Shutterstock

Imagine renting an apartment, and you agree to pay the rent for a certain period of time. If you moved out but still had to pay rent for a couple more months, would you turn in the keys when you moved out or wait until the lease was officially over?

In this story, one renter is struggling with this exact dilemma. He feels like it’s petty to wait until his lease is up to give the landlord access to the apartment, but at the same time, he’s upset the landlord didn’t agree to his compromise.

Keep reading for all the details.

WIBTA if I exhausted my rental contract because my landlord didn’t accept my compromise suggestion?

I want to move and I’ll rent a new apartment starting in Feb 2021.

Where I live you must cancel your rental contract 3 months in advance.

This means if I now cancelled my current apartment lease I’d have to pay double rent for Feb/March next year.

OP tried to compromise with the landlord.

As my landlord has to do some renovations in my old apartment (repaper walls etc, it’s their duty according to my contract)

I suggested the following to my landlord: I’d only pay rent for the full February (saving me March rent), but move out within the first week so they’d have 3 more weeks for renovations and can seamlessly relet the room to a new tenant from March on given they find one within the next 2.5 months.

However, they immediately rejected and made it clear I’d have to pay rent until March.

So, here’s what OP could do.

Now since I’m paying until March I have the right to deny them access to my apartment until the very last day, i.e., March 31st, essentially making it impossible for them to do renovations and find a tenant for April.

Additionally all tenants here are university students and the semester starts in April, so for my landlord it’d be quite a bit harder to find someone who’d want to start a lease in May.

While I have the legal possibility to do so, I’d gain absolutely nothing from it.

It would be petty.

My landlord would get less money, I spend more and I deny living area to a potential new tenant.

To me it seems like a lose-lose situation for everyone involved and I think my suggestion was perfectly reasonable.

Basically it’d just be petty revenge, which is why I think I might be TA if I did so.

If OP decides to be petty and deny the landlord access to the apartment until April 1st, is there anything wrong with that?

Let’s see what Reddit suggests.

This person makes a good point.

Another person thinks it’s not petty, it’s following the book.

This person points out the landlord’s mistake.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a renter who receives a text saying his landlord has passed and asking for checks to go to a different account, but he’s not sure it’s real.

Another person calls the landlord greedy.

It’s not really petty. It’s following the landlord’s lead. If he doesn’t want to compromise, OP doesn’t have to compromise either.

It’d be nice if the landlord learned from this experience, but I doubt he will.

If he’s paying rent, the place is his, and he doesn’t have to allow anyone access. He shouldn’t feel bad about that.