Breaking a joint lease agreement

A joint lease is a rental agreement which has two or more tenants. It can be tricky to get your name removed from a joint lease. A periodic tenancy is ended differently to a fixed term tenancy. However, if one of you ends the tenancy it means that the other joint tenant no longer has the right to live there.

You can only end your fixed term tenancy early if your agreement says you can or by getting your landlord to agree to end your tenancy. If your agreement says you can end your fixed term tenancy early, this means you have a ‘break clause’. Your tenancy agreement will tell you when the break clause can apply. Joint and several liability, a legal term meaning that one tenant can be held liable for the entire agreement , in any rule violation or breakage of the lease being imputed to all remaining tenants.

A tenant can then attempt to collect the amount owed by the tenant who leaves in small claims court or by hiring an attorney to file a lawsuit. What are the consequences for breaking a lease? What is a breach of lease agreement?

How to legally break your lease? Can I be sued for breaking a lease? If your joint tenancy is for a fixed term (for example, months), you must normally get the agreement of your landlord and the other tenants to give notice to end the tenancy. You can end a fixed term tenancy early if you either: use a break clause in your contract negotiate a surrender with your landlord You remain liable for rentif you don't end the tenancy in one of these ways. This is an official date in the lease , agreed by the landlord and tenant, where the lease can be ‘broken’ without anyone facing a penalty.

If you end your tenancy it ends for everyone. As a tenant, you need to give your landlord months. An agreement which suggests that you or your landlord have less rights than those given by common law or statute is a sham tenancy agreement. What an agreement states and what the tenancy actually is may be different.

For example, your landlord may claim that the agreement is not a tenancy agreement but a ‘licence to occupy’. Breaking a lease can have significant legal repercussions, as a lease agreement is a binding contract. Yet sometimes it’s just not feasible to stay in your apartment or house any longer. Most people who are looking into breaking their lease agreement are usually caught in a bind. A break clause is a section of your tenancy agreement which details how you or the landlord can implement the early termination of a lease.

Break clauses can be landlord only or tenant only – meaning only the named party is entitled to exercise the break clause. Evicting one tenant will not affect the tenancies of the remaining joint tenants. In general, any time the language in a lease agreement is confusing or ambigious, unintended consequences can follow. A lease agreement that is signed by only one tenant, or does not identify the names of each tenant in the lease (e.g. “John Doe, et.al”) in the are examples of potentially fatal flaws in a rental lease.

Depending on state law, the tenant would have to wait a certain number of days after giving this notice before he or she could move out, unless the health or safety violation was so severe that it required the tenant to move out immediately. Each Tenant (s) is jointly and severally liable for all Lease Agreement obligations. If any Tenant (s), guests, or occupant violates the Lease Agreement, all Tenant (s) are considered to have violated the Lease Agreement. Landlord’s requests and notices to any one Tenant (s) constitute notice to all Tenant (s) and occupants. Moving out without the landlord’s permission is a violation of a lease clause, and one cotenant’s lease-breaking is a transgression for which all tenants are liable.

The legal term for this shared responsibility is “joint and several liability. Notice to terminate a yearly lease with no end date. Any rental agreement for a period longer than a year must be agreed to in writing.

Conditions for Legally Breaking a Lease in South Dakota. There are a handful of scenarios where a tenant can legally break a lease in South Dakota without penalty. We’ll go through each of them.