Lease-Signing Ordinance Passes
Now that the early leasing ordinance has passed unanimously, landlords go out on a final note of incoherence, threatening befuddling forms of retaliation — sorry, expressing their concern that other landlords may retaliate in a befuddling manner. But none of their proposed scenarios represent much of a change from the current system; it’s already common practice to rent apartments out from under the current tenants.
Is it just me, or does 90 days still seem absurdly short? It still asks people to commit to where they’ll be 21 months after the landlord can ask them to sign an extension.
I started dating someone, got married, and moved into a house in less time than that.
posted by Jen. on March 21st, 2006 at 7:54 pm eand?
posted by peter honeyman on March 21st, 2006 at 9:36 pm e90 days isn’t short if you only have a one-year lease agreement.
posted by Lindsey on March 21st, 2006 at 10:31 pm eWho has 2 year leases? I’ve never heard of one of those.
posted by Brandon on March 21st, 2006 at 11:27 pm eI believe that she means that if, in November of 2006, you sign a lease that begins in September of 2007, you’re commiting yourself through August of 2008 or twenty-one months out into the future. And yeah, that’s a long time. You could die in a house fire and your parents, in addition to your funeral expenses, would probably be sued by the landlord and have to pay the rent for that whole period.
posted by Parking Structure Dude! on March 22nd, 2006 at 9:18 am eI broke an apartment lease in Ann Arbor and the penalty was only two month’s rent, unlike the one year’s rent penalty that I was used to in NYC.
posted by JCP2 on March 22nd, 2006 at 9:55 am ePresumably if the leasehold premises are destroyed, the landlord is released from any obligation to continue to provide the housing, and presumably the tenant is released from paying the rest of the rent. Read the fine print in the lease.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on March 22nd, 2006 at 9:56 am eThat’s exactly what I meant — to ask people to finish out 9 months of a lease and then an additional 12 months means that you’re having to judge where you’ll be in life nearly two years ahead of time. It’s an awfully long time in advance to commit to staying in one place.
In a lot of other cities, once you’ve lived in an apartment for a year, landlords will give you the option of taking a month-to-month lease, albeit sometimes at a higher rate. There’s nothing so special about Ann Arbor that should make landlord-tenant relations so different from other university towns. Why isn’t, say, March, still six months in advance of when the leases would start, soon enough?
posted by Jen. on March 22nd, 2006 at 10:00 am eThere are landlords in Ann Arbor that will do that, too. Whether they rent to students en masse is another question.
posted by Chris on March 22nd, 2006 at 10:47 am e“Presumably if the leasehold premises are destroyed, the landlord is released from any obligation to continue to provide the housing, and presumably the tenant is released from paying the rest of the rent. ”
Ah, but that assumes that lease one and lease two are for the same apartment. If apartment one burns down, killing the tenant, can his heirs still be held responsible for lease two? What if it’s the same landlord but two different properties? And what if it’s two different landlords?
Anyway, I was just kidding. I would assume that the death of the lessee cancels the contract. I would hope anyway.
posted by Parking Structure Dude! on March 22nd, 2006 at 10:48 am eRenters are primarily students who don’t usually look for apartments mid semester. In larger cities you have people looking for apartments anytime of the year so the threat of sitting on an unrented property is less. Apartments in AA are more likely to sit empty for the fall and winter semesters if they are not rented when students are looking. That would be a loss of roughly $8000.+- for realtors for each empty property.
posted by murder on March 22nd, 2006 at 10:51 am eHmm, I don’t think you can say that renters are primarily students. I think you can say that the primary renters in the near-campus area are students, but that does not apply to Ann Arbor renters in general. I rented all over Ann Arbor for years and I think the longest notice I had before needing to renew was two months. When I talk to any of my co-workers or friends who currently rent, they have never had more than a three month notice, and usually it was one month. Many of these landlords will offer month-to-month leases if you don’t want to re-sign for a year. It is only the landlords who rent primarily to students who have these ridiculously long lead times and the stricter leases. As murder noted though, if you have a studnet rental and don’t rent it by the end of August, your property is likely to sit empty for a year so the motivation to rent early is much greater for student-oriented landlords than for landlords who have a more varied rental base.
posted by Juliew on March 22nd, 2006 at 11:58 am eYeah, but if everyone is looking at the same time, even pushed back in the school year, then it should all wash out. There won’t be fewer students renting.
posted by Anna on March 22nd, 2006 at 12:00 pm eI personally loved the landlord saying, “I’m not out on the street corner begging students to rent my apartments in the beginning of the year, it’s the student’s calling me.” Funny if you don’t put a large ugly sign on your dilapidated hell-hole with your phone number on it, they won’t be calling you in Sept/Oct.
I lived for years in the student ghetto in a house that didn’t have a sign on it, and I’m pretty sure Surovell didn’t get any specific requests to rent it, and because of that I think I was asked to renew my lease a month or a month and a half before the existing lease ended.
posted by anon on March 22nd, 2006 at 1:38 pm eMy current tenants (live upstairs from me) have a 2 year lease. I have rented to a number of folks on that basis. I like it. Except this time I got kind of screwed due to the increase in the cost of heat. Oh well.
I would let anyone out of a lease, provided they help me find new tenants. I’ve never been in a hideous dispute with any tenants, thank god, though I did have a throw down with MY last landlord, who was crazy as a shithouse rat.
posted by OFWinsurgent on March 22nd, 2006 at 5:31 pm eI’m confused as to what some folks are complaining about here. This sounds like a Good Thing to me, and I have significant experience as a renter in Ann Arbor, both near campus and not so near.
This all sounds like the realities of a fairly demand-heavy housing market, particularly near campus, and a little bit of moderation imposed by the local government. Its hardly a hardship on the landlords, and it gives both tenants and landlords time to build confidence in each other before there’s pressure to re-commit. Landlords have little incentive to rent properties out from under tenants where there is a good relationship and a small track record of on-time payment history. If the choice is between renting to a tentant who has paid on-time some period of time and a completely unknown tenant, I’d prefer to keep the existing relationship rather than the risks of a new one.
posted by briansp on March 22nd, 2006 at 6:41 pm eBrian,
The problem is that 90 days is still, as Jen put it, absurdly short. And, the 90 day issue is reserved for students alone. It’s still icky, just not AS icky as waiting 14 days after the start of the lease to start pressuring 19 year olds for, essentially, a 2 year commitment to living in an overpriced slum.
In theory, yes, landlords would have incentive to keep their good tenants. In practice, I think the landlords are merely trying to raise the rent as much as humanly possible. If you threaten the current tenants with a rent hike, they either a) move out, and the new tenants get the rent hike or b) pay up. My _guess_ is that landlords see students as walking ATMs(thanks to wealthy parents), so they can get away with this nonsense.
Also, if the students are late, that means the landlord gets the late fee. The lease is generally cosigned by the parents, so they WILL get their money. As for damage to the property, I doubt seriously that companies like CMB actually gives a crap about keeping their properties up.
posted by Pants Rule on March 22nd, 2006 at 11:23 pm ePreface - I’m an employee of one of the big “EVIL” property management companies often mentioned in these threads, and a recent transplant to Ann Arbor, and find the virulent anti-landlord sentiment a bit surprising. Personally, I’m about and as far left of the dial as you can go politically, and so, as in any business I’ve ever worked at, I’m regularly frustrated with the profit imperative guiding decisions. However, I haven’t found it any different than any other business. Yes, the managers are out there to make money - but they haven’t become millionaires off it, and they’re hardly the heartless slumlords out to screw the poor naive kiddies portrayed in the last post.
I (and I think this is a no-brainer) agree that a month after move-in is way too soon to start thinking about the next year’s lease - this ordinance is welcome and was long overdue. However, when you talk about leasing campus properties, it’s only logical to start the leasing process in winter. Students are leaving town in mid-late April (and it’s finals before that), so you need to start by February or so, even though the leases won’t start until the following Aug/Sept.
posted by unlimitedlou on March 24th, 2006 at 8:57 pm eI offer the two-year option when people move in…mainly because I’m a lazy landlord. I dont want to deal with finding new tenants. It’s a good deal for the tenants because the rate is locked in, and with the increase in the cost of heat, they did pretty well (probably wasn’t the best plan for me, oh well.)
posted by OFWinsurgent on March 24th, 2006 at 11:56 pm e“If you threaten the current tenants with a rent hike, they either a) move out, and the new tenants get the rent hike or b) pay up.”
Or, c) negotiate. Admittedly I’ve only gone for c) 3 times (and I’ve renting in Ann Arbor 12 years now), but 2 out of those 3 times the landlord caved and we ended up with no rent increase. I probably should’ve tried more often–can’t hurt, and it might knock a little off the rent.
I also don’t understand your word choice–I’d call it an “offer”, not a “threat”. If you can’t stand the uncertainty of knowing whether your apartment will be available next year, or what the rent will be, maybe you can talk someone into a multi-year lease. If you don’t want to any particular deal beyond the current year, fine, but don’t expect your landlord to have to either.
posted by Bruce Fields on March 25th, 2006 at 10:48 pm e“If you don’t want to any particular deal”
(Er, should’ve been “if you don’t want to commit to any particular deal…”)
posted by Bruce Fields on March 25th, 2006 at 10:49 pm eFor students and the campus-area landlords, The problems are these:
1) You are a freshman. You agreed to live with some people from your dorm, people you have known for 90 days. Before you find out if you will even remain friends, let alone be able to orchestrate a chore-list, you have signed a lease which does not begin for 3/4 of a year.
2) You have a nice apartment. You have applied to some study-abroad programs. You don’t know if you have been accepted. If you go to France, you don’t need another lease. If you do not go to France, you would like to live where you are. You don’t get to, because your landlord rented your apartment our from under you.
3) You are graduating this year and have no idea if you will get that job at the public library, get into that grad school, etc. But before you even APPLY to grad programs, your landlord has rented your apartment our from under you. If you stay in AA, you will definitely not be renting from THOSE GUYS again.
3) The only reason students flock to landlords when they do, is becasue they HAVE to. The rent is comparable to Chicago (yes, it is) and the city/housing DO NOT JUSTIFY IT. Therefore, a rush to get the cheapest, best place first.
4) The students HAVE to live somewhere. Pushing the deadline back does not decrease the amount of tenants, because it is either fixed or rising until the university is demolished. Even if the landlords couldn’t show apartments until summer, when “no one is here,” the students will still rent. That’s because there are almost 40,000 of us, and we all need a place to live. And there aren’t enough places that are reasonably priced, not a slum, etc, to go around.
90 days still isn’t enough, but at least it helps.
posted by Nicole on March 31st, 2006 at 7:27 pm e