Q: Can a landlord charge one tenant for damages in a public area, even though four tenants lived there?
The lease charged individually for the rooms and four tenants could live there, but the rooms were separate. The living room, kitchen, and bathrooms were shared. At the beginning of living there, we were given a inspection checklist. Only one of the tenants wrote it the damages of the public areas, while each of just wrote off the damages in the bedrooms, since those were not shared but the other areas were.
A: It looks like the four of you leased the premises as tenants-in-common, although it was understood that each tenant would have an individual bedroom. If this is the way it went, yes each of you are jointly and severally liable for the damage to the "common areas".
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