Why it pays to avoid a legal standoff between you and your landlord
It’s not a surprise that, in this great city of ours, with 65%+ of the market consisting of rentals, landlord-tenant conflicts arise. During his time, egos flare and it’s all too easy in this tenant-friendly legal environment for renters to threaten legal action against their landlords, and even go through with it to prove a point. Our very strong advice: don’t. Try to do everything short of actually going to court and having the case show up on your public record. Why? Here is the pecking order of bad to worst possible circumstances in terms of finding a rental in the city:
- Insufficient income (<40x rent): you can mitigate this via a guarantor or a few extra months’ security / prepaid rent.
- Foreign national with no US credit history: same, though more paperwork is likely required.
- Bad credit: same, though even more money upfront.
- Bankruptcy: you can expect up pay up to entire rent for the term of the lease upfront.
- Public record of a tenant-landlord dispute: it almost doesn’t even matter if you won, or if you were right. This is the single greatest red flag you could have in this city, turning off a vast majority of landlords and making it damn hard for you to rent anything decent. It shows that you are litigious and a potential trouble-maker, which is the very last thing that a landlord wants when the law is already favoring you.
Bottom line, do everything you can to work out any landlord issues you might have out of court. Don’t sue just to make a point or send a message, lest the message you want to receive is “application denied” for your next rental.
