Tenant want to stay on month to month basis

Melb Invester wrote:

H All,

What do you do if this situation?

MI

MI, You couldn’t disagree with Jamie here. It depends….more info would assist.

Cheers, Ivan

I had this same thing happen in Victoria in my IP. At the end of the day, apparently they can switch to a month-month in vic automatically however you can not continue the lease after a month and they will either have to sign a lease or find somewhere else to live. At the end of the day, are they good tenants and would you rather them stay than have someone else? Or what is the risk of long periods of vacancy?
My problem was the owner of the real estate managing my property had put is nephew in my house, so he was told all sorts of little things he could get away with. I was happy with them staying month-month, although its not 1st preference, until the rent starting coming all over the place at which point i said either sign a 6 month minimum lease or get out. My property manager told me i was a little unreasonable but at the end of the day i treat my IP as a business and i have other things to worry about than to chase my rent which was being ignored due to the nature of the tenants.
My property manager has since improved 150% after a few encouraging words on what kind of a service I am paying for and after riding them for a bit they realised i wasn’t joking and things have improved tenfold. Needless to say, said property manager will actually be getting his christmas gift this year which he went without last year. :-)

Good Luck.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 7 months ago by  Shiny_Suit_Man.

Hi there,

Since your userid is “Melb Invester”, I am assuming the property is in Victoria.

When a fixed term lease expires, you can either ask them to sign a new fixed term lease, or allow it to lapse to a month-to-month basis.

One big problem is that you are not allowed to force them to sign a new fixed term lease. A tidy way of dealing with it is to explain that for insurance reasons, all your tenancies need to be on fixed term leases (not all insurers will cover rental default unless the tenancy is on a fixed term lease.)

The month-to-month thing a nuisance, because your obligations as a landlord, and notice periods you have to adhere to when giving tenant notice to vacate remain the same, whereas the tenant enjoys the ability to bail out with only 28 days notice. This would be quite inconvenient if the tenant decided to move out during a quiet time of the year, so you might prefer to insist on fixed term leases.

Yes. The advantage is that you can put the rent up when you like (given the approriate notice of course).