The internet is littered with “free” lease forms and low cost residential lease forms can be purchased from the local office supply store. The trouble is the old maxim “you get what you pay for” usually applies to leases, especially in municipalities like Chicago, Evanston, and Oak Park that have local municipal landlord tenant laws. Even leases that state that they are designed for a particular city or state can be deficient and almost none of them are fully complete. Worse yet, many form leases leave landlords with obligations that are worse than the required legal limit (for example, one popular Chicago lease form says a landlord must serve a thirty day notice for nonpayment of rent when the law would really only require a five day notice!).
A lease contract is only complete if it is specifically tailored to a particular landlord’s set of facts. No lease contract is perfect. However, smart landlords can reduce their exposure with a well drafted and well thought out lease. Just about every lease form on the market requires at least some modification, addition, or subtraction to suit a particular residential leasing scenario.
Illinois landlords, especially landlords in towns with local landlord tenant ordinances, who merely rely upon a pre-printed form without considering all of the various modification options and municipal ordinance requirements take their leasing business in their own hands and can make costly mistakes.
Reda | Ciprian | Magnone, LLC drafts residential (and commercial) leases for our landlord clients. We take the time to make sure that our landlords consider many of the important, but overlooked, contractual terms that can be dictated in a written lease.
Feel free to contact us or give us a call at 773-399-1122 to discuss the possibility of engaging Reda | Ciprian | Magnone, LLC to assist with drafting a lease that works. We draft leases at our hourly rate of $295 per hour. A typical lease drafting exercise for a single unit or single family home usually takes between two and a half and four hours depending on the client’s needs. A typical lease form for a multi-unit building generally costs a bit more.