Sub-Lease

A sub-lease situation could arise in a fixed-term tenancy where the tenancy agreement is supposed to last for a period such as 6 months, a year, or longer. If the tenant can no longer live in the premises for the whole period, a sub-lease can provide a way in which the property can be rented to someone else for part of the term. The original tenant will need to be clear about who the landlord is and what rights and obligations the new tenant will have.

The Residential Tenancies Act requires a tenant to get the written permission of a landlord to sublet. If a tenant makes a request to sublet, you can only refuse on reasonable grounds and cannot charge a fee or ask for anything for giving consent. If you do not answer the request to sublet within 14 days, you are taken to have agreed to the request.

In order to be a sub-lease, the agreement between the original tenant and the new tenant must be different from the agreement between you and the original tenant. (If it is exactly the same agreement, it will be an assignment, not a sub-lease.) For this reason, a sub-lease will often state the same rights and obligations as the first agreement, but the length of the lease will be one day less than the original lease.

Benefits given to a tenant by the Act cannot be excluded by the tenancy agreement. This would seem to suggest that if a tenancy agreement stated that a tenant was not allowed to sublet, that term of the agreement would be void.

A sublease can occur in two ways: :

• Original tenant and new tenant live together
• Original tenant moves out and new tenant moves in

January 2006