About LeaseGuard

It's October 2023 in San Francisco's Mission District, and the City is enjoying the annual "Indian Summer" of 70-degree days and 80-degree nights. A year and a half after arrriving in San Francisco from his hometown of San Antonio, TX, Beto was relieved to have finally found an apartment to call home. Beto was first asked to take on the obligation himself, but was happy to let this woman - let's call her "Karen" - become the apartment's defacto landlord. She quickly found two other roommates to fill out the beautiful two-story loft with big windows and high ceilings, situtated in a sleepy part of the Mission and just around the corner from some of the City's best restaurants. The four roomates cheerfully moved into the apartment and signed leases with Karen, eager to enjoy their new home and the rights that come with being a renter in a city full of municipal code and legal resources dedicated to protecting renters.

Despite his own experiences as a landlord in Texas, Beto was blindsided to discover a loophole inserted by Karen - or her attorney - that converted the renters leases into a 12-month sublet with a trapdoor eviction hidden at the end. With a verbal promise as hollow as an abandoned office in downtown San Francisco, Beto realized he'd been cleaning, organizing, and buying furniture for a glorified dorm room; complete with an appropriately creepy RA who constantly monitored the apartment's public spaces. Beto and the other roommates never agreed to give Karen discretion over their future in the apartment. (Side note: No other multi-tenant apartments you know in San Francisco have this agreement becuase nobody would ever knowingly give up their eviction rights.) One roommate immediately moved out. The other started exploring their options. Beto explored fighting; The San Francisco Rent Board agreed that Karen had acted maliciously by never disclosing the sketchy clause in the lease. But in the end, there was nothing Beto or the other roommates could do after the year-long deceit, hidden in the lease.

Section 17 (incorrectly numbered) of Karen's lease agreement, which exempts the subtenancy from San Francisco's just cause eviction protections.

Karen is currently the master tenant of the same apartment and still recruiting roomates to live with her.

This experience fueled Beto's ambition to ensure others wouldn't face similar consequences simply becuase they can't afford a lawyer at a time when they're already under financial pressure from moving. Using open-source AI, Beto designed this app to answer this very important question before you sign a lease: is my landlord fucking me over?