Landlord Tenant and Lease Practice Questions
Notice requirements, eviction procedure, security deposit rules and habitability remedies are state law and differ substantially. Work the concepts here, then pull the deadlines and dollar limits from your own jurisdiction's statutes and your exam vendor's current candidate handbook.
Lease items look easy because most candidates have signed one. That familiarity is the problem. The exam is not asking what a renter does; it is asking which estate was created, which cost category moved, who may still be sued, and which remedy the law makes available.
Eight original items follow, written for the distinctions that decide this category. Each answer explains the reasoning rather than just naming the term, so a miss tells you precisely what to go back and rebuild.
What a Lease Item Is Usually Testing
Every item in this category is a variation on one of five questions. Identify which one before looking at the options.
Which estate was created. The whole answer sits in how the arrangement ends: a fixed end date, automatic renewal until notice, consent with no term, or a tenant who stayed past the end.
Who absorbs which cost. Gross, net in its several grades, percentage, graduated and index leases differ only in how the rent number is built and which operating expenses shift to the tenant.
Who remains liable. Assignment and sublease move occupancy but rarely move liability, and items are written to see whether you know the original tenant is usually still on the hook.
Which remedy is available and to whom. Actual eviction, constructive eviction, the statutory summary process, and the state-defined repair remedies each have their own trigger and their own claimant.
What survives an event. A sale, a death, a foreclosure or destruction of the premises each has a default outcome, and the item turns on knowing which interest keeps running afterward.
Four Habits That Cost Candidates This Category
Answering from tenant experience. Personal rental history supplies a jurisdiction's rules and a landlord's practice, not the doctrine being scored. Candidates who have rented for years are the ones most likely to assert a notice period or a deposit rule that is true where they live and wrong in general.
Letting the contract half swallow the property half. A lease is a contract, so contract vocabulary works up to a point, and then the item asks about possession, the reversion, or what happens when the building sells. Candidates who filed the topic under contracts have nothing to answer with at that point.
Skipping the arithmetic. Percentage rent above a breakpoint, proration of rent for a partial month, and escalations under a stepped schedule are all computable in seconds once practiced. Left unpracticed, they take minutes and drain the section clock.
Reading residential rules into commercial facts. The implied warranty of habitability and the protective statutory scheme around deposits and notice are largely residential. Commercial tenants are treated as capable of negotiating, and an item set in a retail center will not reward a habitability answer.
Practice Set: Leases and Landlord Tenant
Eight items written specifically for this page. They are teaching material, not reproductions of any licensing exam. Decide on an answer before reading the explanation.
Question 1
A written lease runs from the first of March through the last day of February the following year and says nothing about renewal or notice. February ends. Neither party has said anything. What was the estate, and what must the landlord do to get possession?
It was an estate for years, because the term had a fixed beginning and a fixed end stated in the document. An estate for years expires on its own date, so no notice to terminate is required from either party. The landlord is entitled to possession when the term runs out. If the tenant stays on without consent, the estate converts to a tenancy at sufferance and the landlord must use the state's summary eviction process rather than changing the locks. Note the trap in the name: the length of the term is irrelevant, and a fixed two-week term is equally an estate for years.
Question 2
A tenant rents a store and pays a fixed monthly amount plus a share of gross sales once sales exceed an agreed figure for the year. Name the lease form and explain why a landlord would agree to a lower fixed amount under it.
This is a percentage lease, the standard arrangement in shopping centers and malls. The fixed portion is base rent and the agreed sales figure is the breakpoint, above which the landlord takes a share of the overage. The landlord accepts a lower base because the structure converts the landlord into a participant in the store's performance: a successful tenant produces more rent than a flat lease would, and the landlord also gains a direct financial reason to keep the center leased, maintained and drawing traffic.
Question 3
Two years into a five-year lease, a tenant transfers the remaining three years and all of the space to another business and retains nothing. The new occupant later stops paying. The landlord never signed a release. Who can the landlord pursue?
Both. Transferring the entire remaining interest with nothing retained is an assignment, so the assignee is in direct privity of estate with the landlord and is liable on the covenants that run with the land. But the original tenant made the contractual promises in the lease and remains in privity of contract, and only a release signed by the landlord ends that. The exam point is that an assignment moves occupancy and adds a liable party; it does not subtract one. Had the tenant retained even the final months, the transfer would have been a sublease, the subtenant would owe the tenant rather than the landlord, and the landlord's only claim would still be against the original tenant.
Question 4
A residential tenant reports a failed heating system in writing. Months pass with no repair and the unit becomes unusable in cold weather. The tenant moves out and stops paying, then claims the lease is at an end. What doctrine is being invoked and what does the tenant have to establish?
Constructive eviction, which rests on the landlord's breach of the covenant of quiet enjoyment and, in residential tenancies, of the implied warranty of habitability. The tenant must show a condition substantial enough to make the premises unusable for their intended purpose, that the landlord had notice and a reasonable opportunity to cure, and, critically, that the tenant actually vacated within a reasonable time. That last element is where these claims fail: a tenant who stays and withholds rent has usually converted the case into a nonpayment action. The specific remedies available instead of leaving, such as repair and deduct or escrow, exist only where state law creates them.
Question 5
A developer leases a vacant parcel for a long term, constructs an office building on it, and operates the building for the life of the lease. The term expires. Who owns the building, and why is this structure written for such a long period?
Absent a contrary provision in the lease, the improvements revert to the owner of the land when the ground lease ends. During the term the tenant owns and uses what it built, but the reversion carries the land and, at expiration, what is attached to it. The long term follows directly from that outcome: a tenant financing a building on someone else's land needs enough years of occupancy to recover construction cost and earn a return before the asset reverts. Lenders assess ground leases the same way, which is why remaining term is a central underwriting question.
Question 6
An investor buys an apartment building that is fully occupied under written leases with a year or more still to run. The investor intends to raise rents immediately. What limits that plan?
The existing tenancies do. A purchaser acquires the landlord's reversion subject to leases already in place and steps into the landlord's position for the balance of each term, so the written rents govern until those terms expire. That is why leases, the rent roll and tenant estoppel certificates are examined during due diligence rather than after closing. Where a lease contains an option to renew, the tenant may extend on the stated terms and the new owner is bound by that as well. Separately, any increase at the end of a term is subject to whatever notice state or local law requires.
Question 7
A restaurant tenant installed a walk-in cooler, a hood system and built-in seating to run its business. The lease term is ending. What may the tenant take, and what is the risk of waiting?
Items installed by a commercial tenant to conduct its trade are trade fixtures, and the tenant may remove them before the term ends, repairing damage caused by removal. This reverses the ordinary rule that an article attached to real property becomes part of it. The risk is timing: anything the tenant leaves behind when the term expires generally becomes the landlord's by accession, and a tenant who assumes it can come back for the equipment next week frequently cannot. Items that are genuinely structural, or that the lease designates as the landlord's, stay regardless.
Question 8
A tenant occupies under a month-to-month arrangement with no written lease. The landlord decides to end the tenancy. Why is there no single correct number of days to state here?
Because the estate is a periodic tenancy, which continues renewing until one party gives notice, and the length of that notice is fixed by state statute and sometimes by local ordinance rather than by any national rule. Jurisdictions differ on the period required, on whether it changes with the length of occupancy, and on how the notice must be delivered. The exam-safe reasoning is to identify the estate as periodic, state that it ends on proper statutory notice by either party, and treat the specific count as a state fact confirmed in your jurisdiction's landlord-tenant statute.
Working These Items Against the Clock
A short procedure that keeps the familiar vocabulary from pulling you off the actual question.
Find the ending first. Before anything else, locate the sentence that tells you how the arrangement stops. In this category that sentence usually determines the estate, and the estate usually determines the answer.
Mark residential or commercial. Habitability, deposit protections and most notice statutes belong to residential facts. Business tenants, trade fixtures and negotiated cost structures signal commercial, where those doctrines do not apply the same way.
Check whether anything was retained. One word about keeping the last few months or one floor of the space flips an assignment into a sublease and changes who owes whom.
Treat a number in the fact pattern as a state fact unless the item supplies it. If the item gives you the notice period or the deposit limit, use it. If it does not, the answer is a principle, and an option quoting a specific count is usually the distractor.
Do the arithmetic on paper, not in your head. Breakpoints, prorations and stepped escalations are quick when written out and unreliable when estimated.
What to Do With a Missed Lease Item
Record the cause rather than the topic. Leases is not a diagnosis. Answered habitability on a commercial fact pattern, or called it an assignment when the tenant kept two months, is a diagnosis, and it takes very little time to close.
Then rebuild only the pair you blended. Assignment against sublease. Actual against constructive eviction. Graduated against index. Estate for years against periodic tenancy. Three lines for each side, in your own words: how it is created, what it obligates, and how it ends.
Re-drill the pair within a few days, mixed into unrelated items so that knowing the topic is not doing the work. A distinction that only surfaces when you are expecting a lease question has not yet been learned.
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Questions About Practicing This Category
Are these items taken from an actual licensing exam?
No. They were written for this page to teach the distinctions lease questions turn on. Live exam content is secure and anyone distributing it is doing something to stay away from. Original items are also more useful for study, because a real question arrives with no explanation of why the other three options failed.
How much of this material is state specific?
The framework is national. Leasehold estates, the commercial rent structures, assignment and sublease, and the eviction doctrines work the same way across jurisdictions. Notice periods, security deposit limits and handling, eviction procedure, and the remedies a tenant has for disrepair are state law, and several of those are further regulated by city or county ordinance.
Should leases be studied with contracts or with property?
With property, then checked against contracts. Filing the topic under contracts is the single most common structural mistake here, because it leaves nothing to answer with when an item asks about possession, the reversion, trade fixtures, or what happens to a tenancy when the building is sold.
How many lease questions will appear on the exam?
The content outline in your exam vendor's current candidate handbook is the only dependable source, and the weighting differs by vendor, by jurisdiction and by whether you are sitting the salesperson or broker exam. Broker exams typically push harder into property management and brokerage operations, which raises the practical importance of this material.
Is it worth memorizing the net lease grades?
Yes, and it takes a minute. Count what the tenant adds to base rent: taxes for single net, taxes and insurance for double net, taxes, insurance and maintenance for triple net. Items use the labels directly, and candidates lose otherwise free points by guessing between the grades.
Where to go next: Related Pages
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