Send Notice to Right Party After Tenant Assigns Lease

When sending a notice such as a termination notice to a tenant, make sure you send it to the right party—particularly if the tenant has assigned its lease. After the lease has been assigned, you’ll probably need to send any notice to the assignee—not the original tenant. If you send the notice to the wrong party, it may become an issue in a subsequent dispute such as an eviction proceeding—and a court may consider the notice defective.

In a New York case, for example, a lease required the owner to send the tenant a termination notice before it could terminate the lease and evict the tenant. The tenant assigned the lease with the owner’s consent. Then the owner sold the building. The new owner wanted to evict the tenant and mailed a termination notice to the space, addressing it to the original tenant—not to the assignee. So the assignee asked the court to dismiss the eviction proceeding.

A New York appeals court dismissed the eviction proceeding. The court said that the new owner should have known about the lease assignment and which party to send the termination notice to. Plus, the new owner had also failed to send the notice to an attorney named in the lease. So, the court said, the notice was “ineffective to terminate the lease” or start an eviction proceeding [Intell 157th St. Realty, LLC v. Winston Harris Galleries, Ltd., April 2002].

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