that plan sounds OK until the part where you want to bill the tenant for your own apartment's broken lease fee and your own moving costs. there is no way they are legally liable for those expenses.
The moving costs I agree don't fit into the plan, which is why I decided not to include it in the letter I drafted for my fiance to send to the tenant last night. She hasn't sent it yet, as we're still talking about it (and also taking input from this great community here. Y'all have been a huge help already in this stressful process).
Requesting compensation for the broken lease fee, however, seemed reasonable to me just because of the options available:
option 1) Standard operating procedure: Relist the house & try to rent it out for 4-5 months to new tenants (scenario A). Then, bill previous tenant for lost rent + re-letting fees. However in the event the house isn't successfully rented (scenario B), I'm afraid "lost rent" would equal 4-5months rent... something like $10,500
option 2) Break our apartment lease and occupy the house 30 days later in early November, relieving the tenants of any responsibility to cover lost rent from November on. The cost of our apartment early termination fee would be much less than the cost of 4-5 months "lost rent" from scenario B of option 1.
option 3) Airbnb. Neither of us has done this before, and we have no idea how close to the rental rate we could get through Airbnb. This option seems like the most difficult, and most risky. My fear would be making so little money through Airbnb that we end up having to bill the previous tenants for a ton of lost rent anyway.
Again, am I way off base? I don't "want" to bill the tenant for my own apartment's broken lease fee, as if it's some plan to make a buck. I'm just trying to figure out how to not lose money in this scenario. Only billing for one month's lost rent would leave us over $3,000 in the hole because of that early termination fee. We don't *want* to leave this apartment right now. We wanted to stay until March, but we're willing to do the move to keep it simple and get the house occupied to avoid the possibility of Option 1 Scenario B
In googling your laws, what did you find you *can* hold the tenant liable for?
You can charge for those, which may come to less, same, or more as the costs you pay to break yours. i.e., You don't need to be able to charge your tenant directly for your costs; you can bill for what you're allowed to and that will happen to cover some of your own.
This noted, I didn't charge for breaks in leases. I think people need to be able to move on when their circumstances change. I think leases are great for showing intent, for encouraging thinking about one's commitments, as a back-up for both parties...but I wouldn't charge for a break when someone is only breaking it due to relocation or severe medical circumstances, etc.
I agree. And I'm not looking to "punish" this tenant for moving on. It's a job change which couldn't be helped, and we totally understand that. However, I also don't see why my fiance should eat the cost of that move, when there was a clear lease agreement. If we were not planning on moving back into the house in March, we would do as you've done & simply find another tenant to rent the place out for 12 months. But as it stands, we have to find a renter for only 4-5 months.
In this case, I might be inclined to charge legally-permitted fees equivalent to the cost to you for your early move. That seems win-win.
I think your plan -once the details align with law- is great!
From what I read, legally-permitted fees are:
- costs of re-letting
- other misc. expenses such as re-keying the doors
- lost rent. As a poster mentioned above, in TX the landlord does indeed have a duty to make a reasonable effort to re-let the property: "Sec. 91.006. LANDLORD'S DUTY TO MITIGATE DAMAGES. (a) A landlord has a duty to mitigate damages if a tenant abandons the leased premises in violation of the lease."
The property code doesn't mention early termination fee (of course not, why would it). But I mention the alternatives above: 1) Try to re-let the house (possibly unsuccessfully) and use the law to seek compensation for lost rent (possibly 4-5months if house is not rented), or 2) Try to make it easy/simple and request a statement in writing that they'll pay our termination fee + lost rent, shake hands, and move on right away.
Again, thank you everyone for your insight and advice. We're trying to have this decision made within a week, and this thread is helping a lot.