When your landlord dies, what happens?
Either the landlord chooses to honor or extend your lease, allowing you to remain.
Alternatively, you may have to look for another place to live when your new landlord decides to start over and cancels your lease.
It was neither of these options for 75-year-old Jane Sayner.
For more than twenty years, Jane Sayner has called St. Albans, Melbourne, Australia, home.
For AUD$250 a week, she rented a two-bedroom apartment from multimillionaire John Perrett of St. Albans.
She had been paying the same amount ever since she moved into the house.
Jane had worked at her previous job for twenty-five years, and she had had enough.
She doesn’t even want to consider going back because she had rent to pay.
Fortunately, she is spared.
John Perrett, her landlord, passed away in September 2020.
Despite being a multimillionaire, he never got married and never had kids.
But thirty years prior to his death, he underwent a kidney transplant, which prolonged his life.
John was appreciative of the fact that the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s Nephrology Department received a sizable portion of his fortune—roughly AUD$18.6 million.
A flat that was left to the Royal Melbourne Hospital was sold for AUD$400,000.
Jane was one of the two long-term tenants who were left two properties.
Indeed, Jane, who now owns the house she formerly rented, received the two-bedroom apartment from John.
Nevertheless, Jane had heard about this before.
One day, John actually gave her a call to get her complete name.
“Then one day he just rang me and said, ‘My solicitor’s here, can you please give me your full name, because I’m leaving you your unit.’ I thought I hadn’t heard it right. Surely not. For the whole time I had known him, (leaving all his money to charity) was always what he was going to do,” Jane recalled.
Even though Jane was devastated by John’s death, she must have felt a great sense of relief knowing that the house is now hers.
She has undoubtedly added coziness to the space since she moved in more than 20 years ago.
“I treated this place like it was my own. When I first came here there was no garden out the back. Because I was living here, I planted lots of plants and flowers, which are still here today,” Jane shared.
Instead of getting upset, John urged Jane to make the place feel more like home.
He even brought the old pots from his father, which Jane could use to grow more plants.
There was no doubt that John and Jane were more than just landlord and tenant; they were friends.
After about an hour of conversation, John would tell Jane about his father.
She occasionally cooked for him as well.
John was not only childless and single, but he was also an only child.
It made sense that he had given Jane the unit since she had shown him friendship.
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