How To Break An Apartment Lease

Hopefully, the apartment you choose is what you hope it will be and you and your landlord are both happy with the arrangement until it is time to move on to something else. This is a lovely scenario, but it is not always how things work out. Depending on what is going on, it may be necessary to break an apartment lease. It can be easy if you and your landlord are both in agreement. This is not always how it happens. There are right ways and and bad ways to go about doing this, so make sure you know what you are doing if you find you must get out of a lease early.

Never withhold rent if you are angry about things going on in your home or apartment, even if you plan to break an apartment lease. If you do not want to pay your rent because of something your landlord has done or neglected to do, you should put the rent into an escrow account that you can set up with your bank. That is the legal way to withhold as long as you have a valid complaint. If your landlord takes you to court, you can show that you have paid the rent but have withheld pending a legal outcome to your problem. The judge can then tell you what you must do to get out of your lease and what you must do with the money.

There are very legitimate reasons to break an apartment lease that you can use if you are sued in court. If your landlord has failed to live up to the lease and repeated requests for help are ignored, you can usually get out of your lease easily. If this is a safety issue and you had to move out quickly, make sure you keep records and take a lot of pictures. You must be provided with a safe environment in any rental no matter what tricky wording may have been slipped into your lease. If you have no heat in the winter and your landlord does not help, you have valid grounds to break your agreement.

What you may not know when you want to break an apartment lease is that not all of the things that landlords put in leases are legal in your state. If you find something that you feel is not right, you can find a lawyer to look over your lease for you. You'll have to pay the lawyer, but they may find something in there that allows you to break your lease without penalty. A lease cannot, for example, tell you that you have no right to defend yourself in court if there is a problem. Believe it or not, unscrupulous landlords have clauses as bad or even worse than than in leases.

You may want to break an apartment lease for practical reasons. Perhaps you have to move for a job or your family is getting bigger and you have to find something else. In some cases, landlords will allow you to move out early with no penalty, or you may have to pay until they can rent the apartment again. Be honest and talk to them about what is going on. You can even offer to help show the apartment to help them get new tenants in when you have to go. Not all landlords are unreasonable and as long as you work with them, you can get what you need as long as you help them get what they need.