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Can you tell me about the "military clause" in a lease? If a potential tenant wants to rent and requests one, is it required?
A potential tenant has been evacuated from Pakistan embassy as non-essential personnel (dependent family of military posted soldier, who stays)
However, if the embassy reopens, the family has about one month to return to Pakistan, and they want to be able to get out of the lease w/ one month's notice under a "military clause." If it doesn't reopen, they might stay 2 years.
The terms of our lease are 60 days notice to move, another 2 months' liability for rent if the place is not rented.
Do we have the option to refuse to give her a lease or have her sign the conditions in our own lease, or does "the military clause" override all other binding agreements?
A military clause is a lease clause that gives a member of the US Armed Forces the right to break a lease on short notice if that is required by military necessity - typically due to a deployment or a permanent change of station.
You are under no legal obligation to offer a military clause. However, those who are in the military and might otherwise rent from your are often forbidden by their organizations to sign a lease at a location that won't provide a military clause.
The reason is that the military is very demanding of its personnel in their dealings with civilian business people, and insists that they obey all provisions of their contracts. A military person who is subject to deployment would therefore find themselves with a potential conflict, in that they could not deploy due to their contract with you. This also applies to families; for many locations of course the family deploys with the person who is in the service.
Consequently, those who could be deployed are generally forbidden from renting without a military clause.
Now, if I were you, and these were military dependents (not civil servants or anyone else) I would jump at the chance to rent to them. If you have a problem, you just go to the Commanding Officer and it gets fixed.
I had several military tenants when Desert Storm began. They all were deployed, but all of them elected to not exercise their military clauses because they didn't expect to be gone long. For awhile, rents arrived sporadically from those people, but I went with it because, after all, we were fighting a war. One tenant, though, became a problem. She flew C-5As back and forth between the States and Saudi Arabia, and the rents just stopped arriving. Finally, I called her CO and asked about it. I put it very politely, because I knew what she was doing, and didn't want to be too difficult to deal with, but I needed the money.
Her rent arrived like clockwork after that.
When you rent to military personnel, the only risk you run is that they will get deployed.
About the Author: Jim Locker is a technical guy who has done a lot of real estate investing and landlording. The experiences he writes about and advice he gives are either first hand, or in answer to specific questions posed by others. He is commonly known as jiml8 around the internet.
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