Saturday, February 10, 2007

A Difficult Tenant?

For the first time, a potential tenant for one of my residential properties engaged a lawyer to negotiate the lease for them. It has been over a decade since I purchased my first residential property and this is the first time this has happened. Some of the changes they demanded were ludicrous and I came very close to telling them to get proper legal advice. Among the requested changes:

1. that the Tenant would not be responsible for damage caused by their guests;

2. to delete the provision making the lease conditional on the approval of the mortgagor (this is a standard condition of all mortgages in Hong Kong);

3. to state that the mortgage is subject to the lease (no bank will agree to this as it impedes their ability to conduct a mortgagee sale if I default);

4. to replace the gate on the front door because they did not like the design.

Needless to say, I said no to all of these (and a few others). I will be watching this tenant very closely and will issue default notices if they ever fall behind in their rent payments without any discussion.

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