What happens if your landlord dies?
If the landlord decides to uphold or extend your lease, you are welcome to stay.
If your new landlord decides to start over and cancels your lease, you may have to find another place to live.
None of these, according to Jane Sayner, 75.
Jane Sayner has been a resident of St. Albans, Melbourne, Australia, for about two decades.
She paid AUD$250 a week to rent a two-bedroom flat from St. Albans multimillionaire John Perrett.
John Perrett, her landlord, died in September 2020.
He was a multimillionaire despite never marrying or having children.
He did, however, have a kidney transplant thirty years before he died, which extended his life.
John was delighted that a significant portion of his fortune—roughly AUD$18.6 million—went to the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s Nephrology Department.
A AUD$400,000 apartment was donated to the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
Jane was one of two long-term renters assigned to two residences.
In truth, John handed Jane the two-bedroom apartment, and she now owns the property she leased previously.
Jane, on the other hand, has heard of it before.
John phoned her one day and asked for her complete name.
“My solicitor is here, could you please give me your full name, because I’m leaving you your unit,” he said one day over the phone. I thought I had misheard. Certainly not. She said, “(Leaving all his money to charity) was always what he was going to do, for the whole time I had known him.”
Jane must have been happy that the house was now hers, despite her grief at John’s death.
She has undoubtedly contributed to the area’s comfort since moving in more than 20 years ago.
I treated this house as if it were my own. When I first moved in, there was no garden at the rear. “I planted a lot of plants and flowers while I lived here, and they’re still here,” Jane explained.
Rather of becoming irritated, John urged Jane to make the flat seem more like home.
He also brought his father’s old pots, which Jane might use to grow more plants.
Without a question, John and Jane were more than just landlord and tenant.
After roughly an hour of conversation, John would tell Jane about his father.
She would occasionally cook for him as well.
John was not only childless and unmarried, but he was also reared entirely by himself.
Given Jane’s friendliness, it made reasonable for him to give her the unit.
