Imagine renting a house with some friends, and you’re told to mail your rent checks to a certain address by a certain date. Would you assume that as long as your check was postmarked by the date it was supposed to arrive you were good to go, or would you mail the check really early to ensure it arrived before the due date?

In this story, one landlord claims the tenants owe late fees because their rent checks were delivered one day late. They mailed the checks before the due date, so they think the landlord is being unreasonable.

Since he won’t listen to reason, they decide to consult their lease. That’s when they make a discovery that gives them the power they need to get the landlord to listen.

Keep reading for all the details.

“As per the lease” we owe you late fees?! Let’s check that lease again…

So this happened in college to me and my friends.

We moved into a house from some small rental company based in the area after signing a year long lease.

House is great, no problems, but we were told a week or so after moving in we would have to send our rent checks each month by the 5th by mail to their new office in the town 120 miles over.

Whatever, barely a problem so we just go with it. So for the next 6 months or so we both mail our rent checks at the same time by the 1st of each month, and never had any problems.

But then there was a problem.

Then one day my friend receives a call from the landlord saying we owe 100+ dollars each in late fees becuase 2 months our rent checks came in the mail a day after they were due.

They were DEFINITELY postmarked AT LEAST 3 days before that, but thats not the point.

So he says, “per the lease you each owe 50 dollars for each month it is late and so that is 200 dollars total”

And we said well it was definitely postmarked multiple days in advance and its not our fault the USPS didn’t deliver it on time, and that we had no way to know that it wasn’t delivered on time, so how could we be accountable for these fees?

They looked at the lease.

He responded with, “Go read the document, per the lease your late fees are stated clearly, you have until next month to pay” then he hung up.

We pulled up our lease, and just as he asked us to do, we read it.

He was right – based on all we knew we each owed them 100 bucks – damn.

But, in a section regarding payment, CLEARLY stated, we were to HAND DELIVER our rent checks to their office which was still addressed to their OLD office in town, and the address we were supposed to deliver them to WAS NOT the one they had us sending our checks to.

They told the landlord what they planned to do.

So we called them back, “we looked at the lease, and per the lease, we are not required to send checks to that office but to this office insert old office address so we will be bringing our checks there from now on and will not be paying any late fees because we technically never even agreed in the lease to mail our checks.

The landlord flipped saying we were being children, that this was unfair, and he was going to get our parents on the phone (he literally said that, despite the fact both our parents were obviously on our side and we were 20ish year old people).

We just said “well if you want your rent money we will bring it to the location described in our signed lease, since as per the lease you need it delivered there and we don’t feel comfortable mailing them to unknown locations”.

The landlord caved.

Inevitably he buckled, he knew he was at fault, and dropped the late fees and said we wouldn’t owe any more late fees ever so long as the envelope was post marked on the right day.

Every month after that we waited until the day before to mail them out, ensuring they wouldn’t receive their money until at least a couple days after it was due.

We stayed in the house the next year (aside from this instance, they weren’t too bad compared to some other college town landlords) and they changed the lease so it couldn’t happen again.

Felt good.

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I wonder what the deal was with the other address. Did the landlord just forget to update the lease?

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a landlord who learned the hard way not to try to keep a security deposit he should have paid.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This is a good point.

Late fees might be illegal.

This person was hoping they’d handle the situation another way.

A rental property owner weighs in.

I’m wondering what the deal is with the two addresses. It almost seems like something fishy is going on. Either that, or the landlord simply forgot to modify the lease after switching addresses.

Regardless, these renters did the right thing by referring to the lease instead of just going along with whatever the landlord says to do. The landlord really was being ridiculous by blaming them for a problem that was really on USPS. As long as the checks were postmarked by the correct date, it shouldn’t matter when they arrive. That’s out of their control.