Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Place to Live?...CHECK!

So, it seems that each step thus far in the process of preparing for law school comes with its own set of issues. This week, I had to deal with the complications that came with securing a place to live. After making a visit a couple of weeks ago, I was settled on our future home. This time I even submitted my application BEFORE leaving town (didn’t want to make that mistake twice). I emailed the woman who showed me the property to make sure she had everything she needed to process my application and it looked as though things were moving along pretty smoothly. That is, until I received the lease agreement. The rental amount on the lease was 25 bucks more than what she initially told me. So after an email and two phone calls, she tells me that her owner assigned all of the units that rented for the price we discussed and the more expensive units were all she had available. I respond by telling her to remove my application because I wasn’t interested. I mean, I’m on a budget and the most irresponsible thing I could do is accept a price that was outside of my budget. Besides, I had other options.

About an hour later I get a phone call from the owner of the property. She was interested in what happened to make me withdraw my application. I told her the situation, I found information on the internet that quoted a specific price, emailed her property manager who confirmed the specific price, viewed the property with the manager who once again confirmed the specific price, but then I end up with a lease locking me in with a different price, which I didn’t plan on paying. The owner was really nice in explaining that basically her property manager screwed up. The price on the lease is apparently what the unit rents for presently, and the price I was quoted might have been a winter special. Regardless, I wasn’t going to pay more than what she verbally quoted me, on more than one occasion. The owner apologized for her manager’s mistake and agreed to change the paperwork to the verbal quote. Problem solved!

This is definitely a situation that has some characteristics of a hypothetical that could be used in a contracts class, LOL! Tokyo Kiss got me thinking about it after the whole “unsigned check in the mail” debacle. What if I really wanted the unit for the price quoted? Would I have a cause of action to get the unit at the price verbally quoted? What if I signed the lease without paying attention to the altered rent amount? Ok, I’m going to stop now, LOL!

No comments:

Post a Comment