I get it. It’s impossible for a lease end date to align with the date of a new lease on a new home. 

Surely with that in mind, your current landlord would allow you to vacate sooner than the actual lease end date?

Well in short. No. A lease (General Tenancy Agreement) is a legally binding agreement with an end date. There are many many reasons why it’s not possible for a tenant  to be able to vacate prior to the end date. 

Starting with the simple challenge property managers have to co-originate a request like that. Most people have no idea the little resources property managers have to be able to facilitate a request from a tenant to vacate prior to the lease start date.

I bet now you are wondering. What? It’s just a simple request. No resources are needed. 

If we could charge for our time it would be ideal to be able to charge tenants $165 an hour to consult with tenants about these types of requests. There is a true cost of our time to communicate with tenants. Most people have no idea how little property managers charge landlords. What we charge is minuscule & it certainly doesn’t cover the cost of our time to liaise with tenants outside of a normal tenancy agreement.

What tenants don’t realise is they’ve sent a simple email with a request to vacate sooner. Then we need to spend considerable time now consulting the owners, our diaries, the impact of the request. Then liase back to the tenant with a response. Time is money and all this is time we can’t charge anyone for. 

Plans have been made months before a tenants lease ends. This has already been scheduled. Property managers are not sitting around with huge times in their day to do an exit report sooner than what had been planned months in advance. Possibly the owner has family moving in. Possibly they are moving in, possibly they are selling. Whatever it is. It’s all been pre planned way in advance based around that legally binding lease end date.

But wait. What if you want to vacate sooner, a new tenant could be found that may even want to pay more. Surely the landlord would be happy about that. Getting higher rent sooner. Maybe not. First, the property needs to be advertised about 5 weeks prior to a lease start date. So even if an owner could agree to let you vacate sooner you would need to give them at least 5 weeks notice, possibly more. So they have time to advertise.

But what time of the year is it? Is your lease ending in a peak period? Vacating sooner would affect this. It’s also very likely the property manager or landlord has maintenance planned for when you vacate. Having you leave prior to the lease end date would then mean all that would need to be rescheduled. That’s time and money that will cost the landlord and he may not even be able to secure the trades he had booked in.

Lastly, requesting to vacate early would not be welcomed. So this would also affect if your current agency would consider leasing to you in the future.  You’ve been a great tenant up until now. Now you want to leave prior to your lease start date. Based on this would we want to rent to you in the future to have that happen again? Possibly not.