breaking lease

[Jennifer McElliott]

Hi All,

I've read through most of the posts on tenants wanting to break their lease, but wanted to post this slightly different flavor here...

My tenants just called yesterday w/ a situation... we have a 5 bedroom house rented out to them - a couple and their grown daughters - and one of these daughter's boyfriend, and on the flip side of the generation, the couple has one of their mother's living w/ them as well.  so that's a total 6 people already.  They are all on the lease, so this was all on the up and up.  

This part is my fault... sort of... on a walk through during a water heater replacement inspection, I noticed they had cats - maybe a couple of cats... and as you guessed it, they are not authorized to have pets b/c they said no to pets when we first leased it out to them - though the house was listed as dogs acceptable.  So I called it out, and she said they were just fostering the cats (it's part of their charity that their store donates to... I know i should have stated that this infraction breaks their lease agreement, but I let it slide (the house didn't smell of cats and they were keeping the house pretty clean/neat.)

Next infraction - this is part of their call yesterday, they had some trouble w/ the other set of the couple's parent's where the parents had to leave their rental due to their landlord selling the house.  the parents came to stay w/ them as a short term solution (i was not made aware of this until yesterday, and don't know how long they've been there now, but I suspect it's been over the allowable 30 days like a visiting guest.)  So now we're up to 8 people in this 5 bedroom 2300 sq ft house!  Anyway, they called to say the parents have needed surgery etc (everyone has a heart bleed story right?!) and that she doesn't see them moving out anytime soon.  As a result, she recognizes that they need to find a new/bigger house.  Great.... except that they still have 2 months on their lease.  She's found another, ideal house and would like to move there next month if they will hold the house for them and if I will let them out of their lease a month early.  

So w/ the infractions, they've otherwise been decent, pay on time, never bounce a check tenants... albeit troublesome... calling every couple of months with issues of clogged drains and 'funny' noises from their fridge.  I'm definitely looking forward to putting new tenants in there, and doing better upfront training like I'm learning from BP!!  But what would you all suggest I do with these current tenants... say they can get out of their lease early if we can find folks to replace them?  So I could do some pro-rating of that last month depending on how quickly we can find a new tenant - keeping in mind that this is also Nov/Dec in the state of WA!  

If you lasted this long - thanks for reading my long winded explanation!!!