A Landlord's Duty to Mitigate in The District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia

Under common law, a landlord had no duty to accept or procure a new tenant in order to mitigate damages (i.e., take reasonable action to avoid additional injury or loss) resulting from a tenant's breach of a lease, including with respect to an abandonment or refusal to occupy its premises. The rationale for this traditional view arose from the characterization of a lease as a conveyance of a real property interest, and not as a contract. In recent years, many states have enacted statutes applicable to residential landlords that impose a duty to mitigate damages. There is no clear consistency, however, in the law regarding a commercial landlord's duty to mitigate damages. The modem trend, followed in approximately half of the states, is to require commercial landlords to mitigate damages. This modern view characterizes the lease as a contract rather than a conveyance of real estate, and it is an established principle of contract law that parties to an agreement have a duty to mitigate their damages.