by johncina444 » Tue Feb 14, 2012 3:42 pm
If you used the past conditional (pour convaincre les proprietaires que j'aurais été un bon locataire) it would mean "to convince the landlords that I would have been a good tenant."
You can think of this sentence in terms of "discours indirect" or "related speech": telling what someone else said. Imagine that in 2005 you were a Harvard student doing a junior year abroad. You're telling the story of how you managed to get an apartment while you were abroad:
The real estate agents said, "He is a student at Harvard, so he will be a good tenant."
The real estate agents said that I was a student at Harvard, so I would be a good tenant.
Note how we transform the verb tenses when we convert from a direct quotation to the indirect form. "He will be" (future) becomes "I would be" (present conditional). The exact same transformation happens in French. The fact that it all happened in the past is taken into account by the way you start the sentence with "the agents said" and by the way you transform the verb tenses.