How a New App Could Make It Easier to Break Your Lease

Here’s the situation: You’re six months into a one-year lease, you just landed a job out of state, and you need to move out of your apartment—fast. One way or another you’ll have to break your lease, and no matter where you live, that’ll cost you.

Depending on the terms of your lease and the real estate laws in your jurisdiction, your landlord could charge you an early termination fee, keep your security deposit, or hold you responsible for rent until a new tenant moves in. It’s impossible to generalize about the costs, since the laws vary widely from state to state. New York City, for example, is especially hard to navigate. The contract law principle of “mitigation of damages,” which requires landlords to minimize their losses before suing tenants, doesn’t apply to residential leases in New York. Instead of trying their damnedest to find a new tenant, landlords “can sit there and sue you for all the rent that would have come due under the lease and make no effort to re-rent the apartment,” says Samuel Himmelstein, a New York tenant lawyer. “Landlords have great bargaining power in these situations.”