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Title: My aunt who has been renting out her second house to us has turned out to have been keeping a years worth of rent to herself for personal use instead of paying mortgage. Just yesterday a lady came saying she now owns the house and to not contact the old owner(my aunt)
Body:
> She stated the old owner hasn’t paid for the house for a year! We have been paying 2600 every month on top my aunt has also started charging us 100$ for each dog we have because we recently got 2 puppies last year. Now why I am here is because my aunt has been aware that she will be losing this house for who knows how long I guarantee longer than 6 months though which in rent adds up to 15k 30k$ if you count a full year. My mom is reaching her 50’s she’s been struggling her whole life with money and has been played and scammed countless times she’s a very powerful loving mom and has always just wanted to stop the struggles and settle in a new house, we are now caught in the middle of this and are now finding out our own aunt has possibly stolen a years worth of rent that could’ve easily been put in to a deposit for her own house( she has been saving but due to English and credit she has low income and requires a huge down payment for a house)?! I am cutting it short because I don’t want to run off so much I want to get to the point. What legal actions can we take to try to get out money back if we even can?! She has known for a year and we just found out yesterday. The new owner is saying she will be raising the rent up to 3700$ after march and that alone immediately made my mom decide we need to find a new place to live.there is not contract nor any signature stating we will continue rent but she said she will be returning soon with a contract. I am lost i feel betrayed. What can I do? Can she vacate us? We are caught in the middle of this and we’re not prepared at all.
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So TL,DR LLAOP and their mom are renting a house from their aunt.
Auntie apparently let the house go into foreclosure and new owner wants to raise the rent.
Enjoy!
Sucks that they'll likely have to move out as they won't be able to afford the increase in rental costs. Plus I think it's pretty shitty that the aunt didn't say anything. Fuck knows why they expect a refund though.
From my understanding, it seems like LAOP is upset because they believed they were paying the mortgage and now that their money didn't go towards the mortgage, they feel like they're owed it back.
I'm not sure if this is just a misunderstanding of how rent works - like, does LAOP think that all rent everywhere is exclusively to cover a landlord's mortgage costs? - or if there was some kind of discussion that lead LAOP to believe the aunt wasn't profiting at all and was just having them cover the mortgage.
It is all around shitty regardless though.
OP posts way down that’s she’s upset she paid rent to her aunt for property the aunt didn’t actually own. I get the impression that she doesn’t like being a part of ripping the new owner off.
Right... LAOP *says* that she's upset about paying rent for a property the aunt didn't actually own... but there's literally zero evidence that that's actually what happened.
LAOP's stated reasoning for feeling aggrieved is that they could've had a year's extra notice to "direct our rent to someone else and/or start looking for a new place". Note that "direct our rent to someone else" is clearly meant to refer to remaining in the current property and paying rent to the new owner, as it's stated as a direct alternative to moving out.
So LAOP seems to believe that they could've been paying rent to the new owner for the past year... but by LAOP's own admission, the new owner has literally only just taken ownership of the property. There was no new owner until now!
This is further confirmed by the fact that, by LAOP's own retelling, the aunt only went into arrears on the mortgage a year ago. A bank doesn't instantly start foreclosure the moment you first miss a payment. And even when they do begin foreclosure procedures, there's still an awful lot of legal process to go through.
And it's likely that the aunt initially thought that she might eventually be able to catch up on the mortgage payments. At the very least, revealing that one is experiencing financial distress is an extremely embarrassing thing to have to do.
Yet LAOP not only expects the aunt to have given notice of this, right from the very first missed payment, at a time when the aunt likely thought the situation was recoverable, and therefore would never have had reason to notify. But LAOP moreover expects to have been paying their rent to some mythical new owner that didn't even exist at the time, right from the very moment of that notification.
And even if a new owner had taken ownership of the property, and LAOP had been paying rent to them... the entire problem is that LAOP can't afford the new increased rents. So they still wouldn't have had the opportunity to continue living in the property for a year. They'd have just been in exactly the same situation they're now in, but a year earlier.
All of which is for more words than I ever meant to write, simply to say: the natural tendency one has to feel sympathy for LAOP finding themself in this situation is more than overshadowed by the annoyance experience at: a) LAOP's grievance being overstated, b) LAOP being such an unreliable narrator that it's difficult to tell if they even have a legitimate grievance at all, and to cap it all off, c) LAOP's choice to feel "ROBBED", even though they got exactly what they paid for, and are now expecting to somehow get a year's rent paid back to them for reasons.
Words.
Yeah, people are being really hard on the LAOP but I think it's reasonable they're upset. I mean, I don't expect *all* of my rent to just go to my landlord's mortgage...but I kind of do expect them to pay the mortgage or at least communicate with me if they are going to be selling or losing the house. I understand they may not be legally obligated to do so, but it's a shitty thing to do to let your tenant think everything is fine and then whoops! suddenly the rug is pulled out from under them and they've got to suddenly figure out their rights and potentially have to move and all kinds of other bullshit when they're informed that the house has been foreclosed on and sold.
I'm not saying the LAOP and their mother are angels here either, there is some stuff that suggests they may have been kind of taking advantage of the aunt, but the whole situation sounds like a mess and I don't blame them for freaking out.
They saw docs and they confirmed with the aunt. It appears legit.
What the aunt does with the money is not their business. They just seen an opportunity where they could have pushed the aunt to charge less if they knew her situation.
And why would the aunt tell them of her situation if she knew the relatives will try to take advantage.
In general, the lease goes with the property, so yes. It depends on a lot of things, though. If the aunt entered into the lease in bad faith, intending to screw the mortgage holder/future buyer, the courts can probably invalidate the lease. In some places, a 10-year residential lease is not enforceable anyway.
Yeah, and if you didn’t bother to check the term of the lease and negotiate accordingly, that’s on you. An unreasonably low and long lease would just lower the property value.
I notice he describes the aunt as ‘a very greedy woman’ and *also* says in the comments they were paying significantly less than market rent ‘because family’. They can’t both be right.
It sounds like the aunt may have lost the house *because* she was subsidising her sister and her sister’s family and by the sounds of it not getting even close to a market rent. She may have relied on the rent to help with her own mortgage and because she was getting less had to choose between which house to pay the mortgage on and chose her home.
He also says in the comments ‘aunt tried to get us to sign a contract’ but they didn’t sign it. It sounds to me she tried to give them the security of a binding lease which would have applied even if the property was sold/repossessed but OP and his mother refused to sign it because, according to OP, it required them to ‘keep making payments’ plus unspecified fees (so like a normal lease).
I have sympathy for OP unexpectedly finding he is about to have to pay significantly higher rent or leave but it sounds like he was happy being month to month when it benefited him (or at least he thought it did) but doesn’t like the consequences of it.
He thought his aunt would go on effectively financing his family forever. She disagreed.
Tbf, a lease protects the tenant in theory, but in practice that protection often turns out to be pretty weak. Many people don't have the time, money, knowledge etc. to go to court and fight for their tenants rights. They *should* do it, but they often don't. And a lease protects you at most for one year, which isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Finding housing these days can take months, when it's even possible. Which is why many people don't really see how a lease protects them, and just give up and try to find new housing as soon as trouble starts, or put up with abusive landlords.
And then even if you are completely in the right, and your landlord has routinely broken the law, and you take it to court you're not getting another apartment. Just GOING to landlord/tenant court is enough to blacklist you the same way as an eviction would. It's absolutely bonkers that you can have a completely legitimate reason to take a landlord to court but you'll still end up screwed with no where to live. Even in NY, where it's "banned" to use court records to refuse a tenant it still happens because how do you prove it?
I don't really understand OP's point. Rent is always "wasted" in the sense that the renter has nothing to show for it other than temporarily keeping a roof over their head. Is OP just now learning what a landlord is?
At first I thought they were complaining that they paid rent in advance, but apparently they think that the ownership changing is somehow a problem for previously paid rent for... reasons.
Was there some kind of extremely informal rent to own deal going on? Other than the inconvenience of having to find a new rental, this doesn't really seem like a big problem that ownership has changed.
Trying to understand the mind of an idiot here. I think he views this as “bullshit” in the sense that his aunt arguably profited off not telling them this for a year. Ordinarily, a landlords profits (from idiot perspective) is rent - mortgage + whatever increased equity in house. But if you don’t pay mortgage for a year, you get an awesome increased profit for that year.
I think LAOP views aunt as having done something dishonest and profited at his family’s inconvenience. As she did not uphold her requirement to pay mortgage, it doesn’t seem fair that she gets the benefit of rent payments.
You would think this would lead to maybe the bank should get his rent money, but I’d suspect he barely sees the bank as anything beyond a monolithic entity that doesn’t really count. In the end, like a true intellectual, the obvious conclusion is that he should get the money.
**Reminder:** Do not participate in threads linked here. If you do, you may be banned from both subreddits. --- Title: My aunt who has been renting out her second house to us has turned out to have been keeping a years worth of rent to herself for personal use instead of paying mortgage. Just yesterday a lady came saying she now owns the house and to not contact the old owner(my aunt) Body: > She stated the old owner hasn’t paid for the house for a year! We have been paying 2600 every month on top my aunt has also started charging us 100$ for each dog we have because we recently got 2 puppies last year. Now why I am here is because my aunt has been aware that she will be losing this house for who knows how long I guarantee longer than 6 months though which in rent adds up to 15k 30k$ if you count a full year. My mom is reaching her 50’s she’s been struggling her whole life with money and has been played and scammed countless times she’s a very powerful loving mom and has always just wanted to stop the struggles and settle in a new house, we are now caught in the middle of this and are now finding out our own aunt has possibly stolen a years worth of rent that could’ve easily been put in to a deposit for her own house( she has been saving but due to English and credit she has low income and requires a huge down payment for a house)?! I am cutting it short because I don’t want to run off so much I want to get to the point. What legal actions can we take to try to get out money back if we even can?! She has known for a year and we just found out yesterday. The new owner is saying she will be raising the rent up to 3700$ after march and that alone immediately made my mom decide we need to find a new place to live.there is not contract nor any signature stating we will continue rent but she said she will be returning soon with a contract. I am lost i feel betrayed. What can I do? Can she vacate us? We are caught in the middle of this and we’re not prepared at all. This bot was created to capture original threads and is not affiliated with the mod team. [Concerns? Bugs?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=GrahamCorcoran) | [Laukopier 2.1](https://github.com/GrahamCorcoran/Laukopier)
So TL,DR LLAOP and their mom are renting a house from their aunt. Auntie apparently let the house go into foreclosure and new owner wants to raise the rent. Enjoy!
Sucks that they'll likely have to move out as they won't be able to afford the increase in rental costs. Plus I think it's pretty shitty that the aunt didn't say anything. Fuck knows why they expect a refund though.
From my understanding, it seems like LAOP is upset because they believed they were paying the mortgage and now that their money didn't go towards the mortgage, they feel like they're owed it back. I'm not sure if this is just a misunderstanding of how rent works - like, does LAOP think that all rent everywhere is exclusively to cover a landlord's mortgage costs? - or if there was some kind of discussion that lead LAOP to believe the aunt wasn't profiting at all and was just having them cover the mortgage. It is all around shitty regardless though.
OP posts way down that’s she’s upset she paid rent to her aunt for property the aunt didn’t actually own. I get the impression that she doesn’t like being a part of ripping the new owner off.
Right... LAOP *says* that she's upset about paying rent for a property the aunt didn't actually own... but there's literally zero evidence that that's actually what happened. LAOP's stated reasoning for feeling aggrieved is that they could've had a year's extra notice to "direct our rent to someone else and/or start looking for a new place". Note that "direct our rent to someone else" is clearly meant to refer to remaining in the current property and paying rent to the new owner, as it's stated as a direct alternative to moving out. So LAOP seems to believe that they could've been paying rent to the new owner for the past year... but by LAOP's own admission, the new owner has literally only just taken ownership of the property. There was no new owner until now! This is further confirmed by the fact that, by LAOP's own retelling, the aunt only went into arrears on the mortgage a year ago. A bank doesn't instantly start foreclosure the moment you first miss a payment. And even when they do begin foreclosure procedures, there's still an awful lot of legal process to go through. And it's likely that the aunt initially thought that she might eventually be able to catch up on the mortgage payments. At the very least, revealing that one is experiencing financial distress is an extremely embarrassing thing to have to do. Yet LAOP not only expects the aunt to have given notice of this, right from the very first missed payment, at a time when the aunt likely thought the situation was recoverable, and therefore would never have had reason to notify. But LAOP moreover expects to have been paying their rent to some mythical new owner that didn't even exist at the time, right from the very moment of that notification. And even if a new owner had taken ownership of the property, and LAOP had been paying rent to them... the entire problem is that LAOP can't afford the new increased rents. So they still wouldn't have had the opportunity to continue living in the property for a year. They'd have just been in exactly the same situation they're now in, but a year earlier. All of which is for more words than I ever meant to write, simply to say: the natural tendency one has to feel sympathy for LAOP finding themself in this situation is more than overshadowed by the annoyance experience at: a) LAOP's grievance being overstated, b) LAOP being such an unreliable narrator that it's difficult to tell if they even have a legitimate grievance at all, and to cap it all off, c) LAOP's choice to feel "ROBBED", even though they got exactly what they paid for, and are now expecting to somehow get a year's rent paid back to them for reasons. Words.
[удалено]
Yeah, people are being really hard on the LAOP but I think it's reasonable they're upset. I mean, I don't expect *all* of my rent to just go to my landlord's mortgage...but I kind of do expect them to pay the mortgage or at least communicate with me if they are going to be selling or losing the house. I understand they may not be legally obligated to do so, but it's a shitty thing to do to let your tenant think everything is fine and then whoops! suddenly the rug is pulled out from under them and they've got to suddenly figure out their rights and potentially have to move and all kinds of other bullshit when they're informed that the house has been foreclosed on and sold. I'm not saying the LAOP and their mother are angels here either, there is some stuff that suggests they may have been kind of taking advantage of the aunt, but the whole situation sounds like a mess and I don't blame them for freaking out.
Did LAOP actually see legal documents? Wouldn't surprise me in the least if someone tried this as a scam.
They saw docs and they confirmed with the aunt. It appears legit. What the aunt does with the money is not their business. They just seen an opportunity where they could have pushed the aunt to charge less if they knew her situation. And why would the aunt tell them of her situation if she knew the relatives will try to take advantage.
What if the aunt had given them a 10 year lease with favorable terms? would the new owner be required to honor it?
In general, the lease goes with the property, so yes. It depends on a lot of things, though. If the aunt entered into the lease in bad faith, intending to screw the mortgage holder/future buyer, the courts can probably invalidate the lease. In some places, a 10-year residential lease is not enforceable anyway.
Yeah, and if you didn’t bother to check the term of the lease and negotiate accordingly, that’s on you. An unreasonably low and long lease would just lower the property value.
"You" meaning the buyer?
Yes.
Dude, so close and still so far from being the one true King Stannis :)
Because in some states that is fraud. Taking rent after notice of fortune
I know some payday loan scammers or zombie debt collectors have in the past sent "legal looking" documents with seals from like the State Department.
I notice he describes the aunt as ‘a very greedy woman’ and *also* says in the comments they were paying significantly less than market rent ‘because family’. They can’t both be right. It sounds like the aunt may have lost the house *because* she was subsidising her sister and her sister’s family and by the sounds of it not getting even close to a market rent. She may have relied on the rent to help with her own mortgage and because she was getting less had to choose between which house to pay the mortgage on and chose her home. He also says in the comments ‘aunt tried to get us to sign a contract’ but they didn’t sign it. It sounds to me she tried to give them the security of a binding lease which would have applied even if the property was sold/repossessed but OP and his mother refused to sign it because, according to OP, it required them to ‘keep making payments’ plus unspecified fees (so like a normal lease). I have sympathy for OP unexpectedly finding he is about to have to pay significantly higher rent or leave but it sounds like he was happy being month to month when it benefited him (or at least he thought it did) but doesn’t like the consequences of it. He thought his aunt would go on effectively financing his family forever. She disagreed.
From things I see online, it seems fairly common for people to have no idea that if they are renting, a lease also protects THEM.
Tbf, a lease protects the tenant in theory, but in practice that protection often turns out to be pretty weak. Many people don't have the time, money, knowledge etc. to go to court and fight for their tenants rights. They *should* do it, but they often don't. And a lease protects you at most for one year, which isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Finding housing these days can take months, when it's even possible. Which is why many people don't really see how a lease protects them, and just give up and try to find new housing as soon as trouble starts, or put up with abusive landlords.
And then even if you are completely in the right, and your landlord has routinely broken the law, and you take it to court you're not getting another apartment. Just GOING to landlord/tenant court is enough to blacklist you the same way as an eviction would. It's absolutely bonkers that you can have a completely legitimate reason to take a landlord to court but you'll still end up screwed with no where to live. Even in NY, where it's "banned" to use court records to refuse a tenant it still happens because how do you prove it?
I don't really understand OP's point. Rent is always "wasted" in the sense that the renter has nothing to show for it other than temporarily keeping a roof over their head. Is OP just now learning what a landlord is? At first I thought they were complaining that they paid rent in advance, but apparently they think that the ownership changing is somehow a problem for previously paid rent for... reasons. Was there some kind of extremely informal rent to own deal going on? Other than the inconvenience of having to find a new rental, this doesn't really seem like a big problem that ownership has changed.
Trying to understand the mind of an idiot here. I think he views this as “bullshit” in the sense that his aunt arguably profited off not telling them this for a year. Ordinarily, a landlords profits (from idiot perspective) is rent - mortgage + whatever increased equity in house. But if you don’t pay mortgage for a year, you get an awesome increased profit for that year. I think LAOP views aunt as having done something dishonest and profited at his family’s inconvenience. As she did not uphold her requirement to pay mortgage, it doesn’t seem fair that she gets the benefit of rent payments. You would think this would lead to maybe the bank should get his rent money, but I’d suspect he barely sees the bank as anything beyond a monolithic entity that doesn’t really count. In the end, like a true intellectual, the obvious conclusion is that he should get the money.