30 day written notice

17 years ago

Hi everyone, I'm new here and have a question. I've had it with my upstairs neighbors who pretend they don't know they are loud. I've written letters to them, called the police, called the apartment manager, banged on the ceiling and called the security company. There seems to be nothing we can do to stop the constant thumping coming from our ceiling. I have three fans going I cover my head and I can still hear them from above. What makes matters worse is that the sound seems to have gotten louder and my husband says he thinks they are now doing it on purpose because we complained. Well our lease is not up until the end of August but we don't want to live like this any longer. It's affecting our sleep and our health. We have an appointment to look at an apartment this week and if everything goes well we will be moving. In the meantime I want to give the management company a 30 day written notice this week. I want to tell them that since they cannot do anything about the noise that we will bite the bullet and break the lease. As much as I want to be nasty in my notice I decided it's not proper to do so. I just want this whole nightmare to end. What should I put in my notice? I've kept detailed notes of the noise and the time I've heard the noise. Do you think it's proper to put a copy of these notes in the notice? The management company moved us to this apartment because the last apartment was just as noisy. In their defense the people in that apartment lived on the top floor so I don't think they understood just how loud they were. They did tend to have loud parties which is the main reason we moved. All of this really is our fault because we found this apartment on-line and went off the reviews of some of our friends. My husband is in the military and got orders to move to Washington. The original complex we were to move into didn't work out because they "accidently" gave our apartment away. We had to find something quick and that is how we ended up in this dreaded place. We didn't hear anything bad so we gave it a try, big mistake.

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moonshadow
17 years ago
First of all, sorry for you uncomfortable living arrangements. From a technical perspective, if your lease is not up until August, you are legally liable for rents till then, unless the apartment is subsequently re-rented. (Say it gets rented in July. Landlord can't collect 'double' rent, so your obligation would stop when a new tenant begins paying rent, if it's before your August renewal date.) You can anticipate losing your deposit is a certainty.

Your instinct to not get nasty is a good one, nastiness will be counterproductive. Just keep it to the facts and leave emotions out of it. Yes, include copies of your notes as substantiation for leaving early. Also, by giving 30 days written notice, maybe luck will be on your side and your vacancy can be rapidly filled. Even if there is no time when the unit is empty, you will likely still lose your deposit.

IF you opt not to pay additional rents due till the unit is re-rented, and IF they send you to collections for rents owed, that will show on your credit report. That is a scenario that makes it much more difficult to secure a future rental. The worst scenario of all is leaving the property and it lands it court and a judgment is secured against you (in addition to loss of rents, they shell out $$ for repairs or there is damage to the unit.) Property judgments are a landlord's biggest red flag: I've only encountered two but they were rejected right off the bat. Their side of the story had no impact. If a court issued a property related judgment, that applicant is just too risky to take on as a tenant. Those are usually more extreme cases, the one I had was where the applicant abandoned the property in mid-winter while landlord was out of town, pipes in basement froze and burst, landlord came back to an empty- and very dirty-house with a flooded basement.)

I know this stinks, but only you know what type of people management are. Rather than bail out altogether, for your own future record, can you sit down with management and request a move to a different unit that would be more tolerable until your lease is up? You're only looking at another 4 months. Although you sound very unhappy and 4 months could be an eternity, it would be a shame to jeopardize future years of renting if you could somehow find a way to hold out till your lease is up.
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