Three people, lets say Jill, her best mate Bec and Bec’s boyfriend Matt all rent a place together, and they are all on the lease. A month into the lease, Jill moves out so Bec and Matt tell her once they replace her they will take her off the lease and she can stop paying rent, but until then she will have to keep paying.

Four weeks later, Bec and Matt still haven’t been able to find a replacement so Jill stops paying rent because she feels four weeks is a generous amount of time to find a replacement. In the mean time, Bec and Matt have to cover her rent she is not paying.

Bec and Matt break the six month lease and move out but still have to pay the rent until the realestate can find new tenants. this goes on four about two months, all of which Bec and Matt have been covering Jills rent.

So, my question is, are Bec and Matt correct to claim that Jill owes them all the rent that they have to pay on her behalf due to the fact that she was on the lease and never taken off it making her legally liable? or is Jill correct due to the fact she gave notice of moving out and "she shouldnt have to pay rent because she wasnt living there" (keep in mind Bec and Matt were having to keep paying rent to the real estate after they moved out until the real estate could find new tenants) etc…
hehe thanks everyone, i actually "bec"
hehe thanks everyone, im actually "bec"
micheleb:

so my "friend" fukced me over for thousands of dollars and im the bad one? lol your messed up.

I would guess that Jill does owe you for the full six months. She did put her name on the lease and agreed to be there for that time. Although she gave you 4 week’s rent while she wasn’t there – which is in itself generous – you would probably be able to ’sue’ her for the balance. Herein lies the problem. Is/was she a good friend of yours or just someone to help cover the costs? Did you do anything to make her want to leave so soon? These things may have a bearing on the case if you do try to get the money out of her legally. How hard did you try to replace her?

[ My dad rented a factory many years ago and he moved out before the lease was up. Although he gave lots of notice to the landlord, he still got sued for the money owing on the unused lease period. The landlord refused to rent the factory to anyone else; my dad even found a few potential tenants but the landlord refused to rent it to them. Anyway, it went to court and my dad did have to pay some money but the judge found the landlord to be very unreasonable and so wouldn't grant him the full amount owed. ]

All in all it teaches you some valuable lessons about sharing a property. One lesson is not to rent with friends if you can’t cover the cost should one of you leave unexpectedly.

It is glaringly obvious you have no clue what you are doing. If you evict yourself, you may find the process taking 2-3 times as long as it should.

A couple months later, you guessed it, the mold is back, and getting worse by the day. We alerted the property manager and a few days later, the contractor was out again. This time, he looked in the crawl space under the house and the crawl space above the house. He found next to no insulation in the attic and a pipe that had a huge leak under the house. They plan on painting over the mold in the cabinet(yes, that came back) with a mold killing paint. I read on blackmold.awardspace that that should kill of the mold because the wooden cabinet was painted before the mold grew(as far as we know), so painting over it with a paint that seals of oxygen will kill the green mold.

I’ve gone through our lease and repairs and maintenance(although mold is never mentioned) is covered by the realty company.

That’s just fine, but my current issue is this: The property manager(claims to have 15 years of being a house inspector experience) has instructed us(the tenants) to use a 20% bleach and water mixture to clean the black mold on the ceiling. 1. As the mold was not caused my tenant negligence, it is not our responsibility to clean the mold right? I estimate this would take us at least 3 hours and we don’t have a way to reach the ceiling(chairs aren’t tall enough, don’t own a ladder). I know if we go buy a ladder and take the receipt to the manager, we’ll get reimbursed, but am I also correct in thinking that we are owed compensation for the time if we decided to take it upon ourselves to do the job? I read on http://realestate.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=22462661 about a tenant who was paid minimum wage for doing his dishes because his dishwasher was broken and the landlord didn’t want it fixed. 2. Anyone know this case so I can reference it? 3. Know a tenant union or housing authority near Hampton Roads? 4. Any other advice?

Sorry for the long read and thanks for your time.
CORRECTION: My questions(yes, there’s multiple questions) now lie in the last paragraph.
Spoke with the rental company, they will be having the maid who cleans their properties out to clean the mold off the ceiling. However, they want to use bleach(20% bleach 80% water). The property manager wants the entire ceiling bleached(roughly 1100 sq ft), and also want us to cover our property with plastic so nothing gets bleached. They expected us to provide plastic, cover all our stuff ourselves, and to be vacant from the house(its a single family home) for a whole day. Well, that wasn’t going to work. If they want it cleaned with bleach, they can pay the maid to cover all my stuff with plastic they provide. If it’s not safe do be in the home, I expect a hotel/motel room provided for the duration of the temporary vacancy. The mold wasn’t due to tenant negligence, so it’s their responsibility to clean the property of the mold and all that that entails(protecting my property). I provided them a website(blackmold.awardspace.com) that lists other cleaners to
use against mold.

Like I said, I’m not spending 3 hours of my time doing their job unless they want to pay me. It doesn’t say anything about maid services in my lease, but it does say the house must be safe and habitable(hence they clean the mold and provide a hotel if the home is inhabitable for even a day). I’m sure the mold isn’t dangerous, but it is still nasty to have on a ceiling I’m paying $995 to look at. They haven’t gotten back to me since I gave them the web site. I’ll be calling them tomorrow and will not be doing business with this company again. I’d like to say thanks again for everyone’s time, sorry to vent. None of the answers stand out, so I’ll put it to a vote.

I am not a lawyer. But not an idiot either.

"black mold" would not grow on your ceiling. It requires raw, untreated wood, dampness and COMPLETE darkness.

Normally basic instructions on how to clean a house are not included in a lease. 1% bleach is enough to kill both mold and mildew (you have mildew). You are right, you do not have to clean this if you do not want to, however, unless maid service is part of your lease no one else will clean it either.

And no, the apartment will not reimburse you for a ladder. If you want a ladder you buy a ladder. Who doesn’t have a ladder?

You are not legally entitled to pay for cleaning your own house. I have never heard of a case where you were paid for basic cleaning, even that article you reference does not talk about cleaning, it talks about a dishwasher in the contract. If your contract states that the landlord cleans your apartment then yes, you could enforce that. If has to be in the contract though.

A BPO is a "Broker’s price opinion" of real estate. Typically this will be ordered by a bank looking to foreclose or as a preliminary estimate of a property before a refinance. The broker gets paid about 50-100.00 from the bank to go out and take exterior pictures of the home, look up comparable sales and current listings and fill out an estimate and send it all back to the bank or finance company. It is kind of an informal appraisal.

Most attorneys don’t charge for an initial consultation, but you should ask about the attorney’s policy when you call for an appointment.

The callous greed of these benefactors is evidenced in their obdurate opposition to any contribution on their part to rebuilding our economy. We helped the wrong people.

We would have acted much more prudently had we bailed out most of the people who have lost their homes to foreclosure. The banks and other speculators holding questionable mortgages would have been paid off and thereby avoided bankruptcy without the hundreds of billions we poured directly into their coffers. Millions of homeowners would still have their homes; these houses would not be flooding the market depressing the value of residential estate.

With millions of people able to keep their homes and their equity, personal spending would not have fallen as precipitously as it did. Portfolios would not have lost their value; as a result, the big banks, insurance companies, etc., would have remained solvent and would have been able to keep all (or most of) their employees. With more people able to spend money, fewer businesses would have lost their customers. With more businesses solvent, fewer people would have lot their jobs.

The bailouts accomplished very little beyond quickly restoring to a few ultra-rich speculators and to monopolistic Corporate America the wealth (and much more) that they had lost in the early part of the recession. Now these corporations sit awash in $2 trillion, which they do not invest, their promises to do so notwithstanding.

We can still salvage our economy. Since the greedy elite will not invest this immense treasure without assurance of immediate profit, we should take much of that idle capital through taxation and spend it on rebuilding and modernizing our infrastructure. Doing so would not be MAKING work; it is doing work that is long overdue. In the process, we could put millions of Americans back to work–and back to spending and restarting our economy.