No Pre-termination Rent if a 30 Day Notice is Used.

What Happened:

The Landlord filed a complaint to evict the Tenant from a business property. Years earlier, the Landlord and Tenant had made a verbal agreement. The Tenant rented part of the building to run a restaurant. The rent started at $1,200 per month, plus a percentage of restaurant sales, and later went up to $1,500 per month.

The Landlord gave the Tenant a 30-day notice to move out. The Tenant didn’t pay rent for February and didn’t leave by the deadline. The Landlord claimed he was losing $116.66 each day the Tenant stayed.

The Landlord asked the court to:

• Give back possession of the property,

• Order the Tenant to pay unpaid rent,

• Pay daily damages for staying past the deadline,

• And cancel the rental agreement.

Legal Arguments:

The Tenant argued that the Landlord shouldn’t have asked for rent from before the move-out notice ended. In California, if a Tenant doesn’t pay rent, the Landlord must usually give a 3-day notice to pay or leave. Only then can the Landlord ask for unpaid rent in an eviction case. In this case, the Landlord gave a 30-day notice, not a 3-day notice.

The court agreed that the Landlord was wrong to ask for that earlier rent in this kind of eviction. But the court also said that mistake didn’t cancel the entire case. That part could have been removed or challenged separately.

Final Decision:

The court decided:

• The Landlord had the right to ask for the property back with a 30-day notice.

• Asking for extra rent was a mistake, but it didn’t ruin the whole case.

• The trial court should have let the Tenant cancel the judgment without trial.

So, the appeals court canceled the judgment and sent the case back to the trial court to continue properly.

Short: if the jury or judge decides the Landlord is right and the Tenant is wrong, the Landlord gets the property back. If the Tenant broke the lease, didn’t follow the rental agreement, or didn’t pay rent, and the right notice was given, the court can also officially end the rental agreement.

The court or jury can also decide how much money the Tenant should pay the Landlord for staying in the property illegally or forcing their way in. If the eviction is based on not paying rent, the court can also say how much unpaid rent is owed. (Saberi v. Bakhtiari (1985) 169 Cal.App.3d 509, 513 [215 Cal.Rptr. 359].)