Read the Renewal Clause Before You Sign, Because It Is the Only Part That Governs Next Year

In hot climates the air conditioning clause deserves its own reading, because servicing, gas, and unit replacement are three different costs and a contract that assigns all three to a tenant has moved a capital expense onto a person renting a flat. We wrote about how much of a household budget that system alone consumes in the piece on cooling and the electricity bill.

Four: leaving early

Almost everybody eventually needs this clause, and almost nobody reads it.

Find the early termination terms and price them. Common forms are a fixed penalty of one or two months' rent, forfeiture of the deposit, or liability for the remainder of the term until a replacement tenant is found. Those are wildly different exposures, and the third one is open ended.

Ask specifically whether a job loss or a transfer out of the country changes anything. In places with large expatriate populations some contracts include a clause for exactly that, and it is worth requesting if it is absent.

The deposit, and the photographs

The deposit is returned or withheld on the basis of a comparison nobody documented properly at the start.

On the day you get the keys, before you move anything in, photograph every room, every existing mark, the meter readings and the inside of every appliance, with the date visible. Send the set to the landlord or agent by email the same day and ask them to confirm receipt. That single email is worth more at the end of a tenancy than any clause in the contract, because it converts your word against theirs into a dated record.

Then read what the contract says about the condition it must be returned in. Professional cleaning, repainting, and returning to as new are three different standards, and only one of them is reasonable.

What to do with all this before signing

Ask for the contract in advance rather than at the signing, and do not accept that it is standard.

Standard means it is the agent's template, not that it is unalterable or fair. The clauses above are routinely amended when a tenant asks calmly and in writing, and the worst outcome of asking is a no. Get every promise made verbally written into the document, including anything about repairs before you move in, because a promise that is not in the contract did not happen.

And read it somewhere other than the flat. Enthusiasm is a poor state in which to read a legal document, which is precisely why it is presented to you there.

For anyone doing this in a new country for the first time, the wider adjustment is its own project, and we covered the part nobody warns you about in making friends as an adult abroad.