Q: Can a landlord remove furniture from our premises?
Hi, I'm a college student living with three other college students in the downstairs apartment of a two-apartment house. The situation is that after we signed the lease for the apartment, the landlords couldn't find anyone to live upstairs, so they decided to sell the house to a young couple who - surprise! - decided to live upstairs. The situation is tense to say the least, but the most recent dispute has been about a load of furniture that the previous tenants left on the porch. The new landlords decided that it was a safety hazard because it wasn't patio furniture but inside furniture, and so when we moved in they told us in an email to get rid of the furniture on the porch. However, we don't exactly have a means of doing that, so we moved the furniture to the basement. But this morning, the landlords decided that wasn't good enough, and came into the basement and hauled the furniture out from our basement (which is ours) to a dump. Can they do this? I can provide more details.
A:
It depends on the terms in your lease. Generally he has to give you a reasonable notice to enter your apartment… This is normally 24 hours. The answer is pretty simple though, if you made it clear to him that you wanted to keep the property, then you have what we call “ rights to the property superior to all except the true owner”; as such, if you openly into notoriously told the landlord you wanted to keep the property and he threw it out without your permission that is civil conversion… I.e. theft… And you will prevail in a lawsuit against him.
If you did not declare that you wanted the property then he had no notice that it was yours and thus you have no standing to bring the lawsuit.
Harassing landlord is a great hobby of mine and I’m really good at it. Call me for a free consultation at 914-358-6420 or go to AG3law.com and send an inquiry under the contact us section. I will get back to you and I think I could handle this entire thing for about 500 bucks.
AG3
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