I had a minor situation happen this week that could easily have been avoided. I have several units that attract college students. This results in having many lease ending dates of May 25 (with college students I cut their year long leases 5 days short - more on that another day).

My property manager is feverishly and proactively getting these units filled before they become vacancies. We have a procedure to inquire with existing tenants 90 days before the end of their lease to see if they plan to stay or move out. He’s been inquiring, and some tenants are planning to stay another year. For these, we sign a new year lease immediately and get it out of the way.

Some of the tenants don’t know if they are staying another year or not. For these, he keeps inquiring every two weeks until they know what their plans are.

Some of the tenants know already that they will be moving out. What should happen with these is the property manager should get a letter in writing that says they will be moving out and on what date. This is a conclusive declaration that they are moving and gives us full license to re-rent their apartment.

In one unit, we had the tenant say she is moving out but my manager did not get a letter from her indicating such. He proceeded to advertise, show, and ultimately rent her apartment to someone else for a June 1 lease starting date. Just after lease signing, the existing tenant called him to say that she wouldn’t be moving out after all. She’d like to stay another year. UGH!

My manager had to tell her that her place has already been rented and that she would indeed need to move out. Lost opportunity! He could have rented another one of our units to the new tenant and had the existing tenant stay. This would eliminate the potential of one more vacancy. Now he has two options: either try to get the existing tenant to move to one of our other units, or try to get the new tenant who already signed the lease to agree to move into a different unit than he wanted.

Either way the hassle factor is way up as is the risk. It could have been avoided by getting the move out in writing. If you don’t have something in writing, don’t expect it to stick.