Your Notice to Vacate should be what the courts refer to as an “unconditional demand for possession.” Your Notice to Vacate shouldn’t be wishy-washy: if you want them to leave, you should say unequivocally: “Get out.”
It should be very-very clear. If you’re wishy-washy, the court could say: “I don’t think the threat of eviction is present in this Notice. You ask them for rent, you tell them that they are late, but you don’t ever ask them to leave.”
Sometimes some courts are going to say, “Across the top it says ‘Eviction Notice’” and that might be good enough for some courts, but it’s not explicit. What can eviction notice mean? That you are on notice that an eviction might happen? Your Notice should be specific. It should say: “If you do not leave, I will sue to evict you.”
Courts don’t do that. In fact, they do the exact opposite. If your Notice to Vacate is unclear and, for example, you use the word “might,” “may,” or “I might evict you,” or “You may be subject to an eviction,” that’s enough for the court to say that you didn’t demand possession. You were suggesting things.
But unless you made an unequivocal demand, absolute, concrete, no other way to interpret it, unless you said: “Get out, or I will evict,” the court has the right to take your Notice and throw it out of the window.
So, to prevent that, just be direct. Your Notice to Vacate is a notice to your Tenant saying, “I’m done, and it’s time to leave. Pack your bags and go.”
I would suggest that you present your Written Notice to Vacate more artfully than that, but that should be the point, and it should not be subject to interpretation in any other way. If there is wiggle room for interpretation, that’s where things go wrong.
Maybe it doesn’t go wrong in the first court, but it goes wrong on an appeal, and you’ll have to start the whole process over. That’s where the problems begin. If you get your Notice to Vacate right from the start, you shouldn’t have these issues.
