Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

You really created a mess for yourself by signing another lease without getting advice first. Your current landlord is basically correct. You have no right to walk away from a lease due to a pending or even completed foreclosure. Your mistake is that you are not at risk of getting kicked out any day. A foreclosure affects you no differently than if landlord just sold the property to a new landlord. The new owner just takes over the lease. In fact, if your lease is up less than 90 days after a foreclosure, you still have a minimum 90 days to move, whereas if the property was sold, you would only have to the normal end of your lease to negotiate a new lease with the new landlord or be forced to move. So you are now in breach of your lease with no just cause. The only thing wrong with what your current landlord says is that she doesn't get to just sit back and collect on the rest of the lease. She must take all commercially reasonable steps to find a new tenant, and can only charge you rent until she finds a new tenant or could have if she had done what she should have done to re-rent it. The problem for you is that in this situation she can probably take all commercially reasonable steps and won't find a tenant to take a property in foreclosure. So you have really screwed yourself. Your best bet is to see what it will take to get out of the new lease.