The Settlement [L]

Have I discussed this? Our Lawyer settled our dispute with the new landlord of our old building. We get out within 30 days (by 10/25) and we owe nothing. We take the deal, of course. So we get back all our rent that we put into escrow minus our lawyer fees. She was more than generous with us. I think she felt bad. On the itemized list was .5 hours for consultation. That was well under the actual time. She took about a 4^th of our escrow money. So you could say our settlement was 3/4ths of a year rent free living. Not so bad considering we had no legal standing. To reiterate: in DC you have to show cause to evict a tenant. Otherwise you pay to get them out. The stubborn ones anyway, and that’s what we were going for. Often it’s in the high 5-figure area. But the new owner only owned that one building in DC, a 4 unit building. If it was a 5 unit building, or if he owned more than one building, then we could have stuck it out. But the one “loophole” (from a tenant view) allows single building, less than 5 unit owners pretty much free will to do as they want. It’s kind of understandable, they want to protect the small businessperson. But it sucked for us.

We tell our Lawyer that we are going to keep the keys for a while in hopes of catching the feral cats. Once we turn in the keys we get the check.