Landlord/Tenant Mediation

Landlord/tenant relations have gotten much, much harder, particularly in California. The state has a relatively new law that controls residential leases in many instances, and is of course the subject of significant ongoing lawsuits. Similarly, many cities have their own ordinances which control what landlords and tenants can and cannot do. People who live in California will not be surprised to learn that these different laws don’t always agree. The stakes are also very high: a tenant who loses a place to live may not be able to find a new room within 50 miles of the place they vacated, and a landlord risks six-digit or more jury verdicts for an improper eviction, not to mention the difficulty of complying with local ordinances.

Mediation for landlord/tenant disputes has the same advantages of all mediation, namely being quicker, cheaper, and, in our opinion, better at solving issues than litigation. Of course, a wrongful eviction suit will almost certainly be referred to mediation anyway, and even for evictions, larger counties generally have some form of obligatory mediation during the case, so it’s nearly inevitable that you’ll have to mediate the dispute to some degree, at some point. We let you do so early, on your terms.

One of the big advantages of mediation here is that living situations are complicated, and one of the difficulties with court solutions is that they often don’t reflect the realities of the situation. For example, the amount of money that goes into the average tenancy buyout between Richmond and Berkeley, two cities that nearly border each other, differs by a zero. There are a lot of historical protections in Berkeley that can make getting a licensed contractor in quickly nearly impossible, whereas often in, say, Martinez, the process is much easier. So the same agreement about repairs might be workable in a month in Martinez and only workable in six months in Berkeley, and a party who looked up buyout numbers in one city is likely to be dramatically wrong about what the figures look like in a city nearby.

Mediation is a much better tool for setting out who will do what, and when, and in mediation we actually have the time. It’s not unusual in Alameda Co. to have 80 cases on a docket for a single day; how much individual time do you suppose each case gets? Mediators aren’t splitting their attention between a dozen clients, it’s just us and you, trying to find a solution. Our mediation will satisfy a court’s order that the parties mediate, but more than that, mediation is much more likely to get you to a real solution.