Carport Damage..Who’s Responsible?
We provide here a few questions that have been posted in the Community Forums and our answers to them.
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Q1
The carport of my rental house collapsed during a big wind storm and the tenant expects me to pay for repair of his two cars which were damaged. What are my responsibilities?
A1
There are several separate issues that I will discuss briefly.
In most states the landlord is responsible for repairing damages to the leased premises of the building which result from an act of God. If the premises are uninhabitable, the tenant has the right to immediately terminate his lease and find other housing. The landlord and tenant have the right to agree to a mutually agreeable plan to avoid termination. For example, the landlord might pay for hotel/motel accommodations if the repair is expected to occur within a short time because the cost for a week at a motel would be significantly less than a vacancy that might take one or more months to fill following completion of repairs.
If only part of the premises is unusable but the overall premises are still habitable, the landlord might have to reduce rent for the part that remains usable. For example, if a one bedroom of a 6-room house were unusable, the rent might be reduced by 10 or 15 percent. This would not usually be acceptable if the unusable room were the only bathroom or the kitchen. A judge would usually award a tenant a reduction if the matter went to court.
The discussion of the previous paragraph is probably relevant to your situation. The rent charged was almost certainly based partly on the availability of the carport. Accordingly, some reduction in rent should be made. The amount of reduction would depend on a variety of factors including the size of the living space and availability of on-site parking in spite of the damaged carport.
Regarding the damaged cars of the tenant, the landlord is generally not responsible for damage to property of a tenant that results from acts of God unless the tenant can show that the landlord’s negligence was somehow specifically responsible for the damage. For example, the carport did not survive a “not-unusual” storm because the landlord had built the structure himself and had not followed building codes. Tenants are responsible for providing their own insurance coverages for their own property. For your case, damages to the tenant’s cars should have been covered by the tenant’s auto policy and/or by a separate tenant insurance policy.
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Q2
I have a tenant who claims that 3 out of 4 jacks in the rental house don’t work. Is it my responsibility as the landlord to ensure they all work or does my responsibility end with ensuring jacks are in place in the house or the fact that at least one works? I actually don’t know if they’ve ever worked since he moved in.
A2
It may depend on clauses in the lease agreement and/or the adequacy of your move-in checklist. In general, problems regarding things that are not a habitability issue can be avoided by disclosing the problem with the selected applicant up front, listing the problem in the checklist, having a statement in the checklist that such discrepancies are accepted “as is,” and requiring that the tenant sign the checklist.
For problems unknown to the landlord and unacceptable to a tenant after discovery, it will depend on the nature of the problem. It may depend on either building codes in effect at the time the property was built and/or on what is usually expected by today’s standards. For example, building codes specify that there be a certain number of electrical outlets along each wall or outlets a certain distance apart along walls. Accordingly, all outlets should probably be operative. Landlords should consider that it is of benefit to them that all outlets work in order to reduce the use of extension cords which can create a potential fire danger. However, for a property built under an earlier less restrictive code or no code at all fewer outlets would have been required, fewer outlets would have likely be “grandfathered” and a landlord would not usually be expected to install additional ones.
Phone jacks are in a somewhat different category. Building codes do not require that there be very many jacks (perhaps only one) for even new construction and phone line extension cords do not normally create a fire hazard. There is no way to know whether a judge would require repair of one or more of the non-operational jacks or not unless you end up in court. A judge may take the position that a tenant is correct to assume that all installed jacks are operative, that modern living requires two or three jacks, or that one operating phone jack in a house is adequate.
The inoperative phone jack is a latent defect that the tenant had no practical way of knowing prior to having phone service turned on. Because of this fact, it may depend significantly on whether he reported the problem soon after moving in or not until months later. You would more likely be responsible for fixing it if the former than if the latter.
The cost of repairing an inoperative phone jack should be fairly minimal. The price will likely be much lower from an independent phone installer than from the phone company. I haven’t priced such a thing is some years now, but it would have cost $25-40 during the a decade ago using an independent. It would likely cost very little more to repair all three inoperative jacks than to repair only one. This is something that many nominally-priced handymen could handle and even many landlords would be capable of doing the repairs themselves.
Even if not legally required, one should consider the value of good landlord-tenant relations, i.e., keeping good tenants happy. If the tenant is month-to-month and you don’t care if the tenant stays, you could tell him/her that you will not repair it and that he/she is free to move in 30 days. You can then disclose the inoperative jack to future applicants who can decide not to rent the property if it matters to them. In this case you would be safer to replace cover plates of inoperative jacks with blank plates if the type. However, I would expect the cost of vacancy, including preparation, advertising, and downtime for rents would be much more costly than fixing all the jacks.
There are various other issues that could be considered, but those mentioned above must suffice. In deciding whether or not to repair the jack at your expense, you need to consider the nominal cost of repair compared to (1) the cost of going to court, (2) the very substantial cost of having a vacancy, and (3) at least the more likely cost of having an unhappy tenant.
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Q3
I want to put my Florida home up for sale. The home is occupied now by 4 tenants with a lease ending in 6 months.
What are the steps in notifying the tenants about the sale and showing of the home while occupied?
A3
First, the existing lease agreement is valid and enforceable until its expiration date.
Second, most lease agreements and the laws of most states require tenants to cooperate with any agents of the owner including real estate agents, appraisers, contractors, etc. If your lease does not contain such a clause, you need to check your state’s statutes. However, entry to the property must be preceded by a notice period as required in the lease agreement or by state law whichever is greater unless state law allows for a lesser time being specified in the lease. Although the period is 24 to 48 hours in most states, my reference says that Florida’s is only 12 hours. This would, however, be overridden by any longer period specified in the lease. However, the entry time must be at reasonable hours unless for an emergency. That is, they cannot require entry at lunchtime or midnight if not convenient for the tenants. As long as proper notice is provided by the landlord, the tenant cannot usually require that entry be made only when the tenant is present.
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Additional Information
Most of the issues discussed in these Q&A’s are covered in considerably more detail in our eCourses and/or in our Mini Training Guides.