Lease Termination Before Moving In due to UnClean Apartment

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Hi,

I would greatly appreciate any help that you can provide me.

About a month ago, we looked at a house that was to be leased by a private owner. We were happy with it but we noticed that the house was not clean - the blinds were dirty, the carpet was soiled and the house smelled like cat urine. Despite all that, we agreed to sign a lease (after credit was approved) and the owner assured us more than once that prior to us moving in, the house will be cleaned and the carpet steamed.

The owners were moving out of the country for education. A week later, we signed the lease and provided the owner with the 1 month deposit. We signed the lease on August 22nd.

The lease was to start on September 15th but the owner agreed to let us move in earlier than that. They moved and left the property in the hands of their property manager.

On September 4th when we were supposed to pick up the keys, we went to meet the property manager at the house and we noticed that they house was still not clean. The blinds were still dirty, the whole place still smelled like cat urine. We asked the property manager to clean the unit and to let us know as soon as possible as we were planning to move in on September 10th. The property manager assured us that he will call us back before the weekend is over to let us know whether he will be handling the cleaning or whether we will do the cleaning ourselves (hire a cleaning company) and deduct it from our next month's rent.

The weekend past (this was the Labor Day weekend) and no call. On Monday, we called the property manager - still no call back. On Tuesday, we called him again at noon. No call back until 6pm. We had made a few calls to a few cleaning company and they needed at least one week notice to clean. At that time, we didn't think that the property manager is going to call us back or was he taking us seriously so we called the father of the owner and told him that due to these circumstances, we are no longer moving in and we would like our deposit back.

30 minutes after we called the father of the owner, the property manager called us back and said that he will meet us at the apartment the next day to get the keys back.

Question is : Can we get our full deposit back since they didn't clean the house?