzib]

Phil, I think where this possibly went off the rails is when you did not have them sign a lease. Perhaps in their mind there was a lot of competition for the house so they were offering you a deposit to hold it for them, but not feeling it was a "done deal" until the paperwork had been signed.

You, on the other hand, are a landlord now and need to conduct yourself as a business person. Accepting money from a potential tenant, whether it is for rent or security deposit, without a signed lease first, puts you at a serious disadvantage and opens you up to all kinds of risk, misunderstandings, and problems, as you are now finding out.

I think your attorney has given you very bad advice. Even if you feel you have a verbal contract and you have texts that show he/she wanted to rent the house, without a written and signed lease, most judges are not going to look very favorably on you. Also, if you turn around and rent the house to someone else fairly quickly, it will also be hard for you to claim any financial setback was occurred to you.

In addition, you have no idea what the tenant needed that money back for - could have been to make up the difference for a down payment on house - could be something else. In the end, it is irrelevant as to why they changed their mind and are requesting their money back. Yes, it sucks they changed their mind, but you'll meet all kinds of jerks in this biz.

In the end, you are giving all landlords a bad name by conducting yourself in this manner; you are setting yourself up for this person to possibly come vandalize your house as retaliation, which will potentially cost you far more than the security deposit to fix; and you may find yourself with a small claims court case date that you will have to spend time and money to defend. Is it really worth ALL that just to keep a deposit??

All you can do is learn from your mistakes in this case and do better next time. There's lots of resources on this site to help you do that.