ALWAYS Send Out Documents in PDF - Uneditable Format

[Mindy Jensen]

Hey Landlords. 

Maybe you've seen this article floating around the Internet this week about the tenant whose landlord sent them the rent in an editable Word Document, so he slipped in his own clause.

Now, this is funny, and I were the landlord, I would take this as a lesson learned and buy them a cake for their birthday for as long as they were tenants. 

But is this the ONLY change to the lease that this tenant made? The Landlord doesn't appear to have read this lease after the tenant signed it... because HE signed it too.

Now they have a legal, binding contract. Sort of.

Remember, the Landlord/Tenant Laws of your state run the show. Just because you put it into your lease doesn't make it legal OR enforceable. I doubt the tenant will take the landlord to court to fight this clause...

But think about this: What if they changed a portion of your editable document that WAS legal? Like, say, the deposit amount? The pet clause? The actual amount of rent?

You send them a lease stating you will rent for $1500 per month, they edit out the "1" and sign it. They return it to you with a signature, which you then sign as well. Without reading. 

I'm not a lawyer - and I would love to hear from anyone who is an attorney - but it seems to me that this is now a legal document, binding and enforceable... And it looks like you just lost $1,000 a month for the length of that lease.

The moral of the story: Always send our uneditable formats to tenants. ALWAYS.