Ask Me Help Desk - Never Signed A Lease

I moved for a short time to VA. A friend of mine who owns a house but had left it unoccupied & abandoned for several years offered to let me stay there while I found something more suitable. I never signed a lease or agreed to any payments for rent, I did agree to pay the utilites while staying there and did so. When I moved out 3 months later he claimed that I owed him thousands of dollars in rent! I refused to pay saying we never had a lease agreement or agreed to any rental payments. The house was in very poor shape when I moved in including no hot water or air conditioning. I paid out of my own pocket twice to fix the water heater and never asked to be reinburst by the homeowner. He recently called me threating to sue me for unpaid rent if I did not pay him at least $5,000. Can I actually be sued? Will it stand up in court?

If there is no lease or any other type of contract stating that you were to provide the owner with compensation-aside from utilities-then the owner would be hard pressed to prove any type of monetary figure that you would owe.

The owner could claim that there was an oral contract.

Google search-elements of a contract to learn more about that and to see if there is any type of issue there.

If no rent was discussed and the utilities were only to be paid by you, then the owner would have to convince a judge that there was a set rent. If you simply said there was not, and there were no witnesses/e mails/correspondence backing up the owner's claim... there is little the owner could do to prove their claim.

Sounds-to me-like the owner may be just trying to scare you into paying them some money.

In the event you do end up going to court. You should try to round up the bills that you paid, receipts for the repairs that you made and take pictures of the residence in its disheveled state.

So, to answer your questions... he can, in theory and practice, file suit against you. In some states, it takes very little evidence to actually file a suit. To have a judgement be found against you, is entirely up to the amount of evidence either party has to corroborate their claim.

If what you are saying is the truth, then it would be difficult for the owner to prove that any amount was due.

How long did you stay there..

Where did the owner come up with 5,000.00?

Is there a more exact amount that the owner says you owe?

My stuff was physically there for 3 months but I did not stay there the last month because the hot water heater had broken again (for the 3rd time) & there was no A/C and it was unbearably too hot to live there. After I moved out the owner called me and just stated he thought $5,000 was a fair price for 3 months rent.
No, he just stated he thought $5,000 was fair to keep him from sueing me.

Hello m:

Tell him to stick it. You held up your part of the agreement. Tell the judge what you told us here, and he won't win.

excon

Wow... 5000.00 for 3 months... that is over 1600.00 a month... must have been a nice place... :D

If it were me, I would call his bluff and tell him I'd see him in court.

Under the assumption that you do not want contact with this person anymore, I would tell him that he should have no future contact with you other than this flimsy suit in court. If he still continues to call... hold onto all of your phone records and keep a ledger of sorts of any kind of contact he tries to make... make up a time line of the events that led up to you living there... what happened while you were there... any phone conversations you had with him while you lived there... all the repairs, no matter how small... and a good explanation of how poor the living conditions were.

Judges take these ledgers as gospel more often than not... and it is better for you to go in there with all the ammo you can muster... Receipts, phone logs, timeline... no contract or lease=SCORE You-1/him-0.

I have been in real estate and still am for over 25-years. In my experience he does not have a leg to stand on, unless he has a signed document stating that you agreed to pay him "X" amount of dollars each month on a specified date. It sounds like your a winner!