They can likely pull all kinds of shenanigans by slipping something into your rental agreement to the effect of, "if the tenant is behind on rent we reserve the right to revoke access to their keys and require the tenant to ask the front attendant to unlock and lock their unit as necessary". Basically still give you access but make it extremely painful and degrading or shameful to ask someone to open it (and maybe even limit your ability to do so to office hours).
No, they really can't. Maybe in a handful of places that have completely given up on the idea of tenant's rights, but this wouldn't fly in almost any major city in the US.
Like I said it's shenanigans. Almost certainly the law is not explicit enough to say people are required to have a functioning key, it likely just says people are required to have residency of a unit. If gaining entry requires some ridiculous process and you sign a rental agreement agreeing to follow it then that's that.
Nope. Contract law doesn’t work like that. Signatures aren’t that powerful. You can’t sign away rights the law guarantees you. That part of the contract is just void. And hell, even if you could it would probably still be thrown out because a judge would look at it, see that it’s a take-it-or-leave it contract and that no reasonable person would assume such things are in a lease agreement and void it.
If the contract said “and you agree to give me your life savings” somewhere in the fine print that doesn’t make it enforceable.
It’s like half the point of having these things in law so landlords can’t put them in lease agreements.
The law doesn't spell out that you have a key to the unit, only access to it. For all the law cares you might have a passcode, retina scan, or button or other non-key device to gain access. But if you agree in your rental agreement that the access requires you to ask a front desk employee then it's solid as far as the law is concerned.
"The law" is a thing that is going to be interpreted and enforced by a human judge, one who is likely going to frown upon a landlord's creative interpretation of it.
A judge's job is not to apply the law to the letter, but to the spirit. They are not going to throw their hands up when a tenant is kept out of their unit, no matter what the landlord might have decided to sneak in into the rental agreement: the law is there to protect the tenant.
> Almost certainly the law is not explicit enough to say people are required to have a functioning key, it likely just says people are required to have residency of a unit.
Actually, the law is pretty explicit about that. And judges have a decent amount of leeway to determine if a landlord has been acting in bad faith.
If you are a landlord, and you have a bad tenant, you are definitely not interested in any "shenanigans" if you have any amount of rationality. All you care about is getting a bad tenant out as soon as possible, and the last thing you'd want is for a judge to delay the process, or penalize you, because they have found that you haven't complied with the law.
Tenant law is one of the few law areas that does, indeed, have extremely verbose language in most US states, and it almost always gives judges immense leeway to punish a party for bad faith actions.
It's not bad faith if it's clearly spelled out in your rental agreement and you sign it. That's why I say it's shenanigans, they know people won't realize the implications of what they're signing but when lawyers argue it in front of a judge it is crystal clear to the letter of the law.
Could that actually be legal though? The system must be pretty dysfunctional to allow people to circumvent tenants rights so blatantly. There's no way that would fly in New Zealand. You can't deny your tenant access to their home at nighttime because you've personally decided they're "evicted". Evictions have to be approved by the tenancy tribunal or something like that, and then you can change the locks or, I imagine disable their fob/app. Same goes for requiring them to go through some degrading begging process when they want to get in or out.
I'm not saying you're denied access, I'm saying they will make the access go through an onerous process like having to ask someone to open the unit (after verifying your identity). This is a classic tactic to make people want to move out on their own.
