All Forum Posts by: Wendy Yang

@Mitch Messer

Thanks for all the advices!

@Mitch Messer

Thanks so much and you are right on! They have since moved out and notified us in writing, although we did not return any money back to them. We told them that we will be doing our own mold inspection and are in the process of finding a replacement tenants for them (we emphasized that we are doing this to help them to mitigate their financial loss, and ours as we were not the one to break the lease). As they have moved out, we have rekeyed the entire property. Their nasty lawyer continued to demand all the money and the moving cost, now also threatens us with potential lingering medical issues (they are seeing doctors) that may have due to their exposure to this mold (5 days) in the house. After the tenants moved out, I have notified them that any communications from this nasty lawyer will be considered harassment.

Tenants moved in just for a couple of days. They then started to complain allergies/asthma and they said they suspected mold, although no mold could be found in the living area.  They then ordered a mold inspection themselves behind my back and claimed copious mold in attic and many walls are wet.  I do not know anything about the attic as we had no reason to look there, but the wet walls are not possible.  Also mold in attic is not suppose to affect indoor air quality (stack flow effect).  The tenants then moved out in about a week and claimed the house was uninhabitable based on the mold report.  However, they would not provide us the mold report.  They made the accusation that we knew mold problems, but fraudulently did not disclose and therefore the lease is invalid.  They demanded all their money back (1st month and security), plus their long distance moving cost ($3000+).  I felt that it could be a scam and I am doing my own mold inspection after they left.  Any similar experience or advice?

We are in Southern California.

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.