Q. I am five months into a one-year lease, and I need to break my lease quickly to relocate to California, where I have been hired for a new job. I read on a Web site about an organization that for a fee will help be break the lease. Is that possible, or is there something else I can do?
A. Whether you can extricate yourself from the obligations of a lease depends upon the location of your apartment and whether there has been compliance with statutes and ordinances by your landlord.
If the landlord has failed to meet his or her obligations, or has failed to follow applicable law, you might be able to assert certain claims that either extricate you from your obligations under the lease, or allow you to assert claims that would deter the landlord from pursuing an action against you.
If your apartment is located in the City of Chicago, or in some municipality that has a landlord-tenant ordinance, there are increased obligations on the part of the landlord. If the landlord fails to meet his or her responsibilities under the ordinance, you may have the right to terminate your lease in some situations if the remedy is provided in the ordinance. In some situations, you may not have the right to terminate your lease, but you have the right to assert claims against the landlord that would offset, either in whole or in part, your financial obligations under the lease. In those situations, the cost of proceeding against you, coupled with the cost of defending counterclaims and the possible exposure to the landlord if you prevail will deter the landlord from acting against you.
Under the law, you can assert your rights under a statute or ordinance even if your ulterior motive is to extricate yourself from your obligations under the lease due to relocation.
However, you should note that if the landlord has complied with his or her obligations under the applicable laws, and if the landlord is intent on pursuing you for your obligations under the lease, you might face a significant exposure for the rent for the balance of your lease term.
Obviously, whatever service you’ve located cannot offer you a guaranty against liability. Further, you have to hope that the service is right in its appraisal of the situation, because if it is wrong, you may become involved in a lawsuit you cannot win. In addition, you have alienated the landlord, who now has no incentive to work with you to help alleviate your situation. For example, a lease buyout that might normally be made available to you might not be available if you have created a confrontational situation and your case is now going badly.
Before creating a confrontation with your landlord, it might make sense to talk to the landlord about subleasing your apartment, or about negotiating a buyout of the balance of the lease term for a portion of the rent. If your apartment is in demand, the landlord might be willing to negotiate a termination, because he or she then has the ability to re-rent your apartment for another year, possibly at a higher rent. The determining factor will be the amount of time the landlord estimates it would take to re-rent your apartment.
The fact is that if there was an action to be brought against you, it would be brought locally, which means that at some time you would have to come back to Illinois to defend the action. When you add up the costs and exposures you could face, you are better served to negotiate an amicable resolution with your landlord, rather than putting yourself in an offensive position, which might or might not accomplish your goals.
Q. The furnace in our apartment is functioning fine, however, our gas bills are high because the furnace is working all of the time, and it remains chilly in the apartment. Apparently, there is a lot of leakage of cold air into our apartment through windows and doors.
What responsibility does our landlord have to keep our apartment at a comfortable temperature, and does the landlord have to fix the leaks of cold air into the apartment?
A. The landlord’s obligation is to provide you with heating facilities that will allow you to maintain minimum temperatures in the apartment at all times. Each municipality has minimum heating standards, which sometimes vary based on the time of day. For example, many ordinances will allow a lower temperature at night than during the day.
So long as those minimum temperatures are maintained, the landlord has little obligation to make the apartment more energy efficient. This is especially true if you, rather that the landlord, are responsible for the heating costs.
The problem will be created for the landlord when he or she has to re-rent the apartment and provide the costs of heating to the new prospective tenant. When the tenant sees how high the heating bills are, the tenant may decide to move elsewhere. For that reason, it is probably to the landlord’s advantage to make the apartment more energy efficient, and marketable in the future.
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Robert A. Boron, a Chicago attorney who specializes in leasing matters, writes about landlord and tenant issues for the Tribune. Questions to him can be addressed to Rental Q&A, Real Estate section, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., 4th floor, Chicago, IL 60611. He also can be reached by e-mail at realestate@tribune.com. Sorry, but he cannot make personal replies.
