Article 16

What it means when you sign

This article says who is responsible for maintenance during the lease. Unless the parties agree otherwise, the landlord is responsible, throughout the lease term, for maintenance work on the property and for repairing any defect or damage that affects the tenant's intended use of it.

When you are about to sign, this article means maintenance and repair of defects start out as the landlord's job. A clause that shifts maintenance to the tenant, or limits what the landlord will repair, is allowed to depart from the article because the article applies unless the parties agree differently. That makes the maintenance clause one of the places where a lease can move cost and responsibility from one side to the other.

It is worth checking whether the contract assigns maintenance to the tenant, whether it says which kinds of repairs are covered, and whether the allocation is clear enough that both sides know who pays for a defect that stops the tenant using the property for its intended purpose.