Lease Renewal when military member is deployed

[Dana Butterworth]

Hello all,

My husband and I have a rental property (former primary residence) that we've rented out to military families for the last six years.  We currently have run into a situation that we've never had before and would like some feedback from anyone who has encountered the same issue.

We currently have a husband and wife renting our single family home in Georgia.  These tenants have been in the home for two years, and no major problems from them.  The husband is active duty military and currently deployed while the wife occupies the residence.  The renewal time frame is July 1st, but the military member won't be back in the US for at least six more months.  The current lease states that if not renewing, the lease does not revert to a month to month lease (and the tenants have said they want to continue on the yearly lease anyway), and if a new lease isn't signed, then they must vacate the property (Standard Georgia lease terminology).  

We submitted the lease renewal to the wife (non military member), and she emailed us that her husband is without wi-fi access (not completely unbelievable, but spouse ISN'T currently deployed in a conflict area, ie, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc,) and would therefore be unable to sign the new lease until he arrived back in the US.  We haven't had any payment issues from the couple, and the wife is currently employed.  We had originally stated that we were planning to have them go month to month after two years of yearly leases, but they declined and wanted to stay with the original lease style (per the wife).  Fine with us, but we have no clue about how to handle this going forward.  We are former military members ourselves, and base our renting decisions on military affiliation (not difficult since home is located near a military post), so we'd rather not reword the lease to only have her on it (not to mention, the application decision we made 2 years ago was based solely on the husband's military pay, etc as his wife wasn't working at the time).  

We'd like to know what others have done in this situation? She doesn't even have a special POA to renew the lease and sign for him. Add to that, Covid-19, and most military bases/posts have stop movement orders at the moment. And of course we don't want to evict her anyway with her spouse deployed.

Thanks for any guidance that we can receive!