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Breaking a Lease in DC
My boyfriend has just moved in with me and out of his own apartment that he was renting from a private condo owner in DC. He has signed a lease through December and there is no early termination clause.
My boyfriend first called his landlord at the end of April to tell him that he wanted to move out and to ask the landlord what he would like to do about this situation. My boyfriend and I had planned to offer to find a new tenant through a reputable agency and continue to pay rent until we found a tenant that the landlord approved of.
However, the landlord said that as long as my boyfriend was moving out, he was going to go ahead and sell the unit. The idea was that my boyfriend would continue to pay rent until the unit sold, which the landlord thought would be by the end of May or June at the latest.
My boyfriend and I then cleaned up the entire apartment, photographed it for the realtor, kept it clean at all times in case prospective buyers wanted to have a tour, and finally moved everything out of the apartment on June 18. We returned the keys at that time and requested our deposit back as we could obviously no longer cause damages to the apartment, since we had no way of gaining access to it. However, the landlord told us that he wanted to retain the deposit to make sure that we did not just disappear and refuse to pay further rent.
It has now been almost a month since my boyfriend officially moved out and his landlord just called to let him know that the place does not seem anywhere close to selling. My boyfriend said something to him about not wanting to keep paying rent given that he was no longer living there, and the landlord just said that he wanted to keep receiving rent until the place sold.
We know that we are ones who broke the lease and that we do not really have rights in this situation. However, given that we told him over two months ago that we wanted to break the lease early, it seems that under normal circumstances we would have been able to find a mutually agreeable new tenant by now and therefore would no longer need to pay rent. It was the landlord's choice to put the apartment on the market, and he has no incentive to price it aggressively or do anything else to make it move faster, since he is continuing to receive rent and still has our deposit. Furthermore, he initially told us that he expected the apartment to sell right away--if we had known in April that we would still be paying rent in July, we would have tried to come to some sort of buyout agreement then instead of this "indefinite rent" plan that seems to be going on.
Is there anything that we can do in this situation to avoid having to pay rent for months if the apartment continues not to sell?
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Re: Breaking Lease in DC
Your Bf is obligated to pay rent until lease expires. Its that simple
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Re: Breaking Lease in DC
If the landlord fails to seek a new tenant and sues your boyfriend for the rent, your boyfriend can attempt to establish that the landlord's losses result partially or entirely from his choice not to seek a new tenant ("failure to mitigate damages").