Hello, and thank you for entrusting us with this important question.

The law in California provides as follows. Once you leave the condo unit, you have breached the lease and the landlord can hold you responsible for rent through the rest of the rental period. Subject to a big HOWEVER, which I will explain below.

Even though you have technically breached the lease by leaving early, the property manager *acting as agent for the owner/landlord) has a duty to mitigate damages. That means that the landlord can't sit idly by and leave the apartment vacant. The landlord must take proactive measures to minimize the damages, so that you will be relieved of some of the responsibilities of the rent for the remainder of the lease period.

What the landlord has done here is attempt to raise the rent. If this went to a court, the court would most likely view this as a failure of the landlord to mitigate damages to you. In fact, the landlord is operating in a very opportunistic way, and doing just the opposite of mitigating damages.

In fact, the landlord should try to rent the condo for $150 LESS than what you were paying, if they were really genuine about mitigating damages. Then they would have a claim on you for the $150 less per month that they were taking in as rent, but that is all.

In fact, if it went to court, and they got any offer to rent the condo from a reliable and safe tenant, the landlord would be obligated to take that offer and charge you with only the small, if any, shortfall. Here, a court would find for you if you can show that the landlord could reasonably have rented out the place and failed to do so.

As I mentioned, you could show this by the existence of offers to rent your unit, by a history of other units in the area renting during the time after you left and by showing that the landlord did not act reasonably here.

I believe that a court would find in your favor, and award you attorneys fees and costs, if this dispute were to go to court. Therefore, you are on solid ground by demanding that the landlord not charge you for any rent after you left the premises and refund your security deposit in full.

I would notify the landlord now in writing that it is their legal obligation to accept any rental offer from any reasonably safe tenant. Put it in writing so that when you go to court, if you have to, you have documentation of your position before the last month of the lease began.

Good luck to you. I wish you all the best.