Condo Rental
If we have a lease agreement for an
apartment emailed to us but not yet
signed, is it a binding legal
document. Our, potential, landlord
wants to back out on an agreement
to lease a condo to us after they
have sent us the lease agreement. It
is, as yet, unsigned. Do we have any
legal recourse?
Re: Condo Rental
A lawyer would need to know where you stood in the overall negotiation process to be sure. Forming a contract requires an offer by one party followe by an acceptance by the other. The e-mail was probably an offer, which you could accept by signing and sending back. Electronic signatures, by the way, are usually acceptable these days if it looks from the e-mail and the surrounding circumstances that the sender intended it to serve in place of a pen-and-ink signature.
If it were only an offer, the maker of the offer (the landlord) could retract the offer by notice to you before you sent back your acceptance. This is favorable to the landlord.
On the other hand, it is possible that a previous communication from you to the landlord would be the offer, so that the landlord’s e-mail we’re discussing would be his acceptance of your offer if said e-mail were electronically signed by him when he sent it.
On balance, and without any information about a prior communication which would be your offer, I think the landlord would prevail and you wouldn’t have recourse. But, as I explained, the posture of pre-contract negotiations seems to govern, and I don’t have full facts.
Bryan Whipple
Bryan R. R. Whipple, Attorney at Law
P O Box 318
Tomales, CA 94971-0318