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My phone buzzed at me while I was on my lunch break.
“Oh! It’s the number from the listing,” I muttered as I opened my phone.
Jesse Delaney at your service. Finalizing the lease agreement. I’ll send it over asap.
It was a short, sweet text. To the point. I appreciated that. I figured I should see if he needed any other information from me before sending the contract.
Do you want to run a credit or income check?
As I ate my sandwich and waited for Jesse Delaney to respond, I pulled up my current lease. My current work had been super flexible when I told them I wanted to move, and they hadn’t even insisted on working my final two weeks. My supervisor told me that my resignation actually came at a super convenient time when they were taking on new staff and entering a slower month where fewer surgeries and appointments had been scheduled.
However, I still needed to tell my current landlord that I would be leaving. I hadn’t wanted to do that until I found a place in Lantana, but now that was all taken care of, I had to give noticethat I intended to vacate my lease and pay any remaining rent for the month. Thankfully, I was on a month-to-month rent.
Another buzz pulled me out of searching for the information I needed. I checked my phone.
No. Month-to-month or 12 month? Could do something in-between if that’s better?
I smiled. I took this as final confirmation that I had gotten the rental, which was wonderful. If I could make it to the meeting with Maria, then there would be no reason for me to worry about how much the rent on the building would be.
Is there a price difference?
Now, I took a good look at my contract. It appeared all I needed to do was pay any rent left for the month – which there wasn’t since I had gotten in the habit of paying my rent in full when it was due, despite there being payment plans – and write up a notice of intent to vacate the apartment and take it into the management office. They could start showing the apartment as soon as I was out of there, or as soon as the contract was up.
Whichever happened to come first.
No. So I guess month-to-month makes sense.
Mr. Delaney seemed pretty new to the rental market, but the next few texts with him were all about the rental process and what he was expecting. He was more than happy to let me pay until I needed to leave so long as I gave him notice. That sounded great to me.
It was exactly the same situation as what was going on here. Except a bit more personal.
After making sure Mr. Delaney didn’t have any other questions, I started typing up a letter of intent to vacate. I had never had to write up one of these before, as my other leases had all had a definitive end date. Then again, that was the case usually with student housing. As soon as the semester was up, or the year, one moved or renewed the lease.
Once I had the text telling me that Mr. Delaney had sent me the new rental agreement, I put my vacate notice on hold for a while. I wanted to get a good look at the rental agreement and see what he had put together.
It was a crude PDF file that I was supposed to print out, fill out, and then scan in and email back to him. It was becoming increasingly common for people my age to not own printers. However, thanks to my beading business, mine was up and running so I could easily print out shipping invoices and other labels.
The moment I got home from work, I printed the lease, and got to work filling in the rental agreement.
It was a pretty rough agreement, hitting all the legal marks without much fanfare. It laid out the terms of the rental, the rent that I’d be paying, and what that rent entitled me to. It also stated that the deposit was due before moving in, which I had expected. I could afford that. And once the deposit from this place was returned, I would be able to put that into my savings or towards some of the other expenses that came with moving out.
I finished filling in the rental agreement, signed it, scanned it, and returned it to Mr. Delaney. He didn’t respond right away. That shouldn’t have surprised me—I’m assuming he worked a job—but I definitely was curious. I’d be sharing a house with this man. I’d have to know his schedule at some point—if not because he told me, but because I had simply observed his movements as the days went on. I’d always fancied myself a bit of a people-reader. Almost a detective. I enjoyed being able to know what people needed without them asking for it, and in the same way, I liked being able to figure out details of someone’s life simply by the clothes they wore or the books they read.
“All right. Where was I with my notice to vacate?” I muttered as I turned my attention back to finishing up the details that were needed to make the move as smooth as possible.
As I glanced over what I’d drafted, I thought about what I knew about my new landlord. From what I had figured out so far, he wasn’t much of a people person. He appeared to prefer email and text over being called, but that could also be because of his job— whatever it was. I wondered what he did for a living and what kind of people he invited around the house.
Then again, the ad had said that the landlord was hardly home and that he thought it a tragedy that no one got to use the house while he was away because it’s beautiful.
I pursed my lips as I continued to write up the notice.
As much as I wanted to take this rental on blind faith that Mr. Delaney wasn’t some kind of creep, I decided that I should look him up to double check. People often say that someone’s voice is a good indication of what they’re like in their everyday life. He’d sounded nice on the phone, but I was already running his name through various database searches.
While most people just look at someone’s social media, I prefer to check the ‘lists.’ You can’t really tell much about someone through their fishing photos, but if they’ve ended up registered on one of the public criminal databases, then you actually know something.
None of my searches turned up any results. I pulled up a final page where I typed in his name for a rudimentary background check.
No results.
