About a month ago, two friends and I were looking to move into a house together. We didn't have enough money to pay a down payment so we decided to rent instead. We are all younger (18-19) and this is the first time any of us have rented a place. We were looking around and found a good deal on a nice house. The owner is a parole officer so we figured that would be a fairly safe person to do business with. When we looked at the house, we noticed that it was also for sale and asked the owner about that. He said he was just waiting for his contract with the realtor to expire and then the house was off the market and it wa sall ours to rent. He wanted someone to move in ASAP and told us that if we did move in, we would have to deal with realtors coming and showing the house for about a month. We all agreed that this wouldn't be a problem as long as his realtor would give us a call ahead of time so we knew someone was coming by. We upheld our end of the bargain and were extremely polite to everyone coming through as if it was our own house we were trying to sell. After three or four weeks the realtor stopped calling to let us know people were coming by and we started to get frustrated. They would come through at seven or eight in the morning and expect to see every room in the house, regardless of the fact that people were still sleeping. We finally started telling the realtors that they could show the house, but they weren't allowed to go upstairs because people were sleeping and they had never given us any notice or anything. Well today we finally call the landlord up to ask when his contract with the realtor is up since it's been about a month and a half and people are still coming through the house regularly. Now the landlord tells us that he intends to keep showing the house and we were like "huh...? you said you weren't planning on selling the place and we just had to put up with people coming through for a month". He tells us that now he does intend to sell the house for "the right price" and that people will continue to keep coming through the house. He also revealed that the realtor is a personal buddy of his and he doesn't want to tell his buddy that he decided to change his mind and not sell the house. Basically, he completely changed around what he said to us and now it sounds like we're going to be evicted when someone comes along and wants to buy the house for a good amount of money. We're really in a bind now because we used a lot of our savings to get into this place. When we moved in he asked us to change all of the utilities (except water) over to our name which we did and we paid all of the activation fees and everything associated with that. We went through and cleaned all the carpets ourself since there were a lot of stains. We also did a bunch of other things around the place just to make it a better place for us to live in. We had to pay to rent equipment for moving into this place and all of that. Basically everything typically associated with moving. Now he changed his mind and it looks like we may have to move all over again which would cost a substantial amount of money. Is it even legal for him to do that? We're going to ask him for reimbursement for everything we spent while under the impression the house would be ours for a while. If he denies any compensation, do we have any sort of legal case there? We're not looking to get rent money or utilities or anything like that back since that is rightfully his, but he asked us to switch utilities over to our name and pay activation charges and let us pay moving fees and everything knowing that he was just going to kick us back out in a month or two. We just wan't activation fees and things like that back since it was fairly wrong of him to go make us spend all of the money on that and everything else while knowing he was going to evict us.
Do you have a lease with anything regarding showing house specified in lease? Also have you looked into what laws LA has on the books regarding tenant rights? I woud definately want a copy of the California and LA statutes.
It's a month to month rental contract with a verbal contract that we would be tenants on a long-term basis. As for looking into the LA laws on tenant rights, I have no idea where to find such information.
Especially in CA, I think you will find a lot of consumer support organizations. Rental problems are something they deal with all the time. They will be VERY familiar with all the local rules and regs. If you are connected with a Univ. I would look in the campus newspaper for ads/notices.
CA may be different. Sorry to tell you this , here month to month means that either party can cancel the agreement with 30 days notice to the other party. It sounds like the guy is a louse. Verbal contracts are very hard to enforce. And anything that is written usually cancels all verbal agreements. Best wishes.