TL;DR This Week
Free workflow: run your lease through AI before your tenant does. On our sample lease, it found up to $3,600 of deposit exposure.
Ryan Clark's first NFL million bought a $30,000 truck and a townhouse. The townhouse became his first rental.
The $12,000-a-month fourplex, why one investor says most people should skip big multifamily, and rates down for a third straight week.
The Workflow
Free Workflow: Run Your Lease Through AI Before Your Tenant Does
Your tenant has a new lawyer, and it works for free: ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever AI they already use. They paste in the lease, ask what could cost them money or their deposit, and get an answer in seconds.
One renter's advice, in a thread about doing exactly that: “Read your state laws, which will cover most of the important stuff and trump anything in the lease. Landlords write illegal [stuff] into leases all the time."
They're right. State law beats your lease, and the law changes. If you're still using a template from years ago, or an attorney hasn't looked at it in a while, some of it probably doesn't hold up anymore. Assume every tenant you sign from here on will check and run the same review first, prior to lease renewal.
This week's free workflow is your side of that review: one prompt that checks your lease against your state's current law and tells you what won't hold up, which disclosures are missing, and what each one could cost you. Run it now, then once a year, and take what it finds to your attorney.
Here's what it found on a sample lease we wrote for a 1952 fourplex in Cleveland, Ohio ($1,200 rent, $1,800 deposit):
Deposit back "within 60 days." Ohio requires 30 days, with an itemized list of deductions. If you wrongly keep a deposit, the tenant can recover it plus the same amount again, plus attorney fees. Up to $3,600 plus fees.
No lead-paint disclosure on a 1952 building. Federal law requires it before signing for housing built before 1978. Knowingly skip it and you're liable for 3 times the tenant's damages, plus their attorney fees.
"Landlord may enter at any time, without notice." Ohio requires reasonable notice, and 24 hours is presumed reasonable. The tenant can collect damages and attorney fees, or end the lease.
Tenant pays your attorney fees. Ohio doesn't recognize that clause, so you can't collect on it.
Tenant waives your liability, even for your negligence. Ohio doesn't recognize that one either. You still carry the risk, so lean on your insurance, not the lease.
It also caught that Ohio requires 5% interest on the part of a deposit above one month's rent: $30 a year here. Small, but your tenant's AI will find it.
