Construction noise a valid reason to break a lease?

Legal Legal - Real Estate & Housing
1

They’ve been doing construction directly underneath my apartment for about 3 months now. I told my landlord he can keep the 2 months rental deposit as my next two months rent and I will be out of there before the next two months rental period is over. Today I got an email from the realtor reminding me about the termination clause in my rental agreement. Its the typical “youll be fined one months rent for early termination, unless provided under the law…”

The noise these people are making is unreal. First, they were jackhammering rock from the foundation of the building. It was so loud and vibrated the whole place, my furniture would practically move along the floor. They would start around 8am during the week and around 9 or 10am on Saturdays (which was completely aggravating!) I could barely hear the television even with the volume turned all the way up! The jackhammering has since stopped and been replaced by incessant hammering, sawwing, workers yelling, and the lousy music they listen to, all starting at the same times during the day. They might as well be doing all this in my bedroom with all the noise they make. I cant take the headaches and noise any longer.

Ive called the police numerous times to no avail (makes me wonder what would happen if someone breaks into my place and tries to kill me…), and even called the Environmental Protection Agency, also which didnt do anything helpful. I was just wondering if anybody ever had a problem like this and if this is legal ground enough to break my lease. Certainly the law has to say that if a place is “unlivable” then the tenant has a right to leave at his discretion. Also, is there a place online that describes tenancy law in detail (and in English?)

2

As long as they’re not doing it outside the permitted hours (8 sounds about right for a weekday) I don’t think there’s a lot you can do. Let us know what they say.

3

Doubt you’ll get out of it without a termination fee. People really aren’t very sympathetic to noise complaints here. What are they working on? I would think after three months it’d be finished by now if it’s remodeling work.

4

They are working on making my life a living hell. You would think three months would be long enough, but when I take a peek below, the place is still in ruins. Its not going to be done anytime soon. I dont know exactly what it is they are doing, but I do know that it is driving me crazy.

5

Reminds me of one of my favorite ‘Life in Taiwan’ moments.

Negihbours started renovating at 6:30am. I called the police who seemd to take it seriously. They insisted on knowing my name and address, which I thought was little odd. But then it all made sense when I discovered that they’d shown up and told the workers that XXXX XXXXXXX living at XXX XXX XXXXXX had called in a complaint against them. Then, the police left and the work resumed.

I’ve been getting angry glares ever since.

6

I can sympathise. I’m on the 7th floor of a 12 floor building and and there has been continuous construction/renovation since May 2004 in the 1st floor apartment. Only after concerted tenant action did we get the noise cut on Sundays, no luck with banging, thunking etc. only jackhammering was stopped. Our security guy just laughs when we say that a year and a half to renovate is a joke. I’m waiting till it is finished and I’m going to hire those funeral noise little blue truck people to come around and play outside when I’m next on leave. Lately the noise has been replaced by noxious chemical smells that make us sneeze and have allergic symptoms!

Move! I months rent loss may be better for your mental health.

7

Move. Sorry, but the only response you are going to get is “Fuck off or I’ll shoot you.” Sad, but true. The EPA will help up to a point, but the guy who’s making all the noise will start putting dog turds through your letterbox and pushing your scooter over. Not worth it.

Sadly builders are hard to come by and the work has to be done when they are available. If you’ve ever had any building or electrical work done here you know the snail’s pace at which they work. This coupled with the face which accrues to the newly minted urban peasant of having bought a new flat or getting renovations done there is no incentive whatsoever to keep the noise down. There is no way some guy who’s just cobbled together enough money to put in a green, brown, and orange paisley bathroom suite is going to allow some bloody foreigner to piss on his parade.

I moved out of a place with unbelieveably selfish noisy neighbours to a quieter place where the neighbours are too poor to afford to renovate and life has been fab since.

8

On the flipside, I moved out of Taipei completely and into a Da Keng mountain community that’s so filthy rich the idea of making any construction noise is quite outrageous. I wake up every morning with a smile on my face having had a full and satisfying night’s sleep devoid of election trucks and stinky tofu carts. I cannot stress enough the delights of a gated community with ‘no riff raff’ signs at the front. Splendid.

Oh, and good luck :slight_smile:

9

side question is cable channel included in you guys’ rental?if not how much do you pay a month? when I moved in he didn’t say anything about tv and I was thinking about maybe landlord can just connect me a line heh

10

Ditto! Lotus Hill does the same thing for me… Here’s what it looks like from satellite:

11

[quote=“agora1104”]They’ve been doing construction directly underneath my apartment for about 3 months now. I told my landlord he can keep the 2 months rental deposit as my next two months rent and I will be out of there before the next two months rental period is over. Today I got an email from the realtor reminding me about the termination clause in my rental agreement. Its the typical “youll be fined one months rent for early termination, unless provided under the law…”

The noise these people are making is unreal. First, they were jackhammering rock from the foundation of the building. It was so loud and vibrated the whole place, my furniture would practically move along the floor. They would start around 8am during the week and around 9 or 10am on Saturdays (which was completely aggravating!) I could barely hear the television even with the volume turned all the way up! The jackhammering has since stopped and been replaced by incessant hammering, sawwing, workers yelling, and the lousy music they listen to, all starting at the same times during the day. They might as well be doing all this in my bedroom with all the noise they make. I can’t take the headaches and noise any longer.

I’ve called the police numerous times to no avail (makes me wonder what would happen if someone breaks into my place and tries to kill me…), and even called the Environmental Protection Agency, also which didnt do anything helpful. I was just wondering if anybody ever had a problem like this and if this is legal ground enough to break my lease. Certainly the law has to say that if a place is “unlivable” then the tenant has a right to leave at his discretion. Also, is there a place online that describes tenancy law in detail (and in English?)[/quote]

The law in Taiwan is a joke and completely irrelevant. The police are only there to help the locals get money out of you. Simple as that. Stop paying your rent, move as convenient. Tell them to go fuck themselves on the 1-month clause. The worst they will do is haul your ass into arbitration court and you’ll have to pay the month, but there’s a 30% chance that they won’t bother or won’t know. Then again, there are people whose time is so worthless that they would go through the incredible time for what your rent probably is.

How I dealt with it is to literally set things on fire and take after neighbors with a baseball bat, the sent a gangster in, and I chased HIM out with a baseball bat, reminding them that I’m not that easy to kill, people have tried. My current reputation is of being mentally unbalanced, dangerous, and best left very much alone. He can teach well, but he’s rather unfriendly to his neighbors. I’ve engineered it that way.

3 months is nothing. The FIRST renovations next door began 6 months ago. They finished those to about 30%, changed their minds, ripped THEM out and started again. Got 40% done with those, changed their minds again, and ripped…you get the picture.

The other thing to remember is that you have an 80% probablilty of your landlord trying to stiff you out of your deposit (has happened in 100% of my building rentals here, I now consider any deposit to be the last two months rent, especially since I am religious about leaving a building/apartment if FAR better condition than when I moved in, which is quite easy considering the pigsties that I’ve usually rented, present apartment excepted, it was not only in good shape, but incredibly clean)…

12

Maybe you could try to get a building inspector to come over and have look at the place to see if there are no building lwas broken, imagine they break out one or more walls that have to be there to support the building, people in Taiwan do everything to enlarge a house or apartment … next quake you could end up in the basement …

13

Building inspector?!?!?!?! Bwaaaaaahahahahahahahah :laughing: :laughing:

Oh, that’s a good one, probably one of the best jokes I’ve seen posted around here…

…no such animal, and they will come down on the side of the one who either has the most guanxi or the biggest red envelope…

14

:roflmao:
The best the OP could expect to come out of that is the building inspector giving him a commission on the bribe he takes.

Dear Sir,
Thank you for presenting me with the chance to collect a red envelope. What sort of finder’s fee were you expecting…

I have a bit of experience with this from both the tenant and landlord side of things. Back in the US and in HK, for the average residential property there is no way a landlord is going to bother taking any legal action beyond a lawyer letter if he has less than half of the balance of the lease to chase up. The legal costs make it a waste of time. Even if it is a clear cut case and the landlord is likely to win and have his legal fees covered by the tenant, most landlords just won’t bother with it. Keep in mind that this is for average properties that the tenant has vacated without serious damage. Most landlords are more worried about having a property occupied by a non-rent-paying tenant who may also be damaging the property and refuses to get out.

This is spot on. I would never do this in the US and it made me very uncomfortable when my wife suggested this when we were planning to move out of our first place in HK. She said “no, this is how it works in HK even if the lease says otherwise. Phone the landlord and ask.” I phoned the landlord, and the wife grinned as she said “you just don’t understand Chinese culture.” :frowning: I would never pay the last month or two of rent in HK or Tawain. In my experience and judging from the stories I’ve heard from others, any landlord who tries to make you pay that last bit of rent is likely planning to screw you on the deposit.

15

Fabulous. Well done that man.

Any neighbours that give me grief tend to be easily placated with meat scraps and/or nuts (the animals aren’t fussy either, etc.)