How to Evict a Tenant Without a Lease

Hi, welcome to another tips for landlords and property managers video brought to you by Fast Evict.com Law Group. On today’s episode, we’re going to cover how to evict a tenant without a written, signed lease. Please remember, the contents of this video shouldn’t be considered legal advice. Please contact us if you have any questions.

How do you get in a no lease situation?
First, we’ll go over a few examples on how you could get in this situation in the first place. This way, you could watch out for warning signs and try to avoid it altogether.

Verbal Lease
The most common way landlords find themselves in this situation is when they rent out a spare bedroom, apartment or house to a friend or family member without ever signing a formal rental agreement. You very much still have an agreement between you and your tenant which is typically referred to as an oral or verbal agreement.

Subletting
Subletting can lead you to have this type of situation. This happens when the tenant you originally rented to passes off the rental to someone else and this new person is not listed on either the existing lease or a new one.

Inheriting tenants
This occurs when you purchase rental property with tenants already in it and these tenants either don’t have a lease or the previous owner doesn’t provide the leases to you.

Can you evict a tenant without a lease in California?
The short answer is yes, of course you can. In fact, a tenancy without a written, signed lease is very much like having a signed lease since the California State Civil Code mentions that these tenancies default to a month-to-month like contract among other things.

How to evict a tenant without a lease
The first thing you should consider is not doing anything illegal during the eviction process. This will only either delay the eviction or get you in trouble. Some things you should avoid are:
Changing the locks and locking out your tenant
Shutting off utilities to the rental property
Harassing or threatening your tenant
Make illegal rent increases or apply other types of fees
You shouldn’t retaliate vs your tenant
What are legal reasons you can evict your tenant without a lease?
You can start a legal eviction for the following reasons:
Any violation of the month-to-month contract established in California Civil Code.
Use of illegal drugs or illegal activity on the rental property
Tenant causing property damage
Tenant fails to pay rent
Unauthorized pets or guests
The landlord is removing the property off the rental market
The landlord or a family member is moving into the property
The first step in evicting a tenant without a lease is to serve your tenant a notice. This could be a 3 or 15 day notice to pay or quit or a 30 or 60 days notice to vacate. It’s important to use the correct notice otherwise your case could be drastically delayed.

Once the notice has been served to your tenant and the days allowed to vacate the premises and the tenant has failed to comply, step 2 is filing an unlawful detainer in court.

The rest of the procedure can vary, just as in eviction cases with a written lease and depend heavily on delay tactics implemented by the tenant and their council.

Have you been in a situation where you had to evict a tenant without a lease? How did it go? Let us know in the comments. Please like, share and subscribe to our channel if you have found this video useful. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you on the next one!