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What To Include in a Rental Agreement

Landlord Advice

If you are a landlord who is looking to write up a rental agreement, then you don’t need to spend $250 an hour at your local lawyers office to get a contract written up. You can write up a rental agreement from your own home.

Or make it even easier for yourself – use our rental agreement template to do all the hard work for you. You simply enter the information that you want to be displayed within your rental agreement, and our system does everything else!

This is the information that you need to include in a rental agreement:

Landlord Information:

You need to provide information on the landlord of the property. You should mention the landlords name and complete address. If there are multiple landlords, you need to mention them all.

Tenant Information:

At the very least, you need to list all potential tenants of your property by name. You may also want to include the tenants current address.

Premises Information:

In your rental agreement, you need to provide basic information about the premises that you are renting. The basic information is the type of property(House, Apartment, Condominium, Basement, Room or Mobile Home) as well as the address of the property.

You may also wish to provide additional information about the property including storage areas and the number of bedrooms or bathrooms. This is optional and not required.

Premises Guidelines:

This is the most important part of any rental agreement. You need to make sure you are covered in writing when it comes to agreements with your tenants over the property.

Important guidelines that should be written in the rental agreement are:

  • If there is a tenant minimum age
  • If smoking is allowed
  • Whether pets are allowed
  • Detailed information regarding parking
  • Whether or not the tenant can assign/sublet their premises

You should also have in writing the amount of days a landlord is required to give notice before entering the premises for any non-emergency reason.

Rental Agreement Terms

You will need to provide information on the actual terms of the rental agreement. You should mention whether it is a lease agreement or rental agreement, as well as when the rental agreement starts. You should also mention how often the agreement will be renewed.

Termination notice details are also something you may wish to consider putting into the agreement.

Payment Information:

One thing you HAVE to put into writing is the payment information, and you need to make sure you keep on top of it too. There should be no such thing as “late rent payments”. Be sure to include how often the rent will be paid, the amount that will be made, the method of payment and where the payment is to be made.

If you want to add a penalty for late payment you can do that. Mention how many days late before the payment penalty kicks in. If there is a security deposit write down the amount of deposit.

Tenant Responsibilities:

Your tenant may have certain responsibilities they are required to do, for example: snow shovelling. If the tenant is required to perform responsibilities on the property then don’t assume they will do it – put it in the rental agreement.

Utilities:

If the tenant is required to pay any utilities, then you need to mention this within the rental agreement.

Appliances:

If you are providing any furniture or electric appliances for the tenant, then you should write these within the rental agreement.

Lead Paint:

If the property was built prior to 1978 and you have knowledge of any lead paint on the premises then you need to mention that in the rental agreement.

Contract Details:

Be sure to write the date that the agreement was signed, and add a space for witnesses if you require any witnesses to sign the form.

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Seriously. Use our Rental Agreement Template. It’ll take 5 minutes!