C. When Does Your Rental Agreement Become Enforceable?

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. There is no three day cooling off period wherein you can rescind a rental agreement if you change your mind. But when is a rental agreement considered “signed”? I ask (and answer) this question in the following context. You are looking for apartments for next year for you and your roommate. You find one you really like, and you figure that your roommate 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 no further part in the
apartment. In fact, she changes her mind about living with you at all and moves to Bora Bora. Your landlord wants to sue you under the rental agreement that you signed (he kept a copy).

If the rental agreement listed you and your roommate as the tenants and your roommate refused to sign it, then the rental agreement will not constitute an enforceable contract without the signature of the second person. In the case of Weizman v. Chapin (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, but Partner Longacre refused. Landlord Weizman tried to sue the Tenant Chapin, relying upon 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 [the lawyer’s] office and ran to two persons, Chapin and Longacre, as lessees [renters]. 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 [renters] 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 [landlord] 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 unless everybody signs.