Greetings, all -
I have owned my home for a little over a year, and I took on a roommate/tenant in one of the bedrooms in February. Upon move-in, he signed a 12-month lease agreement. Unfortunately, I was just ordered to move out of town for work at the end of the year, and so I'll need to rent out the house in its entirety. The way I see it, my options are as follows:
1) help my roommate find another tenant to take my room, then allow them both to stay on one lease. The benefits of this are that I'm renting to someone I know (current roommate), and I'm honoring the 12 month lease agreement we both signed when he moved in. On the negative end, his dog has occasional accidents in the house, and he's a professional brass musician who practices quite a bit. I could see either/both creating issues with a new roommate/tenant, and I run the risk of that person not being down with accomodating those issues, moving out, leaving him high and dry, etc...
2) tell him that I'm sorry, but that I need to end the lease. He has 90 days to find a new place to live. the negative here is obviously that I'm forcing him to move a second time in less than a year, after telling him I expected to be in the area at least through the spring (which was true when I told him..)
3) allow him to live out the 12 months, and put my own bedroom up on airbnb until we hit the 12-month mark.
Does anyone have any thoughts? Of note, both he and I are in the military, and are thus afforded some protections under the SCRA. I haven't seen anything in the SCRA which protects military personnel as landlords, only as tenants.
Given the concerns mentioned in option 1, I think the cleanest arrangement would be to get an entirely new renter who would take on the whole house. He definitely can't afford to rent the whole house himself, and I'm worried that if I let him stay, I'll get in a messy situation.
I am not certain as to the legality of ending the lease agreement inside 12 months, though. Are my military orders sufficient justification to tell him, "sorry, but we're both moving out" even if he would prefer to stay?
-PTS