Tenant wants to break lease - what would you do?
I’ve run into a situation with a tenant that wants to break the lease, wanted to throw it out there to see what other folks would do in this situation.
Tenant signed a lease active from 9/1/2019 - 9/1/2020. The wife filled out the application and was approved on her own and is the only one on the lease paperwork. It quickly became apparent that her husband was the point of contact, which is no problem. He’s the one who calls/texts me for any reason, including asking to delay the rent due date a couple times earlier this year. Come August 1st (6 weeks ago), he texts me saying they want to renew the lease for another 12 months (through 9/1/2021), which sounds good to me. I tell him that I will extent the lease on Cozy (my mgmt. site), and that it will send her an email (since her email is the one used for the lease), and that she’ll need to get log in and confirm the changes, which she does.
Then I get an email over the weekend from the wife: Her husband has been living back in their home state for at least 6 months, and everything we have discussed has been forwarded to her via phone screenshots. She claims that she didn’t know he had renewed the lease for another year (even though she had to open the email she was sent from Cozy and approve the change) and was planning to ask me to go month to month, even though that communication should have been made on August 1st (30-days’ notice prior to the end of the existing lease). She says she took a position on the east coast (we’re in Colorado) and would like to vacate the house on 10/31, and asks “what would you need from my company to break the lease”.
So that’s what I want to throw out there – what would you ask/require in this situation? Even though the husband is the one who texted me asking to extend the lease, she approved the extension so I feel it's binding at that point. Assuming that is the case, I'm not going to force them to pay the full remainder of the lease, but I want to find a middle-ground. I know that finding another tenant in Nov/Dec is going to be significantly harder than finding one in August or September which is what I was originally looking at. Add that to the fact that she asked what I need “from her company” to break it. Thoughts?