# Who pays for rental contract?



## eastwind (Jun 18, 2016)

Time to renew my lease. My landlord's agent is asking me to pay, again, the fee for the notario. I vaguely remember paying it last year, but that was the first time. This time it's just a reprint of the old lease with a couple dates and numbers changed. I don't know why I should have to pay this, it seems to me to be a landlord expense, but she asserts "all contracts are paid by those who rent". 

I know some of you make your own lease contracts on the back of paper napkins, but that is not the process here. The question is when a notario writes up the rental contract, who pays the notario? She is asking for 5000 pesos for the contract. I can't believe average mexicans pay anywhere near that for cheap apartments.


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## TundraGreen (Jul 15, 2010)

eastwind said:


> Time to renew my lease. My landlord's agent is asking me to pay, again, the fee for the notario. I vaguely remember paying it last year, but that was the first time. This time it's just a reprint of the old lease with a couple dates and numbers changed. I don't know why I should have to pay this, it seems to me to be a landlord expense, but she asserts "all contracts are paid by those who rent".
> 
> I know some of you make your own lease contracts on the back of paper napkins, but that is not the process here. The question is when a notario writes up the rental contract, who pays the notario? She is asking for 5000 pesos for the contract. I can't believe average mexicans pay anywhere near that for cheap apartments.


For what it is worth, I never heard of the practice and I have known lots of people who rented.


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## horseshoe846 (Feb 8, 2017)

Did you rent via a third party ? We rented our first year here and that realtor wrote up the annual contract. I am sure that he was compensated - out of our rental. There was no notary in the picture. Perhaps there is a need to re-up the third party's commission.


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## eastwind (Jun 18, 2016)

There is the owner, a foreigner, and the owner's local manager who has some kind of power of attorney sort of thing. I think the local manager is trying to extract a little extra from me. Probably there is no notario, the contract was just modified from last year's version (it's a word document), or if there is a notario the manager will try to bill both me and the apartment owner for the fee, 100% each.

There was originally a real estate agent that put me in contact with the owner's local manager, and that agent presumably got a finder's fee, but that person is no longer involved and I doubt has any idea that I'm renewing the lease.


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## AlanMexicali (Jun 1, 2011)

The rental agent that finds a renter writes the contract and you and the agent sign it in front of a Notario/a and they notorize it for about $400.00 pesos and the agent [owner] pays this fee [not absolutely needed to be legal but a good idea for + or - $400.00 pesos] It has to be in Spanish to be binding in Mexico. Most rental agents that find a renter get the one month deposit for a 1 year contract and a property management agency/person managing a property gets 10% per month of the rent collected. To renew a lease and not give the agent who rented you the property a commission I do not know exactly but presume the owner would then need to write up a renewal lease, not a Notario/a. If the owner wants to spend the money to have someone else write the renewal lease then I also presume the owner would pay for this service, not you the renter.


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## eastwind (Jun 18, 2016)

Thanks

In this case the contract is two columns per page, the left column is in spanish, the right column english. I paid my own abogado a year ago to verify that the original contract was accurately translated and contained reasonable and customary terms. The contract contains nothing about a rental agent, so if there was any compensation for the agent it was between the owner and the agent that introduced us, and if the owner owes the agent again for a lease renewal I don't have any knowledge of it.

This year I can sign the contract in person at the notario, and I don't see any reason to pay the apartment manager anything like 5000 pesos for having the contract written up. I'm on the verge of telling her I won't extend the lease anyway because of all the murders in Cancun and Playa. It would be a scramble, because then I'd have a month to get ready for a move back to the US, including finding some place to stay once there.


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## LMtortugas (Aug 23, 2013)

TundraGreen said:


> For what it is worth, I never heard of the practice and I have known lots of people who rented.


Likewise,,, we have leased a home in Sinaloa for 16 years to multiple tenants and never exercised, or ever considered, any such contract term.


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## AlanMexicali (Jun 1, 2011)

I mistakenly left out the owner has to sign the lease. 

Rental agencies are sometimes used because of the liability an owner has if they find the renter and sign a lease and the renter runs a criminal enterprise from the property and gets arrested. The property is automatically siezed by the government [not liened but siezed]and the owner has to prove they did not know the renter was involved in criminal activity to get the property back. The 3rd party rental agent is libel not the owner and it makes getting the property back much easier because the owner did not know the renter or have anything to do with screening them. We use a rental agent to find renters for our rentals.


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## eastwind (Jun 18, 2016)

Well that was stressful. The owner, living in the US, uses a local abogado to prepare the contract, and a local apartment manager to manage the apartment. The abogado prepares the lease, gets the signatures of the manager and the renter, gets the 5000 pesos, and then takes it to a notario and pays the notario out of the 5000 pesos their fee for registering the contract. The abogado keeps the rest for their work. 

The fee got negotiated down from 5000 to 3000 pesos, since all they had to do was make minor edits to the existing contract and reprint it. But I still have to pay it when we go to sign Friday morning. 

I still think the owner should be paying the abogado out of their rent money, but it was this way or no deal.


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## horseshoe846 (Feb 8, 2017)

eastwind said:


> Well that was stressful. The owner, living in the US, uses a local abogado to prepare the contract, and a local apartment manager to manage the apartment. The abogado prepares the lease, gets the signatures of the manager and the renter, gets the 5000 pesos, and then takes it to a notario and pays the notario out of the 5000 pesos their fee for registering the contract. The abogado keeps the rest for their work.
> 
> The fee got negotiated down from 5000 to 3000 pesos, since all they had to do was make minor edits to the existing contract and reprint it. But I still have to pay it when we go to sign Friday morning.
> 
> I still think the owner should be paying the abogado out of their rent money, but it was this way or no deal.


Oh come on - in the big picture what does a $100 USD really matter ?

When we rented our first year there were no lawyers nor notarios involved. On the very last night of our last house-hunting trip - when the owner of the house we were interested in refused our last offer (it came down to a nice 12' diameter table) - we returned to the realtor's office and signed a rental agreement on our second choice (That other house is still on the market 5 years later). Perhaps all these other charges mentioned were built into the agreement - but we never saw them broken out.


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## sparks (Jun 17, 2007)

I bought the form at a papelaria and we both signed it. Maybe 10 pesos


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## dwwhiteside (Apr 17, 2013)

We have used an agent to find renters for a couple of different properties. The agent draws up the contract and we and the renters sign it. We have never involved either an abogado or a notario. Also, it is important to note that a notario in Mexico is not the same as a notary public in the U.S. In Mexico a notario is required to have a law degree and is appointed by the state governor. However, we have only used notarios for actual purchases, never for rentals.


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