My wife and I entered into a lease option agreement and are currently 6 months into a 2 yr agreement. The owner has been served with Foreclosure notice and has 90 days to resolve the problem. We have invested severl thousand doing repairs only to find out he did not have permits to do remodeling in addition to the foreclosure problem. We want to exit the lease and cut our losses.


Q. Can we terminate the lease? And move?
Q. Can he come after us?
Q. Do we have ANY legal recourse.

We feel he mis represented the property to us not disclosing permit issues and flaws in remodeling work that must now be fixed in addition to not paying the mortgage as well as T & I Payments for the last 3 months.

Why walk away? If you like the house see if the bank will transfer the mortgage to you if you pay the arrears (you will have to go through the owner for this). If he's going to lose it anyway, he may be amenable to do this rather than have a foreclosure on his record.

But whether you can walk away or not, depends on the wording of the contract. The fact that the house is in foreclosure doesn't change the lease until the foreclosure is finalized.