What if you signed your rental agreement but your roommate won't?

Once you have signed your rental agreement and returned it to the landlord, it is a legally binding and enforceable contract. Your landlord can sue you if you fail to perform up to its terms. But when is a rental agreement considered signed? Suppose you are looking for apartments for next year for you and your roommate. You find one that you really like, and you figure that your roommmate will like it too. You and your landlord sign a rental agreement, and you take a copy of it to your roommate to sign as well. In the meantime, your roommate has had a change of heart and wants to move to Austria to become a professional mountain climber. He refuses to sign. Your landlord wants to sue you under the rental agreement you did sign.

If the rental agreement was for you and your roommate and your roommate refused to sign it, then the rental agreement will not constitute an enforceable contract without the signature of the second person.

For example, in the case of Chapin v. Weisman (1948), 79 N.E.2d 668, a landlord (Weizman) gave a rental agreement for some commercial property to a tenant (Chapin) for Tenant Chapin and his partner (Longacre) to sign. Tenant Chapin signed it and then went to get his partner Longacre's signature, but Partner Longacre refused. Landlord Weizman tried to sue the Tenant Chapin, relying upon his copy of the partially signed rental agreement.

The Eighth District Court of Appeals in Cuyahoga County held that the rental agreement was not enforceable against Tenant Chapin and reasoned as follows:

The lease was prepared in Mr. Glick's office and ran to two persons, Chapin and Longacre, as lessees. Chapin took one of the copies of the lease with him but afterwards returned the lease saying that Longacre would not sign. If at that time the position of the parties had been reversed, that is if Chapin desired to take up the lease alone and Weizman was unwilling to do so on the ground that he had planned a lease with both Chapin and Longacre as lessees and not with Chapin alone, would any one contend that Weizman would have been bound? Clearly Chapin would have had no right to hold Weizman to the lease upon his failure to produce Longacre's signature. If Weizman was not bound neither was Chapin and until Longacre's signature was secured, neither Weizman as lessor nor Chapin as one of the lessees was obligated under the lease. Id. at 7-8

So if your roommates will not sign onto a rental agreement that you have already signed, and the intent of the parties was that such persons would sign with you, then the landlord will not be able to enforce the rental agreement against those who did sign. It's best not to sign anything until everyone else has signed on as well. Just to be on the safe side, if all roommates can't sign at the same time, then hand write above your signature that the lease will be invalid unless all other roommates sign it too.

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Disclaimer: The information provided on ohiolandlordtenant.com is not intended to be legal advice, but general information related to legal issues commonly encountered. The law in your state may be different from that discussed here. The facts in your case may be different too.

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