If my building is in foreclosure, can i break my lease without punishment?

Question:

they never cut the lawn, the railing to the outside steps have fallen off and have not been replaced. the light bulbs in the stairway halls are out and havwe been for quite some time. the hallways are dirty. they told me when i moved in in marchthat i was going to get new window screens and mini blinds which i have not. the carpet has a god awful smell to it and it stained, not from me. the driveway is crumbling. and its in foreclosure! i want to move, but i do not want them to sue me! we pay rent to a law office now, not to the landlord anymore. we all got an eviction notice 2 months ago because we werent told we had to pay rent to someone other than the landlord. it took the landlord 3 months to get me a refridge, when he told me in march id have it that next day. i really want to move. what can i do?

I assume that you have a written contract or lease agreement. You still need to follow it.

If you got an eviction notice, then you aren't really breaking your lease?!

Most of your complaints seem cosmetic in nature, so you don't have much ground for claiming that the house is unlivable. A state of disrepair of the lawn or light bulbs doesn't really affect your rights as a leaseholder -- they just make the property uglier.

But the foreclosure may be another question. You may be able to claim constructive eviction and move out of the property with no regard to keeping the lease. The landlord doesn't have a right to keep your deposit or advance payments if there is a danger of you being evicted by the sheriff due to a foreclosure sale. So you may be free to move if the house is in some state of foreclosure, especially since you will have to move anyway if the house is sold at sheriff sale and someone else buys the property.

However, you can't just stop paying your rent. Your lease is still in force, so if you want to continue to live there, you have to honor the lease. Just because the property is not to your aesthetic taste and because the owner has not paid the mortgage, you can't just live there for free without consequences. The owner's consequence for living there without paying is the foreclosure -- yours would be eviction.

What you should do now is just find a new place to rent and move there as quickly as possible. The situation there seems to be going from bad to worse and the lawyer's office will not take care of the property; they are just dealing with it until someone serious purchases it. They won't do any upkeep or improvements. Get out while you can and find a landlord that takes pride in their building.

Good luck.

ForeclosureFish
http://www.foreclosurefish.com/...

If my building is in foreclosure, can i break my lease without punishment?

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