I feel that my previous landlord is charging my family and I wrongly after we have moved out of the residence.

Question

This is what I said to the landlord:  
Good morning, I looked over the statement you send my husband and I. A lot of this  doesn’t make sense or add up. There is no way we owe the apartments $2,133.45.  
We were on no lease agreements and we left 8/1/2024. The amount here doesn’t make sense at all. Why are we being charged for past months on utilities and past August when we moved out? We have always paid the utilities for the apartment when we lived there, so I really don’t understand why we are paying past amounts that was taken care of each month by us. Why would we be charged an accelerated rent charge? We were not there during that time frame nor were we on a lease. What is a resident fee? I never heard of anything like this! Franklin all of this can’t be what we owe. I understand if you want to charge us for some bulk items, trash fee, and maybe the cleaning fee although it was not dirty when we left. But everything else is not right. Does this sound correct?

John Michael Frick · Answer

It would be unusual for someone to refer to someone else as their landlord and to occupy an apartment without a lease agreement of some sort.  While it is legally possible to have an oral lease of less than one year, it would be extremely uncommon for an apartment complex to allow someone to occupy an apartment without a written lease agreement.   
 
Without a lease, it would usually not be possible for a tenant to get utility service at an apartment.  If a tenant pays utility bills directly to the utility company, a landlord typically would not include utility charges in a statement sent after lease termination.  On the other hand, if a landlord paid utility charges to the utility company and the tenant agreed to reimburse the landlord for such charges, there is typically a lag time for utilities such as water, electric and gas because the amount of each monthly bill depends on the amount of water, electricity, and gas used.  The utility company reads the meter, calculates the charges for past usage typically on a monthly basis then sends the bill to the landlord who pays it and then bills the tenant for reimbursement.  It would, therefore, it would not be unusual for a landlord to bill the tenant for utility charges used in the premises up to the day of lease termination 4-6 weeks later to account for this lag time. 
 
A lease usually has a set term or can be month-to-month.  If a tenant or landlord wants to end a lease, the law requires at least thirty days advance written notice to terminate the lease ending at the end of the month, although the parties can agree on a longer time for advance notice.  A tenant can't just leave.  So a tenant might owe rent through the end of the following month if the tenant did not give the required advance written notice to the landlord.

Q: I feel that my previous landlord is charging my family and I wrongly after we have moved out of the residence.