Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in Illinois

1. Relocation clauses are not typical. Is this part of the form lease or was it inserted at your request? If so, who wrote the language?

2. The point of a relocation clause is to allow a tenant that believes it may move during the term, or is subject to being moved during the term, to terminate the lease. Often tenants who are in the military and live near a base where this is common, will find such clauses in their leases.

3. The point of a relocation clause is that housing needs have changed typically involving a long distance move.

4. You have admitted your local housing needs have not changed in terms of location, and that the reason for your wife's wanting a larger place is apparently solely for her convenience. If instead the reason was that she did not want to live alone due to your relocation for safety reasons, that might be a different story.

5. Without seeing the exact wording of the clause, it is impossible to determine whether it intended this scenario. But even so, the customary meaning of the term relocation is that the TENANTS need to relocate due to one or both being transferred for employment or related purposes, not for convenience or personal reasons.

6. If the clause is clear enough, you may be stuck.

7. If the clause is not clear enough, but it was part of the form lease or inserted by the landlord only, then if there are two valid interpretations (the landlord's and yours) the landlord's interpretation MAY lose out under legal rules of construction ("against the drafter").

8. If the clause is not clear enough and was not part of the form lease but negotiated by landlord and tenant, then the rule is that the intention of the parties at the time the clause was drafted is supposed to control.

9. One argument may be that as a result of 1 tenant being relocated (something within the clause) the other tenant's housing needs also changed. That could be a stretch and without further legal research whether this precise issue has been addressed by the Illinois courts can not be stated.

10. The fact that the landlord accepted your reason for the relocation may have been only a "half-truth", meaning you thought it could apply only to you to validly exercise it and their intent is that the entire household needs to move together. However, assuming your lease imposes joint and several liability on each of you and your wife (and most leases do) you may also be able to argue that the clause should apply when only one of you needs to physically relocate because the impact is that the other of you needs to reassess housing needs as a result.

BOTTOM LINE: Have an attorney review the lease with the relocation clause to see if the lease as a whole provides any guidance as to how it should be interpreted, and/or how it was included in the lease.