Standard Form Of Condominium Apartment Lease: Fill & Download for Free

A lease agreement is a legal document outlining the rental terms for either a commercial or residential property between the property owner, also known as the landlord or lessor, and the renter, also known as the tenant or lessee. These documents can also be called apartment leases or lease forms.Creating a thorough and effective lease agreement is very important as it protects all parties involved throughout the length of the lease. While many landlords begin with boilerplate lease agreements, the language and terms are negotiable by all parties until signed, at which point the lease agreement becomes a legally binding document.Types of LeasesPeople can lease all manner of property, including items like cars and boats. Most frequently, however, lease agreements are used for real estate, both residential and commercial. A few of the most common types of leases include:Commercial lease: Commercial property like offices.Condominium lease: A residential property that shares some building amenities with other tenants.Family member lease: For family members leasing property.Hunting lease: To use private property for hunting.Lease-to-own lease: Provides the option to purchase the property from the landlord.Month-to-month lease: A type of short-term lease agreement.Parking space lease: To use for parking a vehicle on private property.Room lease: Leasing a single room within a home.Standard lease: Used for single-family homes, apartments, and other residential properties.Sublet lease: A lease created by the renter for adding a renter to the lease.Short-term lease: Used for short-term leases of unusual periods.Weekly lease: Used often for vacation properties.

“How does living in America work? Are apartments rented only or purchased? If rented only then do I have to pay monthly or annually? Can I know everything and every information related to living in New York, apartment and expenses?”There is much variation.Apartments can be rented or purchased. (When you buy an apartment, it is usually called a “condominium”). Rentals can be by the week, month, or year. Purchase can be for cash, or with a mortgage loan from a bank.When you rent a nice apartment (not in a slum, not rat-infested, not with criminals for neighbors), you typically sign a lease for a year. You pay a security deposit before you move in. Sometimes you must also pay one or two months rent ahead of moving in. After that you pay at the beginning of every month. When you have one or two months left on your lease, your landlord will probably offer to renew the lease (if you have been a trouble-free tenant), usually at a slightly higher rent but not always.To rent or buy a nice apartment, you generally need to pass a background check. Disqualifications include any criminal record, any record of evictions or lawsuits with past landlords, any bad credit history that would indicate you won’t be able to afford the rent. In New York you will probably have to pay the landlord to conduct the background check (perhaps around $35) - that is because he has to pay to access your criminal and credit records.If by “New York” you mean New York City, be warned: apartments rents and condominium prices are extremely high by the standards of the rest of the USA, there is not much availability, you will have to search long and hard for a nice place unless you can afford many $1,000’s per month in rent. New York City has “rent control” - local laws micro-manage the rental housing market, dictating what landlords can charge and theoretically giving tenants many rights against landlords. In practice, it is a complicated, frustrating system that rewards insiders, long-term residents, and people who are willing to be in constant conflict with their neighbors, landlords, and/or tenants.The rest of New York State is much more reasonable.You can search for rentals on several big listing sites, such as Zillow, Apartments.com, ApartmentGuide.com“Public housing” is a separate category - government owned and managed with subsidized, below-market rents. It usually isn’t advertised, because it has long waiting lists. There are often maximum income limits. It will often collect criminals and assorted lower-class people who can’t pass the background checks for nice apartments. If you look at crime rate maps, you often find public housing complexes have hugely more crime than surrounding neighborhoods. I won’t absolutely say “never live in public housing”, but be aware of what you may be getting into. In America, you often see references to “Section 8” housing. That means, government subsidized rents aimed at poor people. Again, you may have more criminally inclined neighbors than you would like. Many nice apartments advertise “No Section 8 Tenants”.Also, see: Matthew Park Moore's answer to How much money per month is needed for a single person to live comfortably in the cheapest areas of the USA?

The furthest I had ever traveled from New York prior to going to Asia was Hawaii. That is about half way to Singapore. As my long flight approached Changi Airport, the midnight darkness made it difficult to identify the strange lights below. The lights came from ships, hundreds of them, awaiting entry into the port of Singapore. The sheer number of vessels was notable. And the ships were lit with white florescence, a popular method of lighting in South East Asia, compared to the yellow incandescent style more present in the west.First impressions are enduring, such as the bumpy runway that greeted me in Manila when I first arrived in Asia from New York ten years ago. While Singapore is a beautiful, orderly, gleaming city of skyscrapers and gardens filled with fashionable ladies dressed in a sexy tropical style, the memories of the many ships lit with white lights are what is first retrieved when my memory impulses are prompted with the stimulus: Singapore.(From the crowd at The Singapore Formula One)Attached to my first arrival in Ho Chi Minh City, still Saigon for me back then, is a memory so complex a succinct description is elusive. At the time I did not understand the Vietnamese language. However, I understood when the flight attendant said “Than Son Nhut,” the name of Saigon’s international airport.I grew up in an era when images of a war in a far away land appeared nightly on TV. Hearing “Than Son Nhut,” while viewing the distinct orange rooftops of suburban Ho Chi Minh City under the wing of my approaching plane are the visual and auditory anchors that were attached to my adolescent memories of turbulent times. Those troubling memories were most present as my plane drew near Vietnam. I was wondering if I may have made a mistake by coming. Within forty-eight hours of my arrival in Vietnam, the warmth I experienced from the people of Saigon - seventy percent of whom were not born prior to the war’s end - made my memories obsolete as a harbinger.Bangkok caught my attention with billboards. Dominant in my early memories of Bangkok are thoughts of me riding into town from the airport in a hired town car. My Bangkok expat buddies, and certainly the Thai folks I know, viewed my propensity for hiring a Toyota Camry and driver for my ride into town as extravagant. AOT kiosks, where you can hire a chauffeured Camry for about forty US dollars, flank the exit from immigration and customs at Suvarnabhumi Airport. For comparison, a metered taxi cost about six bucks. My New York City brain knew of fifty-five dollar rides from New York City airports with rude New York cabbies on the other side of a bullet proof partition expecting a big tip as well. So a pleasant ride in the back seat of a properly air conditioned Camry driven by a uniformed, English speaking driver informed about and properly oriented to Bangkok for twelve hundred baht was a bargain in my eyes. The relaxing ride along the ten lane superhighway leaving Suvarnabhumi Airport, lined with gigantic billboards touting all manner of expensive, modern goodies, reminded me that Bangkok had indeed become a first world city, or at least she was trying hard to be one.I often write essays for Quora and then go searching for an appropriate question to which I can attach my story. But I am now searching for an appropriate metaphor to describe how this particular question from Quora impacted me. Bludgeoned comes to mind. I must write an answer for this question. It was not my essay that went looking for a question this time. The question bludgeoned me into a response.I will surpass one million views on Quora soon after my answer to this question is made public. The one million mark is an arbitrary measure with little practical value. But it is a club many here on Quora hold as meaningful and important. And while I told myself not to get caught up in false, online hoopla around the one million views thing, I failed.I am delighted, thank you.Now, back to the question: “Which is a nicer place to live, Singapore, Bangkok or Saigon”?Ten years ago I landed in Singapore with a four month work contract. I am still in Asia, and I have lived happily in Singapore, Bangkok and Saigon. The past ten years have been among the happiest years of my life in many ways. My one decade anniversary, combined with the advent of one million views on Quora, compels me to write a Quoran Opus Dei in response to this question.Well, okay, that is a bit overboard. What follows is a retrospective on a decade in Singapore, Saigon and Bangkok. Be forewarned, the actual answer to the question is “it depends”. I will simply tell you of my experiences and you can make up your own mind.Singapore:In olden days long ago, a Malaysian Prince, Sang Nila Utama, went hunting on Temask, a small island at the southern tip of the Malaysian Kingdom. He was startled by a lion rustling in the bushes and subsequently named the tiny island Singapura: The Lion City.Ah, yeah, no, there are not any lions on Singapore. You would be hard pressed to convince me there ever were. I have a different theory.Malaysian Princes, like princes anywhere with any clout, travel with a entourage. Prince Sang Nila Utama had come up short on his expensive outing, failing to kill even so much as a squirrel. When startled by rustling in the bushes - most likely one of his retinue taking a leak - quick thinking sycophants made up a story.“Tell him it is a lion. He can go back to the palace and tell all his concubines he was nearly killed by a lion”.Hence Singapore!Ah, yeah, I made that up. But it makes as much sense as the Legend of Singapura.At first, I did not like Singapore. It’s hot! The weather is consistent: hot and humid with afternoon thunder showers. Except in the rainy season when it is hot and humid with rain all day. When asked about the most important thing available to him when converting Singapore from a rough and tumble trading port full of opium gangs and prostitutes into the urban miracle it now is, visionary founding father Lee Kuan Yew replied: “air conditioning”.I quickly learned how to navigate the city. I moved closer to the MRT, a light rail commuter system that can take you to most places in the city, including the airport. Downtown Singapore is also interconnected with underground passageways I call hallway malls. For lovers of shopping, many big expensive shopping malls are interconnected by hallway malls. One can learn how to traverse much of the area Google Maps calls the “Downton Core” of Singapore using the MRT and hallway malls, venturing out into the tropical heat only when close to your desired destination, which unless it is a park, will be air conditioned. Even the giant ferris wheel Singaporeans call the “Singapore Flyer” dominating the skyline is luxuriously air conditioned. You can hire one of the large cars of the circular attraction for a upscale dinner party.“Upscale” is a key word here. Singapore ain’t cheap. Singapore’s Changi Airport is a hub for many airlines . If a frugal traveler were to find themselves on a layover in Changi Airport wondering about places to visit cheaply during their brief time on the ground, stay in the airport. Changi is an attraction unto itself. I knew Singaporeans who would travel there for dinner. The three terminals (a fourth opening soon) are loaded with good restaurants and food courts. Additionally, Changi has a botanical garden, a butterfly garden, and outdoor park, a free movie theater showing Hollywood films and several world class art installations all free.Long before Instagram influencers began renting Hollywood mansions for a day and pretending to live in them so they could get a good snapshot, I rented a high perfomance Lamborghini from a counter in the lobby of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Casino. Accompanied by a guide, I drove the streets of Singapore where the annual Formula One race takes place. Afterwards a hot Asian bimbo in a spandex mini-skirt posed alongside of the sports car with me for a few snap shots. The whole affair was an expensive outing, extravagant for sure.Ha! Riff raff by Singapore standards, have you seen “Crazy Rich Asians”?There are folks in Singapore whose Lamborghini would be their weekend car. In my four years in Singapore I once conjectured that Singapore could be measured in investment bankers per square meter. The city is a place of high finance, banking and many other enterprises high up on the food chain of world economics.My home was in Geylang, a rented condominium steps away from the Paya Lebar MRT station. If you were to ask a Singaporean if their city had a bad neighborhood, they might say Geylang. That is only because it is the part of town where many of the migrant workers from Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Vietnam and The People’s Republic of China (colloquially PRC) congregate.Within the streets of Geylang, legal brothels, or not so legal curbside ladies, happily take the hard earned money from the migrants as well. In reality, I felt more safe walking along Geylang Rd than I would along many New York City streets after dark. And Geylang Rd was host to a variety of ethnic restaurants and food stalls where you could get an awesome Malaysian prati rota (a crepe) for breakfast, a Vietnamese Banh Mi for lunch (sandwich) and an authentic Sichuan style meal for dinner, seasoned with a spice that makes your mouth numb (it’s better than it sounds). Geylang was a hodgepodge of people working in construction, housekeeping, nannies and hookers. Bad?Yeah, it indeed was bad, you know Bad.Catharsis comes in strange ways. There is a McDonalds on the ground floor of The Raffles City Shopping Center where I worked. Raffles’ Mickey D’s is a busy place with a small collection of tables arrayed on the sidewalk adjacent to the mall. I was sitting at one of the coveted tables when I saw a well dressed woman leave her expensive designer handbag on the empty table next to me. It was the lady’s way of claiming temporary ownership of the table while she went into the restaurant to get some grub.I grew up in Brooklyn, New York; I love my hometown. But it can be a dangerous place. I internalized an effective intuition for such places, call it an urban radar for danger. That skill-set had become automatic, unconscious and intuitive for me. For a few weeks leading up to my observation of the lady with the handbag at Mc Donalds, I had an undefined sense that something was amiss with me.There may be other places in the world where a woman could leave a six hundred dollar handbag unattended on an outdoor table. But there are surely not many such places. Even in the best of New York neighborhoods, the lady’s bag would have disappeared in a New York minute. In the experience of watching a woman nonchalantly leave something valuable unattended in a crowded public place, I realized what had been amiss for me. In Singapore I did not need my urban danger radar. For the first time in my memory, I could let my guard down. I was safe.Vietnam“This country sucks”.The speaker was Ed a former US Marine and combat veteran of the American war in Vietnam. I was sitting with Ed at a sidewalk table near Bui Vien Street, a crowded tourist trap in Ho Chi Minh City known as the backpacker area. I asked an obvious question.“If you think this country sucks, why are you here”?The superficial answer I got from Ed was about money. Vietnam was a cheap place for him to live on his disability pension. Ed was saving money to buy a cabin in Montana where he could live off the grid. Old Ed was a colorful guy. But there are other countries where an American pensioner could live cheaply. Why Vietnam?Ed never expressed this, but I believe Ed was seeking resolution for some kind of psychic wound incurred during the Vietnam War. It is not pure conjecture on my part. Ed’s disability is PTSD. The US government supports Ed due to his psychic wound. The memory of that conflict so long ago is still present in the minds of my generation. US politicians running for office must still respond to how they behaved regarding their military service during that era. But even more tellingly, when I was checking for the proper spelling of the name of Saigon’s airport I typed “Than Son Nhut” into Google. I received many pages of links to stories about the Tet offensive, a battle that took place in 1968 involving an attack on the airport. My point is many older Americans have not really resolved the Vietnam War. (A story about Ed)The Vietnamese have moved on.About 70% of the population of Vietnam was born after the war ended. While young Vietnamese people have learned of the sacrifices endured by their parents and grand parents, they have no first hand experience of the long conflict. Clear and obvious to a Western visitor who takes the time to observe what is happening in Ho Chi Minh City today is enterprise. The Vietnam I came to know is youthful, hard working, entrepreneurial, tech savvy and optimistic. Upon learning I was an American, more often than not young people wanted to practice their English with me. English is the language of global business. They wanted to know English. The Vietnamese in Ho Chi Minh City are also quite adept at using Google Translate. A good way to use Google Translate is to make short statements without adjectives or adverbs. Then copy what the app has translated into Vietnamese and paste it back into the app and see how Google translates the Vietnamese result it gave you back into English. Once I became proficient with Google Translate, I had little difficulty communicating in Vietnam.If you want of get a sense of what is going on with locals in Ho Chi Minh City, have a cup of coffee. There is a burgeoning coffee shop culture in Ho Chi Minh City where young barristers take pride in their presentations. Avoid the big players such as Starbucks or Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Seek out smaller establishments in the labyrinth of back alleys in the city. In addition to really good coffee you will discover community bulletin boards, perhaps some free live entertainment and friendly staff often eager to engage with American visitors. Americans, you see, know business. Vietnamese entrepreneurs see America’s wealth and want to kind of snuggle up to it.Speaking of snuggling - I am about to offer you a subjective opinion - Vietnamese women are amongst the most beautiful in the world.I met Huyen in Singapore. Huyen was an impressive small business person. When the war ended in 1975, the Communist government unified the country under a Marxist style economy. Within five years the country was starving. Ever practical, Vietnamese leaders erected a bunch of statues of Ho Chi Minh, named Saigon after him, and then introduced a free market economy. Huyen’s family was among the first in Ho Chi Minh City to start small businesses. By the time she was thirty, Huyen was like the Mayor of Bui Vien Street.(Huyen)Huyen had an instinct for capitalism. She was good at organizing and starting small enterprises on Bui Vien Street just as Saigon was becoming a destination for budget travelers. After getting a shop up and running, Huyen would sell the existing business for a good profit to hungry young Vietnamese. When I met Huyen she was in Singapore helping a cousin set up a nail salon. Back on Bui Vien Street in Saigon, Huyen was the founder of two massage shops, a nail salon and a small street side food stall all now under the ownership of other young folks.I liked Huyen. She was industrious and smart. She and I dated for six weeks in Singapore. When I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City I was happy to reunite with Huyen. I had some small business ideas of my own and saw Huyen as a potential partner. And she was sexy and fun to be around.Huyen invited me to join her for dinner one evening. Also present at the dinner on a river cruise ship, an expensive affair Huyen paid for, were her mother and three children: an eleven year old boy and two adopted seventeen year old girls. Huyen’s responsible commitment to supporting her family was yet another display of character that made her attractive. Later that evening, Huyen asked me what my intentions were in our relationship.I told her I liked her a lot, admired her too. I hoped we could have a relationship and look at some business possibilities as well. I’m not dumb. I know the woman wanted to know about marriage. I am certain the dinner cruise was to see if there were any objections from her family directed at old American me. I did not rule out marriage, but I was honest. A conversation about marriage was a long way away.I never saw Huyen again. The next morning I found my communications apps and social media connections with Huyen severed. They are a practical tribe these Annamites.I found a place to live in a back alley in the heart of downtown Ho Chi Minh City: 15A Lê Thánh Tôn. I rented a furnished four story townhouse for $800.00 a month. When settling the one year lease - two months rent and one month security in cash - with the landlady, a woman my age who owned four buildings on the alleyway, I asked her about her experience during the war. “Stop living in the past” was her response, not bad advice.The French once occupied Saigon. After booting them out, the Vietnamese kept the good French stuff. Ho Chi Minh City has the best bread in Asia, great pastries, French boulevards and gardens, fantastic food and French styled architecture. There is a mini Notre Dam Cathedral downtown surrounded by parks and a magnificent French style structure housing the post office. The actual post office is run by commies. Like most commie enterprises, they suck. Use FedEx. A fabulous fine arts tradition introduced by the French in the 19th century has reemerged in both Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. So yeah, the food, the culture, growing opportunity, friendly people and beautiful women, what’s not to like?Ah well, now that I’ve asked: air pollution; motorbikes; clotted traffic; noise; and an inept bureaucracy of government minions competing for attention at every level. The Vietnamese central government calls themselves Communists. But there are few social benefits available to the Vietnamese. I have heard of sick people being thrown out of hospitals for failing to pay their bills. There are far more social benefits available to people in capitalist systems. When the Vietnamese government introduced market reforms in the 1980s, they eliminated any government assistance as well. They retained their one party system but not the goodies that normally go along with it. Governments at the village, town, city and provincial level all compete amongst one another for influence and power. It makes for a mind numbing and corrupt bureaucratic mess.But the Vietnamese are hooked into the global banking system and I had little to do with their government affairs. I could get my pension money without difficulty making me upper middle class in Vietnam. I left Vietnam for other reasons.When I decided to live in Vietnam I got some good advice from a well-traveled friend in Singapore:“If you plan to live in a third world place, make sure you schedule visits to the first world frequently”. Go visit the mall, so to speak.It was good advice. I maintained a small apartment in Bangkok where I would visit monthly, in addition to my trips to the States and Singapore.BangkokIn Bangkok I held a lease on a one bedroom apartment in Lumpini Place, a well run condominium complex adjacent to Rama IX, a major thoroughfare and the title of a dead Thai King. My friend Eric, a smart go-getter I met in Singapore, was capitalizing on a boom in Bangkok Airbnb rentals. Eric managed more than a dozen condos for short term rentals, mine included. When I was in Saigon, Eric would keep my Bangkok condo filled with tourists. It was costing me nothing to keep the place. I even saw an occasional small profit.In 2015 Bangkok officials forbade the continued use of condominiums for short term rentals. Lumpini Place management complied with the new city regulations designed to protect the big hotels. I did not want to spend the money required to keep my places in both cities without the Airbnb income. I had to make a choice. It was a difficult decision. But Bangkok’s first world-ness won me over.Bangkok has a good light rail complex with three separate systems serving much of the city. Ground transportation is plentiful and inexpensive as well with abundant taxis, motorcycle taxis, city busses, canal boats and song tows available along with Grab. Car rentals are easy and cheap too, accepting my NY driving license without issue. The Brits never occupied Thailand, so I am stumped as to why they drive on the left side of the road. But I found that adaptation to be easier than one might think.Bangkok has a style all its own with amenities galore. There is a lot of wealth in Thailand as well. If you want to go upscale, that lifestyle is available. The big attraction in Thailand for me is the welcoming culture.Thais avoid conflict. Buddhism is a powerful underlying value system informing the larger Thai culture. Hard driving, get-it-done types of western go getters will find Thai ways frustrating. A Thai will say yes to something he or she has no intention of complying with simply to save face. A confusing excuse will follow. This apparent passivity can be perplexing to a Westerner. But I am retired, for the most part. I had a small yoga studio in my home one could call a business. But it was a simple enterprise and I had a Thai partner. I came to appreciate the peaceful Thai ways.My most recent stories on Quora are about Thailand, replete with details about how I have come to regard Bangkok as my home. So rather than turn this essay into an actual Opus Dei, I will recommend readers interested in more about Bangkok to check the recent posts on my Quora profile. Start with this one, a downright spiritual experience connecting me with the grandchildren of an American war hero who died in the Vietnam War. Thank you all once again for viewing my essays here on Quora. If views were currency, you made me a millionaire:)Link to the first of four companion videos to this essayLink to video number 2: Asia Lite: SingaporeLink to video number 3: Vietnam Doesn’t SuckLink to video number 4: Bangkok: City of Angels