Georgia Residential Lease Agreement 2020: Fill & Download for Free

Back when the Dome At America’s Center was under construction starting in late 1992 and continuing in 1993, 1994 and finishing in 1995 in the fall St. Louis didn’t have a team nor any real agreement with the Rams until January 1995. There were plenty of rumors that the Rams were to be moving but at first they tried to stay in Orange County or the Los Angeles region. However, with California being opposed to building sports teams using public funds this wasn’t terribly viable. Also, because of the 1991 and 1992 recession tens of thousands of good paying jobs evaporated in SoCal and then of course by 1994 Orange County declared bankruptcy because its county government spent too freely and of course there was no money to fund a new NFL stadium in Anaheim and Los Angeles was not particularly prepared to fund it either due to the vast amount of rebuilding after the 1992 LA Riots and all of the resulting damage as such.Plus, the Rams were a horrid franchise for much of the 1990s starting after their 30 to 3 blowout loss to the San Francisco 49ers in the 1989 NFC Championship game and after that they went from winning 11 games a year to only winning 5, 3, 5, 5, and 4 games the rest of their years in LA for a cumulative record of 22 wins and 58 losses during the years 1990 to 1994. Also, the machinations of Georgia Frontiere during the 1980s and early 1990s turned away a lot of fans including the fact that the team pretty much tanked during the early 1990s and most of the good talent they had either went elsewhere or got tired of management penny pinching.So in 1994 the Rams were exploring other cities to move to including Baltimore and St. Louis among others. Originally the owner Georgia Frontiere whose deceased husband Carroll Rosenbloom was the owner of the Baltimore Colts eventually traded the Colts for the Rams with one Robert Irsay who later moved the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in order to get a new stadium. This happened in 1984 when Baltimore lost its NFL team. However, Frontiere couldn’t get a deal cut with John Moag and the Baltimore city government about how the stadium would be paid for and who would be paying for what. So it left St. Louis to be the only candidate since it was the largest city at the time without an NFL franchise since the Cardinals left due to no new stadium in 1987 and went to Phoenix, AZ for the 1988 season.Therefore, St. Louis leaders were desperate to get an NFL team back into St. Louis but they were rebuffed in 1993 when Carolina in Charlotte and Jacksonville in Florida both got NFL expansion teams. In fact, St. Louis already had a name for the team, a stadium that would have opened in 1995 and were even selling memorabilia and things like shirts, jackets, hats, etc. In fact they were going to call them the St. Louis Stallions. However, they were rebuffed by the NFL and its commissioner Paul Tagliabue whose understudy was one Roger Goodell.So St. Louis was basically stuck with a 280 million dollar domed stadium with no team to put in the stadium for the future after 1995 when it was slated to be finished. Somewhat similar to what Indianapolis did starting in 1982 and 1983 with the Hoosier Dome being built with no team until the Baltimore Colts chose to move there in 1984 under the cover of darkness.Anyway, the Rams were also desperate to leave Anaheim Stadium at which their final game drew about 25,705 paying customers but looked more empty than that and St. Louis was going to be the city where they moved to for the 1995 season since Baltimore was out of the question and other cities not deemed large enough to be stable NFL markets.So Rams President John Shaw and Frontiere hammered out a lease agreement with the city of St. Louis and the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Bureau which held sway over the Dome At America’s Center since the city owned the facility being built with 68,000 seats and artificial turf field. The lease was supposed to be for 30 years from 1995 until at least 2024 but St. Louis gave the Rams plenty of leeway and provisions to change the lease especially if various terms were not meant. The dome was to be considered in the top 8 stadiums in the league out of the soon to be 32 teams in the NFL and for the lease to be honored it had to remain as one of the top 25 percent of NFL stadiums for amenities, luxury boxes, overall cleanliness and atmosphere, etc.Another part of the lease allowed for the Rams and the City of St. Louis to engage in arbitration by a third party in case the lease provisions were not honored. Furthermore, if the lease was not honored by the city of St. Louis, the Rams could vacate the lease after 20 years and after arbitration allowed them to move to a year to year lease.After varying levels of success including a couple of Super Bowl runs and a win in 1999 and another appearance in 2001, the stadium was still a viable facility but the city of St. Louis didn’t keep its bargain but Frontiere allowed the city to skate by letting them alter certain parts of the lease and payments to be made to the team for noncompliance of the lease. The city of St. Louis was essentially not keeping with the terms set forth in the lease signing in 1995 and the Rams had moved there for the 1995 season occupying the stadium with its first game on November 12, 1995. Some of the improvements made to the stadium were to the scoreboards, Field Turf and other small concessions including payments to the Rams ownership.Georgia Frontiere died in Los Angeles in January 2008 and the team ownership was retained by her heirs until they sold it to Enos Stanley Kroenke in 2010 who was already a 40 percent minority owner and had rights of first refusal to buy the team. After his years of owning partial ownership of the team Kroenke now owned 100 percent of the team and I am sure by 2010 was having a wandering eye already looking for a new location for the team.In 2011 and 2012, the Rams and the City of St. Louis entered arbitration over the upkeep and maintenance of the Edward Jones Dome as it was called by that point after being the TWA Dome from 1995 to 2000 and then to the Edward Jones Dome after 2001 to 2016. The Rams complained that the stadium hadn’t been kept as one of the top 8 stadiums in a league with 32 different venues. Also, there had been noncompliance by the city that had been largely allowed to skate on making improvements and modifications to the stadium. Also, there was quite a bit of consternation regarding the lighting pattern in the stadium being one of the darkest stadiums in the entire league especially after the Rams went to St. Louis Gold and Navy Blue colors from their former scheme of Royal Blue and Canary Yellow uniforms.Also what was brought up was that there wasn’t enough boxes, amenities, natural light and other things to attract things such as tailgaters and enhance the fan experience. In 2013 the arbitrator allowed the Rams as of 2014 to move to a year to year lease therefore breaking the 30 year lease as it found that the City had not kept up the stadium as it promised in the original lease of 1995. Furthermore, the arbitrators recommended that the city of St. Louis spend 700 million dollars to reconfigure the dome and allow for a new roof to be installed which would allow for more natural light and other amenities to be included as part of the agreement under arbitration.However, St. Louis having been hit hard with the 2007 to 2012 recession and losing more and more residents and businesses in the years prior balked at spending 700 million dollars to work on the facility and especially when it still owed about 150 million of the 300 million original cost of the facility. So the city balked at the ruling of the arbitrators and refused to put more money into the stadium during 2013 and 2014. This would have also rendered the stadium useless during the spring and summer construction season as it could not have been used for other civic events, conventions and things such as sports, church conferences, etc.Therefore the Rams were looking to be on the move again and since 2007 to 2011 the team won 15 games total and lost 65 after which it went through a succession of coaches and then hired Jeff Fisher who was experienced in leading a team under turmoil with formerly being the coach of the Houston Oilers who later played in Memphis in 1997 and then moved to Nashville in 1998 for the season. Therefore Fisher was brought in to not only try to improve the record which didn’t happen but also to provide some sort of insight into how to handle a team that was possibly going to be moving elsewhere in the not too distant future.While the Rams fortunes improved from being a horrid team to one that was somewhat competitive, overall attendance wasn’t really getting better having collapsed from about 2007 to 2011 and then improving in 2012 and 2013 but still only drawing about 56k a game in a 68k seat stadium. The team was still average to mediocre finishing 7–8–1 in 2012, 7–9 in 2013, 6–10 in 2014 and 7–9 in 2015.With all of the rumors later proven to be true that the team was going to be moving back to Los Angeles once a new stadium was designed and agreed upon, attendance bottomed out in 2014 and 2015 when it was increasingly apparent the team was on the way down the highway back west. Attendance for 2014 was about 58k and in 2015 when things really fell apart it fell to just over 50k for the season average.After Silent Stan Kroenke spent several years not talking to the St. Louis community and not talking to the media as well as public officials nor the fans, people started really turning on the owner and the team because they knew they were about to lose the team back to Los Angeles. A last minute campaign was formed in 2015 to try to build a new waterfront stadium for the Rams on the Mississippi River just east of the dome but it was already largely too late as Kroenke bought the old Hollywood Park site in Inglewood CA to build a new sports complex and stadium along with other shopping and residential apartment developments near the stadium.The City of St. Louis along with local economic development officials and local lawyers attempted to cobble together a plan to Save The Rams from being moved by spending about 1.1 billion dollars on the stadium of which the NFL would contribute either 200 million or 300 million which was argued about. However, the NFL and the Rams broke various league rules to prevent teams from picking up and moving and basically handled the whole relocation process with utter disdain for the attempts by St. Louis to build a new stadium and the 2nd one in 25 years to secure having an NFL team in St. Louis. Not to mention the various lies that were told about St. Louis and its metropolitan area to get out of the city and move the team back to Los Angeles. As well as having two other California teams in San Diego and Oakland also vying to move to Los Angeles at the same time as the Rams.However, the NFL didn’t follow through with its own relocation guidelines including allowing existing communities to negotiate with the owners to build a new facility including exhausting all possible options for retaining the team and building a new stadium. However, that wasn’t in the cards because the NFL wanted the Rams back in Los Angeles honesty and integrity of the relocation rules be damned. The NFL didn’t want the Oakland Raiders back into Los Angeles because of the Raiders fans and their rowdy reputation and the Chargers were largely an afterthought although they were allowed to join the Rams starting in 2020 at the new LA Stadium called now SoFi stadium.St. Louis unfortunately lost its NFL team, a great deal of prestige and some economics due to the loss of 10 NFL games in its downtown core along with lost tourism and convention business around the NFL season. However, they were fortunate in a way that they didn’t have to fork 1.1 billion dollars for a new waterfront stadium at a time when other more important needs such as schools, police, fire and infrastructure had to be address. Its quite a shame how the NFL, Rams and Kroenke and his underlings treated the city of St. Louis which really did try its best to retain the team but its probably good that St. Louis dodged a bullet and didn’t have to fork out hundreds of millions of dollars as much as a billion to build a waterfront stadium for outdoor events since it was not going to be a domed stadium.The NFL broke its own relocation bylaws and various other rules it instituted to prevent this sort of franchise free agency ironically after the Oakland Raiders chose to move to Los Angeles from 1982 to 1994 and then back to Oakland in 1995. However, that didn’t make one difference to the NFL owners, Commissioner Roger Goodell and the Rams ownership. Also, I might add that they trashed St. Louis going out the door instead of doing the honorable thing and just leaving the city by bashing its economic potential and various other socioeconomic issues saying that any team that located in St. Louis would end up losing its shirt. That was the most dishonorable thing to do to a city that supported the Rams relatively well especially years of sellouts from 1995 to 2007 and after lean years was building back up only to have the rug pulled out from under them again in 2013 to 2015. A shameful debacle by the Rams, NFL and NFL owners.This was basically an NFL to Los Angeles money grab with a very wealthy owner being able to build his own stadium at estimated cost of 2.5 billion in 2016 which has now increased to 5 billion dollars in 2020 due to California's high labor costs and insurance and materials. Not to mention that the NFL gets a new NFL Network facility, new NFL films facility and the Rams franchise increased from 930 million dollars in value in 2013 to about 3 billion dollars now in 2020 after the move from St. Louis back to Los Angeles. To this point, St. Louis still hasn't received a new team though it has been winning various legal challenges to the NFL and the Rams franchise. It's quite a shame that St. Louis didn't have any real opportunity to keep its team or at least be given an expansion team that wouldn't be torn away from the city and its great fanbase.

This is a very interesting question. I just received the information regarding changes to our contract forms provided by the Georgia Association of Realtors (GAR) for 2021, as well as the accompanying training videos provided by the general counsel for GARl. Cleaning and disinfecting a property before title transfer is not addressed in the standard language for residential purchase and sale agreements in Georgia. If this were a buyer concern, it would need to be addressed in a special stipulation added to the contract. I don’t deal in commercial property sales or leasing so I could not speak to that side of the business.We did add some language to our standard verbiage in 2020 addressing cleanliness but it dealt mostly with sellers who moved out and left garages full of junk, furniture left behind, and other issues like old cars left on the premises. This was occurring often enough so that we felt a need to add language making the seller responsible for the cost of removing items left behind.

Good morning Carla,Good question. After reading all posts, a few things came to mind.Good on you for keeping written documentation of previous agreements made with the landlord. I can't tell you how many times people “mis-remember” agreements.As for lead, there are federal laws around this. For example, if your building was built before 1978, your landlord is required by Federal Law to disclose this fact and give you a “Protecting your family from Lead” disclosure brochure. This brochure is about 8 pages. Also, he/she should have given you a document that disclosed this info and you should have signed it and it also would allowed you 10 days to test for lead at your expense if you selected that option. This is where a “counter-lawsuit” could come in (contact a real estate/land practicing attorney as I am not one).You mentioned that you “know” that you can with-hold rent for repairs. There are a few different answers for this. Yes and no. First, what does your lease/contract say? 2nd what does state/local laws say? Third, what other documentation from the landlord do you have allowing you to “alter” the building? Fourth, was the condition a result of the tenants fault? In the case that the landlord does not make “necessary” repairs ie leaky roof (assuming you didn’t intentionally/accidentally damage the roof somehow), if he/she refused to fix the condition, you could inform them that you will be doing it at his/her expense and deducting it from the rent. This probably varies from state-to-state, but you as the tenant may have to put that money into an escrow &/or show receipts for the repairs done. Why you may ask, well lets play devils advocate here. Say a tenant can’t pay rent and all of a sudden, they had a “necessary” repair and said they had to pay for it. In court, the landlord/landlord’s attorney could ask are you able to pay the full rent. You would reply yes. The attorney would then say can you prove that you have the rent to pay ie bank account, cash on hand, etc. If the answer is “no”, it starts to look suspicious that you don’t have the cash and are trying to get out of paying for rent and the attorney would make this his argument as to why you haven’t paid and rebutt your claim of “necessary” repairs. Again this is where a conversation with an attorney in your area is very valuable and worth every penny.Lastly, I would strongly recommend to you to call your local health department and city residential zoning/code enforcement inspector and report this to them. Of course with all of this, the city and health department will not “immediately” shut him down, they will give him/her warnings/issue citations of code infractions of which he/she will have a certain time to remedy the issues. If he/she fails to do so, then things will start to go down hill very quickly.The last thing I would encourage you to think about strongly is get an attorney to represent/protect you from this eviction/lawsuit from the landlord. What you don’t want on your record is an eviction. It will be that much harder for you to find a good home for you and your family.I wish you the best of luck and please let all of us know how this all turns out for you.