Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

As I told you before, if you don't have a valid lease, then you are legally a month-to-month tenant. Period. If you have a lease with a month, day and time it ends, and it was signed a year before that, then that is enough information to know when the lease legally ends. If the lease does not specifically say it is a one year lease at all, only a month and day and time it ends, then it might not be valid, but then, again as I told you, that makes you a month-to-month tenant whether that is what you wanted or not. It is also legal to introduce personal testimony as to what a confusing contract means, rather than have it be invalid. So if you say the lease was for a year, and a year is up at or around the month, day and time in the written lease, then that month, day and time are when the lease ends in the year after the lease was signed.

As for the color of the ink, you are just wrong. The color of the ink has NO legal relevance.

And as I ALSO told you before, an invalid lease does not get you out of paying rent. If you have an agreed monthly rent and you occupy the premises, you must pay that rent or the owner has full legal right to evict you. There is NO legal requirement of a valid lease in order to collect agreed rent from a person occupying your property, and to evict them if they don't pay.

The additional information you provide about repairs indicates that what you are trying to do here is fish around for some hyper-technical excuse not to pay rent in order to force repairs. You need to give up on that. You have to pay your rent unless the needed repairs make the property legally uninhabitable. Otherwise your only option is to sue the landlord for an order that he make the repairs.

You can find information on what makes a property legally uninhabitable (warning: a lot of things one might think should be on the list are not considered "uninhabitable" under the law) here: http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/catenant.pdf

Also, bear in mind that even if the premises ARE legally uninhabitable, you have to get an order from your local code enforcement authority and then have 30 days pass with still no repairs, before you can start withholding rent in most cases.

I agree with Mr. McCormick.

I write separately to point out that a lease is not required to create a tenancy. A tenancy is created when a person occupies property with the consent of the landlord in exchange for rent. A tenancy can be created with a verbal agreement, or even the implied consent of the parties. A lease agreement is not required, but merely helps bind the parties to some sort of agreement.