How we check your lease

A lease review is only as good as the law behind it. Here is where ours comes from, what has to be true before a finding reaches you, and what we don't do.

The short version

We build a database of each state's landlord-tenant law from official government sources. When you upload a lease, AI reads it against that database only. Any finding that cites a law that isn't in the database for your state is thrown out before you see it. A state goes live only after it passes a test set of leases with known legal and illegal clauses.

Where the law comes from

Every rule we check comes from an official source: the state legislature's published statutes, the state's official regulations, or a city's own code where local law differs from the state's. We don't build the database from law-firm blogs, landlord-software sites or other secondary summaries, because those repeat each other's mistakes.

A rule only reaches live lease checks after it has been checked against that official text. Each one keeps a link to its source, which is the citation you see on a finding.

States and cities we cover

We check leases in 9 states today. Each state page lists every law we check there, with a link to the official text.

If your lease is for a city with its own rules, we read the city from the property address in the lease (or you can pick it) and check the city's rules on top of the state's.

What happens to your lease

  1. Text extraction. We pull the text out of your PDF or photo, including addenda and riders, which is where unusual clauses tend to be.
  2. Matching the law.We load your state's rules (and your city's, if it has its own).
  3. Reading the lease.An AI model (Google Gemini) reads the lease clause by clause against those rules and only those rules. It applies the law; it doesn't decide what the law says.
  4. Checks on the result (below), then your report.

Checks every finding passes

  • The citation has to be real.A finding must cite one of the rules we loaded for your state. If it cites anything else, including a statute that sounds plausible but isn't in our database, it's dropped. This is the main difference from asking a general chatbot, which can cite laws that don't exist.
  • No double counting. The same clause flagged twice under the same law is merged into one finding, and the same problem repeated in two places counts once in the dollar total.
  • Dollar estimates stay realistic.Cost estimates are bounded by the rent in your lease, so a misread form field can't turn into a five-figure number.

How a state is tested before it goes live

For each state we keep a set of test leases. Some contain clauses that state law makes illegal or unenforceable; others contain clauses that feel unfair but are legal there. Before a state goes live, the analyzer has to catch the illegal clauses and leave the legal ones alone. We rerun the test whenever the state's law database or the analyzer changes.

Keeping the law current

We re-check the official source pages for changes on a schedule. When a source changes, the rules that depend on it come out of live checks until someone re-verifies them against the new text. When a law is renumbered or replaced, the old version is retired rather than left alongside the new one.

What we don't do

  • We're not a law firm. LeasePatrolis legal information, not legal advice, and using it doesn't create an attorney-client relationship. For a dispute or a court date, talk to a tenant lawyer or your local legal aid office.
  • Residential leases only,in the states listed above. We don't review commercial leases.
  • We can miss things. AI reading is not perfect, and a clause can be legal on paper and still enforced unfairly. A clean report means we found nothing against the rules we check, not that the lease is perfect.
  • We only see the lease.We can't check the condition of the unit, verbal promises, or whether the landlord follows the lease in practice.

Your lease file

The file is deleted from our storage as soon as your analysis finishes, and your lease is never used to train AI models. The privacy policy has the details, including how long the extracted text and your report are kept.

Found a mistake?

Tell us at support@apartmentleasereview.com. We check every report of a wrong rule against the official text and fix the database, the guides and the analyzer together.