A Suspicious Sublease

I once had a landlord in Los Angeles who rented out rooms in his house for about $900, which is ridiculously cheap for the city. Unfortunately, the landlord turned out to be more of a slumlord. One time, he left tomatoes on the counter and let them mold, leaving fruit flies all over the house. He also did not let us use the A/C, so the house would get to around 85°F in the summer. The air quality was so bad that I was hospitalized due to my asthma. I never thought I could have a crazier housing situation…boy was I wrong.

I recently moved to Washington, D.C. with my parents and my partner. We made it an adventure, spending a month traveling across the country. When we arrived in D.C., we did not yet have a place to live. Fortunately, we had a family friend named Ryan who happened to be renting a two-bedroom condo. Little did we know, Ryan was not the owner. We discovered this about a month after moving in, when we were rudely awakened with incessant banging on our door. A process server was attempting to serve Ryan with eviction papers, stating he was eight months behind on rent. Given the uncertainty, we decided to move. But could we have stayed?

While D.C. landlord-tenant law would give an actual answer, this situation resembles some cases about improper sales of real estate, like Harding v. Ja Laur. Suppose we had purchased the condo, not just rented it, and that Ryan told us he owned it. What would happen then?

While the property law principle nemo dat states that a property holder cannot give more rights than they have, the Harding v. Ja Laur case provides an exception. In that case, a widow was told by a family friend that her signature was needed to resolve a boundary dispute, so she signed a blank piece of paper that the “friend” later attached to a deed wherein she actually conveyed away over 1,500 acres of land to Ja Laur. When she found out what actually happened several years later, Ja Laur had already conveyed the land to someone else. She sued to get her land back and won.

The court in that case highlighted the rule that “[a] deed obtained through fraud, deceit or trickery is voidable as between the parties thereto, but not as to a bona fide purchaser. A forged deed, on the other hand, is void ab initio.” The court distinguished voidable titles from void titles, noting that “[i]n a fraudulent deed an innocent purchaser is protected because the fraud practiced upon the signatory to such a deed is brought into play, at least in part, by some act or omission on the part of the person upon whom the fraud is perpetrated.” By contrast, a forged deed “does not necessarily involve any action on the part of the person against whom the forgery is committed.”

In my family’s situation, the question becomes whether our hypothetical purchase of the property would have given us good title. The elements required for us to get good title are 1) we acted in good faith; 2) we were purchasers rather than gift recipients; and 3) Ryan conveyed a voidable title. The first two elements are met. Ryan appeared to have full control over the property, and we had no notice otherwise. We also would have purchased the property, not accepted it as a gift.

However, the third element fails. Ryan never actually gained voidable title. To create a voidable title, the original owner must have conveyed their interest due to Ryan’s fraud, deceit, or trickery. By creating a lease, the original owner conveyed limited rights of possession, use, and exclusion, while retaining ultimate ownership. A lease does not grant a lessee the right to alienate. Even if Ryan had attempted to give himself that right, such as by attaching his landlord’s signature to a new deed conveying the property to himself, there would have been no act or omission by his landlord. The deed would have been obtained by forgery rather than fraud, and a forged deed can never give rise to good title.

This conclusion is also correct for public policy reasons. Allowing lessees to sell their landlord’s property to good-faith purchasers encourages forgery and creates instability in landlord-tenant relationships. If the law allowed an exception to nemo dat in these cases, landlords would constantly fear losing ownership of their property, discouraging them from renting and causing rental prices to increase.

We have all heard the saying “possession is nine-tenths of the law.” But that other one-tenth is what keeps the law fair. It protects us from opportunistic abuse of the law and preserves the reliability of property law by ensuring that only those who truly possess the power to convey title can transfer it. For that, we are all better off.

Josie L. Minjiao is a student at American University Washington College of Law.

Image: Chris Woodrich, INDX Condos (70 Temperance Street), Toronto, Ontario, 2025-08-25.