the owner or an immediate family member wants to move in
Abso-fucking-lutely not. A lease is a contract. You don’t get to shove someone out into being homeless because Cousin Lou needs a place to stay. Either rent/sell the property, or keep it for personal use. Not both.
Where i live if the owner needs the space for immediate family use, they must give three months written notice to the tenant.
Additionally the property cannot be legally rented again for three months after the tenant has moved out.
Oh, and the tenant doesn’t have to pay rent for the last of those three months. And if they move out before the end of the three months, the landlord must pay the tenant an amount equalling the rent. So if you move out after 1.5months from the notice, the landlord must pay you 1.5 months rent.
And our tenancy board, usually finds in favor of the tenants in disputes.
Where I live, there are two types of leases. Periodic and fixed-term. Fixed-term is where you sign a lease saying you can stay for 6 months or 12 months. Theoretically longer, but those are the normal lengths. Periodic leases are indefinite, but can be broken with some notice.
That term would not be available in the middle of fixed-term leases, only on periodic. Where I live, our state government passed laws preventing “no grounds evictions”, but they allowed a number of exceptions for what counts as “grounds”, and one of those causes is “end of fixed-term lease”. The main difference between my current state laws and the proposal above is to specifically outlaw that grounds. In fact, what’s commonplace right now where I live is that you get your 6 month lease, and at the same time you get a “notice to vacate” (an eviction notice, effectively) dated 6 months from now. And if, after 4-ish months, both you and the landlord want you to stay, they cancel the notice to vacate and get you a new lease to sign. My main intent here is to outlaw this practice.
I think allowing this use in some form is important because I’ve seen cases where it comes up. People move elsewhere for a period of time that’s long enough that it would be a bad idea (both for their personal finances and for supply of housing) to leave it empty, but not long enough that they want to sell. Think 2–5 years or so. I want to make sure that these people are as strongly incentivised to rent out their place as possible, which means removing obstacles such as “you might not be able to move back in once you return if you do rent it”.
(Also, cousins are not immediate family members.)
Ok, that makes more sense. Periodic I think would be the same as what I’ve heard called “month-to-month,” which does make sense to be a more tentative arrangement. I gotcha now.
Yeah month-to-month is another name for the same thing. Generally, you fall back onto a periodic lease if your fixed-term lease expires and you aren’t given another fixed-term lease to sign. With our current laws where I am, a period lease is actually incredibly secure, thanks to the relatively recent “no grounds evictions” ban. The two types of leases have the same “grounds” apply to each, except that “end of fixed-term lease” is one which obviously doesn’t apply to a periodic lease. So the current situation is that you get that immediate day-one “notice to vacate” because landlords desperately want to avoid you ending up on a periodic lease where you’re better protected.
My changes were basically “hey, fixed-term leases shouldn’t be less secure than periodic leases are”.
