Is a landlord better off with a written lease or an oral lease in Florida?

Attorney Tom Olsen: From a landlord's perspective here in the state of Florida, residential leases, is it better for them to have a written lease or better for them to have an oral lease?

Attorney Caleb Maggio: Well, Tom, you can have both, but I advise all my landlords to have written leases. The reason for that is we do have a landlord-tenant statute in Florida. It's Chapter 83. It covers non-residential and residential tenancies. It does have some good terms in there, but it's what we call a gap-filler statute, meaning that it fills in the gaps of a lease agreement. It doesn't cover everything. It's just simply not going to cover a lot of scenarios, and you need to put everything in writing to really protect yourself.

Tom: When you do a written lease for a landlord, what are some of the more important terms that you think, hey, you need to make sure these terms are in your written residential lease?

Atty. Maggio: First of all, you're always going to want to have what's called the material essential terms, otherwise, there's no agreement at all. That's the parties involved, the amount of rent to be paid, the duration over which you pay the rent, and the premises which is actually being rented. Above that, especially in commercial settings, you're going to want some indemnification. You're going to want insurance clauses. Most importantly for those residential situations, you're going to want an additional rent clause, which allows you to put more than just the base rent in that three-day notice of non-payment.

Tom: I think what you're saying is that when you're doing a lease and it has a late charge in there, you need to define that late charge as additional rent for you to actually have to collect it if push comes to shove.

Atty. Maggio: Absolutely. Above late charges, that also includes things like utilities as well.

Tom: Do you and your residential leases, do you put in there how many adults, how many children can live in a home?

Atty. Maggio: You can, Tom. I do very often. It makes sure that you don't have entire families moving in there or too many overnight guests coming in there, staying too long. Especially if you're the landlord and you're paying for the utilities, the more people they have in there the higher your bill is going to be.

Tom: Then how do you handle pets in a typical lease?

Atty. Maggio: Tom, it's typical to have a security deposit for damages to the property, and then a separate often non-refundable security deposit specifically for pets. That way you can cover any damage the pet's going to cause there.

Tom: Hey, folks. My name is Tom Olsen. The name of the show is Olsen On Law. My guest today is Attorney Caleb Maggio.

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