Subleasing apartments

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Alabama
1

Can someone give me some info on how subleasing works, and some steps you have to go through.

Do they check your credit and treat the sublease like a standard lease (i.e. income, 3 or 4 times rent for guarantor, etc.)?

Also is it easier to obtain an apartment through sublease or applying individually?

2

Do you want a sublease for just a few months or for an entire school year?

Someone else will chime in, but usually sub-leasing is available as an option only for those months when the original renter/student is not on campus themselves, either for summer break or is on a co-op assignment. I doubt you would be able to get a sub-lease agreement that would match up perfectly with an entire school year.

3

Good morning!
I asked our Off-Campus Resources team to chime in on this subject for you.

Hope this helps,
Janine

Every property has different policies and procedures in place when dealing with subleases and relets for their apartments or houses. The ideal way to find out about sublease and relet policies would be to call the property in which your student lives and they can tell you the exact procedure.

  1.   The original tenant typically pays a fee to the property to have their lease taken over. Once a new tenant is interested, the new tenant pays a fee to take over the lease. These types of transactions are known as relets and are becoming more and more popular because it protects the original tenant and the new tenant coming in. If a property has this procedure, then they usually send someone in to clean the apartment before the new tenant moves in. In this case, the original is typically released fully from the lease and the new tenant is now responsible for the rest of the term of the lease.

  2.   The traditional sublease is that the new tenant subleases from the original tenant and takes the apartment “as is”. This can be fine if there are no pets or the original tenant was a clean person. If this is the way your property handles a sublease, I would be sure that you understand everything that you are responsible for before moving out and finding someone else to sublease. You don’t want to be hit with late fees or other deposits that you were not aware of.

If you have other questions regarding subleases, please contact Whitney Sewell at wmsewell@sa.ua.edu.