She Paid Her Rent Months in Advance—Until Her Landlord Tried to Double-Dip Her Vacant Apartment
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Imagine moving into an apartment and signing a lease for a year. What would you do if you found another place to live that you liked even more but your lease wasn’t up for half a year? Would you try to break your lease, or would you keep living in the apartment until your lease is up?
In this story, one renter is in this situation, and she comes to terms with paying rent for two apartments until her lease is up. That’s why she’s pretty surprised when she gets a phone call about renting her old apartment to someone else.
Her lease wasn’t up yet. What was the landlord thinking?
Let’s read all about it.
Apartment complex rented my apartment while I still had an active lease.
Arkansas has well known laws that lean heavily on the side of the property owner which leaves the renter pretty vulnerable to owners who want to be difficult to say the least.
Or at least they did when I lived there, I doubt much has changed since.
She avoided the late fee and the monthly checks.
So I move into town and find a 2/2 apartment, intending for it to be a short period of time while I scout the town and look for a more permanent place.
As for paying rent, they wouldn’t/couldn’t take an automatic monthly check from my bank or charge my debit card monthly, it had to be a paper check from me, with a 4 day late fee window.
I hate writing checks and I had the cash so I paid out the 12 month lease all at once.
Breaking the lease wasn’t as easy as she thought it would be.
I find a great place about 6 months later, thinking I’ll just break my lease and pay the extra one month penalty and walk away from my apartment.
I call and let them know I’ll be moving out, long conversation short, the way the lease is written makes you think that’s how it works when in reality, at a second or third read, I’m still liable for the entire 12 month lease, and to break the lease essentially adds a 13th month worth of rent money.
Knowing that upfront, why anybody would break a lease is beyond me.
So at this point I’ve already made the deposits on my new place when all this comes to light so I’m stuck with two places.
She took her time moving out.
I tell the apartment complex I won’t be moving out, figure I’ll just go ahead and let the lease run out, set the AC to 80, and open the breakers to keep costs low.
I slowly move my stuff to my new place since I have plenty of time now and in the end I leave behind my ironing board and iron just to leave something and I never really use them anyways.
About 2 months later I get a call from the power company asking if it’s okay to transfer power into somebody else’s name.
Shocked, I reply, “Absolutely not”, while laughing a little on the inside. I decide to give it a day before I call the apartment complex.
Let’s see what the apartment complex has to say.
First thing the next morning I get a call from the apartment complex and with a super snarky entitled tone I hear “We need you to drop the power from your name so the new tenant can take over and move in.”
I explain that I still have an active lease on the place and can’t fathom why they’d rent it out.
She accuses me of abandonment and therefore she is allowed to rent the apartment.
My reply went along the lines of, “I rent that apartment with the sole intent of having somewhere to iron my clothes. Did you not see my iron and ironing board there?”
She said she did and she took it to the office to get it out of the apartment.
She eventually talked to the boss.
We go back and forth on the semantics for a little. I let her know that I’m open to receiving a refund to the date on the new tenants lease and at that time I’d be happy to drop my name from the power.
She refused and the call ended with getting her boss’s number from corporate.
After mentioning to her boss that I can recognize a breach of contract when I see it, and that nowhere in the lease does it say I actually have to live there, not to mention her employee admitted to entering my apartment and stealing items of mine from inside. She quickly assured me they are putting a check in the mail that day refunding my money to the first of that month and told me I could go to the office to pick up my iron and board anytime.
Yes I know they could have run up the power bill but they’d only be able to do so much really and a few days isn’t that huge, and they didn’t do it anyways. Even if they had it would still be worth the expense considering the refund.
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You can’t rent out an apartment with an active lease to someone else. I’m glad OP got a refund.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This is pretty funny.
One person thinks it sounds illegal.
Another person agrees that it sounds illegal.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a college student who decides to send his university a counter-bill after they try to get him to pay “inconvenience fees.”
This person had a similar experience.
That is so frustrating! If one tenant is paying rent, you can’t rent the place out to someone else! I’m glad she called them out on what was happening and got a refund.
Breaking a lease isn’t always easy.
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