Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in California

A "lease" is the legal name for the contract in which something is rented out. So you have a lease; the terms of the lease determine the rights and obligations of both sides. Absent wording to the contrary, both sides must give thirty days notice of not renewing or continuing under the lease and the tenant is required to leave the unit clean or the landlord can charge to clean it up. A requirement that the unit be repainted at the tenant's expense would be legal. Why wouild such an agreement not be legal?

If you are under a lease you are liable for rent to the end of the lease or until the landlord finds another tenant, whichever is earlier. So if the lease ends January 31, and you give notice 9/18, you still owe rent until 1/31 unless the landlord can re-rent the place sooner. Of course the landlord must take commercially reasonable steps to re-rent the property as soon as possible.

As for the deposit, without reading the lease, it sounds ike it means that if you stay two years the landlord won't charge for cleaning and painting when you leave. That's kind of nice and very unusual. Under the law it doesn't matter how long you stay, the landlord can deduct for whatever cleaning and painting, and anything else, is needed to put the unit back in the condition it was when you moved in. The landlord has 21 days to provide an itemized list of the things that were done or need to be done with amounts, and refund the rest of the deposit.