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From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: Landlord collects thousands in fees from tenant's estate
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2025 20:30:54 -0000 (UTC)
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BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:
>Mar 6, 2025 at 11:26:16 AM PST, Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

>>Legislation was introduced in Colorado that's passed one House to end a
>>practice of a landlord collecting early termination fees following the
>>death of a tenant.

>>A man's mother, who had dementia, lived in a senior complex. He couldn't
>>reach her by telephone and went over to the apartment to find that she
>>had died peacefully in her sleep the night before, January 5, 2024.

>>He received a call from the landlord. It was not a condolense call. The
>>landlord was calling to inform the son that he was enforcing his rights
>>to two fees for liquidated damages. $3,200 in early termination fees,
>>and a $2,000 rent concession fee.

>>The mother, you see, was in breech of contract.

>>Sure enough, there was a clause in the contract that the lease could not
>>be annulled for any reason. Death was specifically mentioned.

>If the guy was going to have to pay the rent anyway, he should have just kept
>the apartment empty, to at least make sure the landlord couldn't double-dip
>and take rent from him *and* a new tenant at the same time.

Was he allowed to take over the lease from his mother without the
landlord's permission? I'll bet the contract didn't allow it either.

No, what he should have done was left his mother's body in the apartment
so that she was NOT in breach of contract. The landlord might have very
quickly turned reasonable.

I assume if the son had taken the landlord to court, the judge would
have abbrogated the contract as it's unreasonable to expect a dead
person to perform a contract.

>>Normally, in a landlord-tenant contract, if the tenant leaves, the
>>landlord is obligated to mitigate damages. He's supposed to show the
>>apartment, offering it for lease. Now, he may have expenses to charge
>>the departing tenant but if there's, say, nine months left on the lease,
>>he's not allowed to attempt to collect that much unpaid rent from the
>>tenant if he's taken no steps at all to find a replacement tenant.

>>There are certainly debts to collect against an estate as death doesn't
>>make a debt go away. But an obligation to perform a contract after death
>>is a new one on me.

>>In this case, I don't see how the rent concession fee is fair because
>>the landlord is still obligated to seek a new tenant. I can see that a
>>certain amount of time on the lease would be owed but anything
>>significantly longer than a month after death would be unreasonable.