QUESTION
Can my landlord hold me to Novembers rent?
Asked on Nov 01st, 2022 on Landlord and Tenant Law - Virginia
More details to this question:
We have well water where we lived and the water took on a nasty tint of orange, sometimes brown in the month of Sept. I contacted her to see about repairs and she told me to give it a week, see if the rainfall would help. It didn’t. It got worse so I sent her a picture of it and she sent a plumber out to put a new filter under the home. The filter took care of the cloudiness, but the color was the same. I notified her of the changes and she again told me to give it time. We moved out on Oct. 19 with a 30 day notice, and she is requiring all of November’s rent since our notice falls within the month. Am I liable for Novembers rent too, since the water was unsuitable for drinking/bathing?
1 ANSWER
1 Award
If you are still in the middle of a lease you could be held liable for additional months rent under the lease, even if you gave a proper 30-day notice. Under the Landlord-Tenant Act you must give the Landlord a 21/30 day notice if the problem is something that can be fixed, which this presumably could be. So your notice may have been defective. If you're month-to-month and gave 30-days notice then you should be good to go, but the 30-days normally has to give until until the end of a rental period. So if you gave yuor notice anytime in September AND you're month-to-month then that should be sufficient. If you gave your notice anytime in October then you have to pay through the end of the next month, November.
Answered on Nov 06th, 2022 at 6:47 AM