Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California
Tenants rights in terms of a lease
The house my husband and I recently moved into is trashed! We were shown the house while the owners still live here and were verbally told that the carpet would be replaced and the walls would be painted and the house would be clean. We had to move into an unpainted, unclean house with smelly carpets. The landlords show up un announced all of the time, and I can never get ahold of my real estate lady. We wouldn't have moved in here, but our old apartment had already been re-rented and we were homeless. We did not see the house all dirty until the day we got our key to move in. I never signed the paper stating that the house is clean, can we terminate our lease?
1 Answer from Attorneys
Re: Tenants rights in terms of a lease
Maybe. However, you can expect a real struggle to enforce your rights or escape a small-claims suit with your credit intact.
Oral modifications to a written lease, such as promises to repaint, etc. are difficult to prove and have accepted by judges, especially if the written lease has an 'integration clause' stating that the writing is the whole deal and there are no other terms or agreements outside the four corners of the paper.
There is in every residential lease an implied warranty of tenantability, but this property, however messy, seems to meet the minimum standards. You also have rights of privacy that severely restrict a landlord's drop-in rights, but you don't give enough information to show that this is a ground to rescind the lease.
My recommendation is to negotiate with the landlord and/or your leasing agent and see if you can get the problems handled. Only if this fails consider any legal action, and that looks like an uphill struggle. The moral of the story is get it in writing.
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