What are the grounds for the landlord to send the termination?

If you have received the notice from your landlord asking you to vacate his rental home, in this article you will find the JURIDICAL answers to the doubts that you may legitimately have when a landlord sends you a contract termination. As you will be able to see from the comments of this post, many tenants need clarification regarding their specific case when they receive the notice of termination from their landlord, I invite you, if this article does not clarify your thoughts, to read the responses to the comments to see if they can satisfy your specific case as well.

What are grounds for the landlord to send the lease termination?

Premise: The homeowner may ask you to vacate his or her apartment.

To do so, however, he must comply with the notice period, which by law is at least 6 months, with respect to the nearest due date.

Having made this clarification, we need to make 2 further distinctions.

The landlord CANNOT ask you to vacate the house at any time during the contract but can only do so close to one of the expiration dates in the contract (so at the fourth or eighth year in 4+4 or at the third or fifth year in 3+2) the distinction we need to make lies in the reasons why a landlord may decide to terminate the lease, which vary depending on the year in which the termination is sent.

Reasons for giving lease termination on the first termination date

If the landlord wishes to terminate the lease at the first expiration, i.e., at the third year ( in 3+2) or at the fourth year ( in 4+4), the regulations provide for the possibility of terminating the lease only in the presence of specific needs of the landlord identified in ' Article 3 of Law 341/98.

Let's take a closer look at what they are:

The landlord can send you a request to vacate the apartment at the first contractual deadline

1. when the landlord intends to use the property for residential, commercial, craft or professional use by himself, his spouse, parents, children or relatives within the second degree;
2. when the landlord, legal person, company or public entity or otherwise with public, social, mutual, cooperative, welfare, cultural or religious purposes intends to use the property for the exercise of the activities directed to pursue the aforementioned purposes and offers the tenant other suitable property and of which the landlord has full availability;
3. when the tenant has full availability of vacant and suitable housing in the same municipality;
4. when the property is included in a severely damaged building that needs to be reconstructed or whose stability needs to be ensured and the tenant's stay is an obstacle to the completion of indispensable work;
5. when the property is located in a building of which complete renovation is planned, or it is intended to carry out demolition or radical transformation for the purpose of new construction, or, since it is a property located on the top floor, the owner intends to carry out elevations in accordance with the law and in order to carry them out it is indispensable for technical reasons to clear the property;
6. When, without any legitimate succession in the contract, the tenant does not continuously occupy the property without justified reason;
7. when the landlord intends to sell the property to a third party and does not have ownership of any property for residential use other than the one possibly used as his own home. In such a case, the tenant shall be granted the right of first refusal, to be exercised in the manner set forth in Articles 38 and 39 of Law No. 38 of July 27, 1978. 392.

Only and exclusively if there are these reasons, the homeowner can send you the termination of the contract on the first due date.

The question arises, " What if the landlord makes up a lie to send me away and then rents the house back to someone else? How do I prevent that? "

Fortunately, the legislature has been far-sighted and has established rules in the next 2 paragraphs that actually prevent this kind of injustice. Indeed, subsections 2 and 3 state:

Paragraph 2. "In cases of termination of the contract by the landlord for the reasons referred to in Paragraph 1 ( d) and (e), possession, for the performance of the work specified therein, of the building concession or permit shall be a condition for the prosecution of the action for release. The terms of validity of the concession or permit shall run from the actual availability following the release of the property. The tenant shall have the right of first refusal, to be exercised in the manner set forth in Article 40 of Law No. 392 of July 27, 1978, if the landlord, upon completion of the work, leases the property again. The landlord's notice must specify, under penalty of nullity, the reason, among those exhaustively indicated in paragraph 1, on which the notice is based."

Paragraph 3. "Where the landlord has regained the availability of the housing as a result of the unlawful exercise of the right to terminate under this Article, the landlord shall pay compensation to the tenant to be determined in an amount not less than thirty-six months of the last rent received."

In fact, a kind of penalty is established that would discourage any landlord from improper actions toward the tenant, so that the law is properly enforced.

So if the landlord wants to send the tenant away before 4 years ( or 3 )or before the natural expiration of the contract, he must have valid reasons otherwise there is trouble!

The termination of the lease on the second term:

At the natural end of the contract, then once the scheduled renewal has been exhausted ( eighth year in 4+4 or fifth in 3+2 ) the landlord can express his will not to renew the contract without having to justify the reason as specified in the previous part of this blog post. This means that, the landlord, if he wants to increase the rent of the house can send you the notice of termination asking for a rent increase. If you do not agree with the new rent obviously you will have to leave the house and allow the landlord to find another tenant willing to pay that rent.

What to do if the landlord wants the house before the contractual lease expires

Quite often I am contacted by tenants who receive requests to vacate the house during the contract, without prior notice and without the proper grounds and timelines required by law to do so. My response (which you can check in the responses to comments) is always the same:

The landlord cannot WITHDRAW from the current contract, but is OBLIGATED to abide by it until the stipulated deadlines. The tenant has the right to stay inside the house until the terms stipulated in the contract. If the landlord needs the house before the terms, only a voluntary agreement by the tenant to release the house early can be a solution. Basically, you can agree with the landlord to leave his apartment early, but it is you (tenant) who decides the manner and timing of the release.

Can the landlord send me notice if I don't pay rent?

Many rental contracts include a clause for termination of the lease in case of non-payment of one or more rentals. Even if this clause is included in the contract, the landlord, in order to gain possession of the property must still proceed with an eviction. In order to regain possession of the property, the tenant's willingness to give up the tenancy is necessary, otherwise a judge will have to stable whether there are conditions for an eviction or whether there is the tenant's ability to repay the debt and remain inside a house. To sum up, if you do not pay the rent, the landlord has to go through the whole eviction procedure before he can send you away. Be careful though:

once the judge's ruling is obtained, the landlord can also act to obtain payment of all past due rent, legal fees, and interest.

The advice I always give is to agree on a consensual release between landlord and tenant that provides for a mutually beneficial "exit strategy" in which the landlord does not have to file a lawsuit and lose months and months of rent for nothing and the tenant sees his debt discharged or at least reduced.

If you are interested in learning about how to cancel and terminate a lease early, read this other article where you can download fillable forms to terminate your lease!

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