Realtor lease extension fee

[Wendy Yang]

Our current rental house tenant with one year lease was found by a realtor who we paid 5% yearly rental income as her commission when we rented the house to the tenant. The tenant wanted to extend the lease after a year.  We drafted up and signed an addendum to the lease to extend the lease for another year.  Two months after we extended the lease with the current tenant, the realtor who found the tenants for us more than a year ago came and demanded that we pay her another 5% of the full year rental as her commission again for the lease renewal.  We did all the renewal paperwork ourselves with the current tenant and the realtor was not involved in any of it at all.  We were surprised at her demand as we only paid one-time 5% yearly rent commission to any other realtors who had found a tenant for us with or without lease renewal.  However, she presented us with the simple standard contract we had signed with her more than a year ago, which had an extra small insertion of a line stating that she would receive the same amount of 5% full commission every time we renew the yearly lease with this current tenant she had found for us. We did not pay close attention to this seemed usual simple contract at the time as we had done this so many times with other realtors in the past with no issues.  We never expected that she had inserted something so unreasonable in the contract.  Is it legal for realtor to ask for full commission every year when you renew the lease with the same tenant while she is not involved in the process at all?  If this is the case, we will probably have to look for another tenant instead.