Signed lease with a verbal agreement, now Landlord changing commitment

[km4sun]

My husband and I rented a house from a lady we know. At the first meeting to see the property, I told the landlord that we were building a house and might need longer than the 1 year lease. She said that would be fine that we could just do rent on a month to month basis after the year was up. We have been in the house 7 months and now she says we have to be out at the end of the year lease and she will not extend it. She says that things have changed and she now needs to let her mother live here. We will probably need 1-2 months longer than the year lease to complete our house.

I feel that we were misled into this lease. I would not have taken the lease with the understanding that we had 1 year only. Not only will i have to repeat the $800 it cost for moving expenses to another temporary location, I don't know if I can find someone to lease me a house for 1 or 2 months. We have pets so an apartment is not an option.

Do we have any rights?

 

[NYClex]

There are quite a lot of obstacles to enforcing this:

First of all, you only had a vague commitment. You did not make a specific commitment to actually rent the house for more than 12 months, you said you "might" need the house. Therefore neither you, nor the landlady committed yourselves. She said at that time that it would be fine with her, but since you did not commit at that time, she did not have to either. No contract was formed.

One might say that this should be treated as an option contract, but since you did not pay for keeping the option firm, this does not work either. An option contract has to be created formally.

If she offered the possibility of a renewal of the lease, unless this is an option with consideration, as described above, she can revoke this any time before you actually accept it, which she seemingly has done.

Now if you would want to claim that you actually did commit yourself contingent on the fact that your new house is not finished and that this has already been part of your current lease agreement, the next problem would be the written lease agreement. Since I assume you do have one and nowhere in it this option is mentioned, the parole evidence rule might apply, barring you from claiming that this was part of the agreement.

Could you try to argue that this was a separate oral contract to which both sides have in fact committed themselves? May be. But you might then run into a Statute of Frauds defense, depending on the laws in your state regarding the requirement that lease contracts must be written.

Therefore you are probably out of luck here. Of course, this is only a general overview of the law and you should not only take my word for it, since I have neither seen your lease contract nor know all the details of this case.