First as a disclaimer, I am licensed in NY, not ON, so I don't know the governing law. I presume this is a fixed term lease?
Well, normally, when someone wants to get out of a lease, you typically find an assignee, and then present him/her to the landlord. They have no incentive to find one for you, I've never even heard someone try to do what you're doing. What you should do is find an assignee, and since the lease is silent on assigning the lease, I presume, though look into it a little more, if silent, at least in NY, that means you are free to assign the lease, though there sometimes is a withholding of consent provision in caselaw, where they can only withhold consent for commercially reasonable reasons. Ie, you get a homeless person, or someone with no money, then it would be commercially reasonable to refuse your proposed assignee. So what you should do is find someone else, then present them to the landlord.
If you stopped your payments, you would breach the lease, and then you would most likely trigger an accelleration clause where all the remaining rent would become immediately due, the the LL would probably have a duty to mitigate damages, by finding a new tenant, but you will still get sued, would owe money, and if you don't respond, you would get a default judgment entered against you, you would get bad credit. In short, find someone else.
001 said:
I have leased a small office that I have not used for over three months. I informed my land lord, in December, that I no longer needed the office and would like him to find another tenant. Three month have passed and he has not yet found anyone else, meanwhile I keep paying him the rent every month. At this point I get the feeling that he simply lacks the motivation to release since I continue to make the regular payments on time.
What are the legal implications if I were to stop paying him. As far as the lease contract goes there is no clause dealing with early termination. Further more the lease is not in my name but rather in my companies name.
That the lease is in your company's name isn't really that big of a deal, you might have something in the lease that says you are personally liable, or if you don't run your company with correct formalities, they could pierce the corporate veil and sue you, but your company must have the assets to cover the damages for the LL, so you will still have to pay.
Any help on this matter would be appreciated.
