My wife and I are moving from Wisconsin to Westchester County, and have found a rent-stabilized apartment that we like. The problem is that the lease we received a couple of days ago is ridiculous. It doesn't spell out simple things like who pays what utilities, and it's full of outrageous clauses: the landlord can sign documents in our name, the landlord can not be held liable for negligence or crimes, the landlord can deduct an (unspecified) administrative fee from our security deposit, the landlord doesn't have to make the apartment available to us from the start of the lease, and on and on. The landlord (who apparently rents thousands of apartments with such leases) is perfectly willing to make verbal assurances to satisfy us, but unwilling to give us anything in writing.
I'm sure that most of these clauses are illegal and void, but we still don't want to sign this junk. But, we also don't want to reject this lease if we're unlikely to find anything better. So here are my questions: is this a typical New York lease? Should we pin our hopes on finding a reasonable lease that spells out a normal tenant-landlord relationship, or is that a fool's errand?
Thanks.
--glenn