On May 9, 7:49 am, esro...@msn.com wrote:
> I have a ski rental at Squaw Valley which is leased to skiers each
> year for 4 or 5 months in the winter, fully furnished.
You mean a single tenant has a lease for the whole season, or is this more like a motel where guests stay just a few days and then a new batch moves in?
Probably the former, since if it were the latter, you would have to have your own maid service to change the linens between tenants, and the vacating tenant would know that he had no obligation to clean the sheets for you, just like in a hotel.
> This year my
> tenant moved out, when lease was over, with 8 sets of bedding which is
> for the four beds. The bedding was returned 10 days later to my home
> in the Bay Area after it was cleaned.
Sounds like they were trying to do the nice thing, cleaning the linens after living on them for 5 months, instead of leaving you with the dirty mess.
> My question is: as the rental
> was not rentable for those 10 days plus my time to return the bedding
> to the rental, does the tenant owe rent for those days?
Well, was this a 5-month-at-a-time, once-per-season rental, or a "hot bed" inn? Makes a difference. If you weren't going to be able to rent it anyway at the end of the season, and especially if you had no one waiting outside the door to be provided with a furnished place to rent, I don't think you have much of a case. In any event, you would have an obligation to "mitigate damages", which means, if you stand to lose (say) a thousand bucks a week in rent for this place, you can't just claim that as your loss, but you have to go out and purchase replacement linens for maybe a hundred bucks so that the new tenant can move in. The lower figure, not the higher, is your measure of damages, if that.
> The lease says
> that tenant must return the rental ready to rent in same condition
> that it was in when lease commensed.
Sounds like that's what this tenant was trying in good faith to do.
If you had not informed the vacating tenant that he needed to leave all the contents in place because you had a new tenant coming in right after him, I don't see that you have much of a chance of winning such a case.
--
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Mike Jacobs
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