Lease Executed Without Permission
Hi everyone, I’m looking for some advice with dealing with scummy Property Managers (I’ll gladly DM you their name if you want to avoid them!)
I’m currently living in a 4 bedroom apartment. We signed the lease two years ago with four of us on the lease. We’ve had no issues until this most recent renewal of the lease. One of our roommates planned to move out, and another was uncertain. We were told we could sign with just two of us, and later the uncertain roommate could join on with whoever our new fourth roommate is. It sounded like they did our a favor, and we were thankful for their accommodation.
Needless to say, they went behind our back and executed our lease with just two of us on it. Had we known they planned to do that, we would not have signed the lease. Now to add our two other roommates on, they told us we’d need to pay a Lease Assignment fee of $1000. The below statement is from the last page of our lease as an addendum:
“If you are looking to change a roommate with a new applicant, you can do a process called a Lease Assignment. It's essentially a sublet, so this person will be replacing the current roommate and taking over the lease.
The new applicant will need to fill out application and will most likely need a co-signer. Please, call the office and we can email you a copy of those forms. If the new person coming in is an international student, we do not need a cosigner form, but a copy of their 120 (or 1-1, etc) and VISA. Please keep in mind that the incoming tenants) will need to reimburse the outgoing tenants) for the deposits (last month, security deposit, and key) as the deposits we have for you here would be transferred to the new tenants. This is because those funds are in an escrow account, so we cannot simply touch it or take the funds out.
Per the lease, there's a fee for doing a lease assignment, the fee is half of the full months rent (not what you " - split between each other, it's half of whatever the rent is for the apartment). Keep in mind that the fee can be paid by anyone, so the incoming tenants) can pay or it can be split between everyone as well.
The fee can only be paid in a form of a check, so a personal check, money order, cashiers check, or bank check. Please have the check made payable to Real Estate Management & Investment.
Once the fee is paid and we have the applications & cosigner forms, the lease assignment documents as well as the new lease will be sent out via Docusign for everyone to view and sign.”
This seems blatanly illegal to me under MA’s laws for there being no charged except for first month, last month, and security deposit for leases. Especially since we had not granted permission for them to execute the lease in the first place… Right now my roommates and I have begrudgingly accepted to pay the $1000, but the Property Manager isn’t even emailing us the paperwork we need, and refuses to let us speak directly to the owner of our building.
Reddit, please help! Should I get the MA Attorney involved? I don’t want to jeopardize our lease this late into the housing cycle.
TLDR: Being charged $1000 sublet fee to alter our lease after our 4 bedroom lease is executed with only 2 people on it.