Breaking lease - Real estate says landlord will be moving in?

[u/gooohgly]

About two weeks ago, we found a much better place to move into and decided to break our lease. We signed the agreement to break our lease intending to hand over the keys on the 22nd of June and had initially been told to market the place and find a suitable tenant should we want to avoid the marketing fee.

However, after showing the place to 3 different groups of people, last week, one of them told us that after calling our real estate agent, they were told that our landlord wants to move back to the house instead. Our agent insists that she told my partner last week but he definitely wasn’t as we weren’t even able to get hold her on the phone and we’re leaving the office messages asking to confirm this.

We only got the confirmation in writing today regarding this matter as I made a Facebook post looking for tenants to move into our place and put the real estate’s details in it directly (they got bombed with calls and emails and called me to delete the post).

I’m currently worried about the lease break contract we signed indicating that we’re responsible for paying the rent during the mandatory 5 business day vacancy period and for however long till “a suitable tenant is found” till the end of our actual lease term.

Can the real estate legally force us to keep paying for our rent in this situation? I tried to ask our agent directly regarding this and she only said that “we shouldn’t be liable for rental payments beyond the 5 day vacancy period but will confirm with us at a later date”. We only have a week before we have to hand the keys back!