Backed out of a lease 48 hours before signing, here's what I found in the contract

I almost signed this lease. I'd toured the unit, liked it, negotiated the rent down $50 from the asking price, and was ready to send the deposit. I'm a paralegal by trade, so I decided to do one more read-through the night before signing. Forty-eight hours from moving forward, I found three clauses that made me put the pen down.

Clause one: "Landlord may enter the unit at any time with 12 hours notice for purposes including but not limited to property inspections at landlord's discretion." NC law generally requires "reasonable notice," which courts interpret as 24 hours. Twelve hours is borderline and "at landlord's discretion" with no stated frequency limit is a red flag.

Clause two: "Tenant is responsible for all pest control costs incurred during tenancy, including treatment for infestations present at move-in." This means if there are cockroaches on day one, I'm paying to fix the landlord's problem. NC courts have pushed back on this in habitability cases, but I didn't want to find out in small claims.

Clause three: "Landlord may perform any maintenance, repair, or improvement within the unit at their discretion and charge tenant the proportional cost thereof when such maintenance is necessitated by normal building operation." I read this three times. It means they can charge me for building maintenance they decide is associated with my unit. That's almost infinitely broad.

I sent a polite email saying I'd decided to go a different direction. The landlord called me the next day, clearly annoyed, and said he'd "never had issues with those clauses before." I said I was sure that was true and wished him well. The unit sat listed for three more weeks after that.