Apartment Lease Agreement

By ljade24

Here’s the story, we have lived at this apartment for 4 years and it is a 1bd/1bath place basically big enough for a couple.  Our apartment lease agreement is a fixed lease agreement and we chose to end it early basically by communicating with our landlord verbally.  There was only a verbal agreement between us and her stating February as our move-out date and us communicating with her several times during the month of February.  We then did our walkthrough of the house with her and she said that she would give us back our security deposit.

She sent us a letter a week later along with a list of deductions that included faded paint and items that were missing from the apartment, such as lightbulbs and drip pans and half of our security deposit.  She did not include any receipts.  We were reasonable and gave her the benefit of the doubt to mail us/e-mail receipts explaining the deduction.  The receipts were unreasonable and far more than any professional cleaning service would charge.  We then debated what she should owe us minus quotes we received from professional cleaning services.  She opted not to return our deposit and we went ahead and filed a claim in small claims court for the security deposit.  The landlord counterfiled us for the same claim but stated that we broke the fixed lease agreement.  Now to me, it doesn’t seem logical for her to counterfile for breaking the agreement if she verbally agreed to let us go, do a walk-through of the apartment on our move-out date and return half the security deposit.  We’d appreciate any advice/opinions/comments of anyone who is or went through a similar situation.

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