5 Ways to Get Out of Your Apartment Lease

1. Find Something in Your Apartment that is Dangerous.

   Your landlord is required to repair conditions that materially affect the physical health and safety of an ordinary tenant.  Examples of these conditions might be a broken air condition, mold, broken smoke detectors, severely loose railing on your balcony, etc.  You have to specify this condition in a notice certified return receipt to the place of which rent is normally paid, and you can’t owe any rent.  By the way, you as the tenant or any of your friends can’t cause this condition so don’t take a sledge hammer to your air condition.

2. Does Your Apartment Look Like the Model They Showed You When You Leased?

   This one works a lot better when you have only lived in your apartment a short period of time.  Most states have a Deceptive Trade Practices Act that prevents businesses from employing a bait and switch sales tactic.  A lot of cases have recently come out against apartments that show you a ridiculously nice model that in no way is representative of the unit they gave you the keys to when you moved in.  The remedies in most state Deceptive Trade Practices Acts are severe, and your apartment community will probably offer to pay you to move out once they get wind of a Deceptive Trade Practices Act against them. 

3. Are Your Apartment Complex Entrance Gate Broken?

   Odds are that the security gates to your apartment complex are broken now, have been broken for a while, or are habitually broken.  These electric gates are very expensive to maintain and idiots are always getting drunk and running into them.  Apartments also love to advertise gated access as a selling point to their communities. This combination of disrepair and advertising leads to another good bait and switch argument, and our company has spoken to several landlord/tenant attorneys who have been successful getting their clients out of their lease based on these facts.  

4. Are the Streets of Bagdad Safer Than the Parking Lot or Garage at Your Apartment?

   If so you may have a pretty good civil negligence case against your landlord.  Say for example, your car has been broken into five times and your landlord refuses to spend 100 bucks on lighting the parking lot.  There is a good chance that your landlord is acting negligently. A quality demand letter from an attorney will probably get you out of your lease and is a small price to pay for your safety.  This area of landlord/tenant law is called premises liability and there some extreme cases on the books where tenants have been raped and killed because of the landlord’s refusal to take reasonable safety precautions.

5. Do You Even Know Who Your Landlord Is?

   Most states require a landlord to disclose the name of the owner and management company of an apartment complex.  A lot of small complexes and individually owned units attempt to hide the ownership and management company of the property to avoid dealing with maintenance requests, bill collectors, and to make it hard to sue them.  If you demand notice in writing of ownership and management and you don’t get the information within some time period, there may be stiff penalties against the owner.  One of the penalties probably includes allowing the tenant to terminate the lease.

Some notes about the above information:  The above does not constitute legal advice and we strongly recommend that you seek legal counsel before exploring any of the above methods yourself.  Landlord tenant law is specific to the state in which you live.  Use an attorney familiar with the landlord tenant law in that state.

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