What happens if your landlord dies? Either the landlord honors or extends your lease, allowing you to stay. Alternatively, if your new landlord decides to start again and cancels your lease, you may have to find another home to live. Jane Sayner, 75, chose neither of these alternatives. Jane Sayner has lived in St. Albans, Melbourne, Australia, for almost twenty years. She rented a two-bedroom flat from St. Albans multimillionaire John Perrett for AUD$250 per week.
She had been paying the same amount since she first moved in. Jane had been at her previous job for 25 years and had had enough. She doesn’t even want to think about returning because she has rent to pay. Fortunately, she is not killed. Her landlord, John Perrett, died in September 2020. Despite being a multimillionaire, he never married and had children.
However, thirty years before his death, he received a kidney transplant, which extended his life.
John was grateful that the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s Nephrology Department received a large chunk of his fortune—approximately AUD$18.6 million. The Royal Melbourne Hospital was left a flat, which was sold for AUD$400,000. Jane was one of the two long-term tenants who had been evicted from both properties. What happens if your landlord dies? Either the landlord honors or extends your lease, allowing you to stay.
John actually called her one day to acquire her full name. “Then one day he called and said, ‘My solicitor’s here; could you please give me your full name, because I’m leaving you your unit?'” I believed I’d misheard something. Certainly not. “(Leaving all his money to charity) was always what he was going to do for the entire time I knew him,” Jane recounted.
Even though John’s death crushed Jane, she must have felt a huge feeling of comfort knowing that the house was now hers. Since she moved here more than 20 years ago, she has surely brought comfort to the area. “I treated this place as if it were my own.” There was no garden out back when I first moved in. “Because I lived here, I planted a lot of plants and flowers that are still here today,” Jane explained.
Rather of being upset, John encouraged Jane to make the place feel more like home. He even brought his father’s old pots, which Jane could use to grow additional plants. Without a question, John and Jane were more than landlord and tenant; they were friends. John would tell Jane about his father after roughly an hour of conversation. She also cooked for him on occasion. Not only was John childless and alone, but he was also the only child. He had given Jane the unit because she had shown him friendliness, thus it made logical.