Tips for making a good residential lease

Having a good residential lease will save you time and money in dealing with tenants.

Attorney Rob Solomon: A month-to-month tenant is a tenant in every sense of the word. Month-to-month means that their commitment and your commitment as a landlord is short term, it runs from month to month, so that if you give 15 days notice before the end of a rental period -- So if the rental period runs from the first to the 30th, and you give a notice that they need to return possession to you, you can do that before the 15th of that month, and they would be required to leave pursuant to that notice at the end of the month. That's the notice that you would give.

In all other respects, it looks like an eviction because a notice isn't an eviction, a notice given, you hope, will lead to the results that the notice will be followed and the person will depart, but if they do not depart, you have to go through a standard eviction. In this case, the eviction isn't based on a failure to pay rent, it's based on the fact that they received, and you can show they received a proper 15-day notice, and that they didn't vacate the property in return possession to you at the end of end of the month as was required by the notice.

So you see that notices are not evictions, three-day notices and other kinds of notices that we may talk about, but they are the necessary prerequisite to doing an eviction if the notice doesn't succeed in getting the result that's demanded by the notice. So, that's what a month-to-month tenancy eviction begins to look like, and it starts with a 15-day notice to vacate and return possession before the end of the month.