Gateway Development/East Lyme, LLC v. Duong

Citations

• 227 Conn. App. 38

Syllabus

The plaintiff subleased certain real property to the defendants. After the defendants failed to make a rent payment, the plaintiff sent the defen- dants a notice of cancellation of the lease and served them with a notice to quit possession on the ground of nonpayment of rent. When the defendants did not quit possession, the plaintiff served the defendants with a summary process summons and complaint. The sublease agree- ment contained a clause providing that the agreement could not be modified in any manner except by an instrument in writing executed by the parties. At trial, the plaintiff presented testimony from the plain- tiff's lease administrator, who testified that the defendants' rental pay- ments were habitually late, that she typically sent the defendants a notice of default with a ten day right to cure such default, and that she would routinely accept the late payments that followed but that she had lost patience with the defendants. The court found that the defen- dants had breached the sublease agreement by nonpayment of rent, rejected the defendants' argument that the sublease agreement required the plaintiff to provide the defendants with a pretermination notice and a ten day right to cure, and rendered a judgment of possession for the plaintiff. On the defendants' appeal to this court, held: 1. The defendants could not prevail on their claim that the trial court should have considered evidence of the parties' course of performance in its interpretation of the sublease agreement and improperly concluded that the language of the lease controlled; the plain and unambiguous language of the sublease agreement made clear that a pretermination notice and a ten day cure period were not required in the context of a default for nonpayment of rent and that such notice applied only to other specified events of default. 2. The defendants could not prevail on their claim that the parties' course of performance modified the terms of the sublease agreement; the trial