General Advice:
Ending Your Contract
Most agreements for student accommodation are ‘Fixed Term
Agreements’ this means that you will have agreed to rent a
property for a certain length of time and you are legally bound to
continue with the agreement unless there is a period of notice
included in the terms.
If you wish to leave a fixed term agreement early you should first try to
negotiate with the landlord to see if he will agree to release you from your
contractual obligations, however, you cannot force a landlord to agree to this.
You are legally bound to continue paying the rent for the full period of the
agreement. If you decide to go ahead and leave anyway you may well lose your
deposit and you may be sued for any outstanding rent.
However, the landlord is obliged to try to find a new tenant and the balance
due would be reduced if the landlord were able to re-let.
Joint Tenancy
If you are part of a group who have rented a property and one of you wants to
leave you have 5 options open to you:
The remaining tenants can carry on with the tenancy making up the
shortfall in rent between them. The leaving occupier would have to wait
until the end of the tenancy for the landlord to return their deposit.
The remaining tenants find someone to replace the departing tenant, but
this must be someone that the landlord approves of.
It may be possible to bring in a new occupier who simply pays a share of
the rent to the remaining tenants, but you must check your agreement as some
clauses forbid you from ‘taking in lodgers’.
The remaining occupiers could remove the tenant who is leaving from the
agreement and take over the tenancy on their own. They would then have
responsibility for the whole of the accommodation and the rent. This would
need the agreement of the landlord though and would amount to a new
agreement.
The departing tenant ends their potential liability by bringing the whole
tenancy to an end. This would result in everyone losing the accommodation.
This cannot be done in the middle of a fixed period tenancy though but
can be done where the tenancy is weekly or monthly or has become one after a
fixed period agreement has expired.
Finding a Replacement Tenant
If the property you are renting is currently registered with the Accommodation Office you may ask them to re-advertise the
property for you, but you must tell your landlord that you are doing this. You
may also advertise a vacancy in your house on the
studentpad message
board.
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