Experience Breaking a Lease in UK?

ekc11
New Member



Joined: 20 Dec 2007
Posts: 1

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 8:31 am

 

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Hi,

I'm hoping that someone here has experienced something similar and can offer some words of advice as to what out rights are in this sort of situation.

My 4-year-old daughter and I moved to London in August to live with my British fiancee. I recently found out that I am pregnant and I am horribly sick and desperately want to go home (I'm Canadian) and be close to my family. We signed a 12-month lease at our flat through an estate agency and have been told that we can break the lease and leave early if:

a) we pay them the landlord's fee to find a new tenant (11% of the yearly rent) and forfeit our deposit

b) we allow them access to our flat at any time, with no notice given to us that they are showing the flat or have been there in our absence (yesterday we came home to find the balcony door open)

c) with the condition that we cannot break the lease and leave until they find a suitable tenant to replace us. This is of an unspecified time frame.

Ok, I am fine with paying money to get out of this and understand that yes, we signed the contract for 1 year and are the ones breaking it, but when we said that we would not agree to them coming into our flat without notifying us that they are going to be there/have been there, they got very angry and said that they persuaded the landlord to let us break the lease and since they did us a favour and now we are being uncooperative, that they will now stop advertising the flat and will convince the landlord that he should sue us for the rest of the rent left on the contract if we do leave. They won't back down on this at all. It's either all or nothing.

A friend who is an estate agent said that all they charge is £200 to break the lease and £200 to cover costs to find a new tenant.

Unfortunately, our lease says nothing about what would happen in case of breaking a lease, and the estate agents have been unable to provide to us written notification of their policy that they are holding us to.

Sorry this is so long, but I am somewhat exasperated with the situation and I just wanted to see what others experience is with this? Are we totally at their mercy?

All I want from them is to agree that we can leave on a specific date, and to pay them their fee and get on with things.


Thanks so much,

Erin

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