All Forum Posts by: Maya V.

Thank you Andrew and Mark. I should not need more than one full month to take care of the work needed to have the unit up to snuff and ready to rent out again. Although my lease was pretty thorough, I did not include a lease break clause - next time for sure. Am I legally able to ask him to pay for those two months that he is bailing on? I'm thinking meet in the middle and just demand one full month's rent plus damages for the granite (which he has already agreed to pay for) and let him slide on one month. As I said, it should take me no more than one full month to clean up and get some back in there. What a hassle... What good is a lease if you can't hold them to it - this is the second tenant that bailed on their lease.

Please advise. Thanks

Hello all,

I know there have been multiple threads regarding lease breaks but I was hoping to get some feedback from some of you more experienced landlords with my particular situation.

There are two issues I have with my current tenant:

1) He wants to break his lease two months early due to the fact that I would not let him have a cat 8 months into his lease that specifies NO PETS. I verbally said that I wouldn't have a problem with it until I went into the unit to do a maintenance check and saw that he was a slob and that having a cat would only intensify the uncleanliness of his situation so I told him that I would like to stick to the original "no pets policy". So now, he is willing to uproot his life to search for a cat friendly apartment requesting to break his lease. I told him that I have no problem with this but I told him that he would be responsible for any down time for re-renting the apartment (this is my only concern - I just don't want to lose any rent income due to his breaking the lease). This is a desirable in-law unit in a very desirable area of SF bay area so I am not worried about not being able to rent it out. There will be a bit of time & money exhausted on my part after he leaves painting, cleaning, screening tenants, etc. He has given me 5 weeks notice to vacate. I'm not sure how to handle negotiations with him.

2) To complicate matters, before he moved in I tore out the kitchen cabinets and installed brand new cabinets and brand new granite counters. The granite counters were sealed with a water based sealant with 2-3 coats in the appropriate recommended manner per manufacturers instructions. I stressed to the tenant to just please take care of the kitchen because it is BRAND NEW and that if he ever has any maintenance issues of ANY KIND to please let me know ASAP. 8 months roll by and I finally decide after him asking to have this cat that it might be time to do a maintenance check (originally I plan to do quarterly but it got away from me) and I go in and find the granite with multiple stains of water that had penetrated into the stone. I think from him being paranoid about damaging the granite so he has been all this time covering it with huge pieces of plexiglass cut to fit on either side of the sink. I think what has happened is that the stone has not been able to breath and caused moisture to be trapped inside. So now, he has ruined the counters and wants to break his lease. He stated the counters were not sealed properly (which infuriated me) and I told him that he should have come to me right as he noticed this happening. On each side of sink - their are literally about 15-20 three inch circular stains. By the way, we live on the same lot - I live in the main house and he lives in the in-law unit with a common backyard that is shared. So there is no reason for not properly communicating to me. I would even ask him at times how are things going back there and he would always reply "fine".

I live in the San Francisco bay area in California if it matters. Please advise of what you would do. He seems pretty amenable considering the circumstances. I just want to be fair to both parties.

Thanks in advance for any and all recommendations.

Also, Smart Move never even answered my email.

Thanks Ashley, I ended up putting his info in the system my self. It was my first time using Smart Move to do my checks. I was using Firefox! I'm now going to have to ask my tenant which browser he was using. Thanks for feedback.

Thank you so much for posting this form Jon! You made my life super easy today. Cheers

I'm trying to use Smart Move now for the first time and I am having no luck getting the darn thing to work. I followed the prompts and added my tenants info. The are getting back to me claiming that it will not allow them to enter in a pin number. Smart Move does not even have a phone number to call just an email. Maybe I didn't set it up correctly but I really just followed their prompts.

Frustrating.

thanks for the comments folks.

In all seriousness Brant, I am just getting into real estate investing and want to know how I can leverage 100k to buy a 4 plex? Do tell.