Renewal Application Rent Controlled: Fill & Download for Free

My apartment complex management sent me a notice of non-renewal of my lease, after 9 years of paying my rent on time. It is either move out or pay another $300.00 USD. Is this legal?Of course it’s legal. No landlord is EVER required to renew a lease. And they’re certainly not required to renew it at lower-than-market rates, unless they’re subject to rent-control ordinances.We’re about to send such notices to four of our eight tenants - all of whom will be offered renewals but at $250/month more than they’re currently paying. All have been with us 7–10 years. But they’ve all been paying far below market for their houses. If we went with market on the houses, though, we’d have to raise the rent $400–500 on a couple of the units and we’re not going to do that.But, they’ll either pay the new rent or move out. We won’t have any trouble finding new tenants. Our units are never on the MLS more than 24 hours before we have 3–5 applications.

Assuming that your property is not subject to any rent control regulations – and most won’t be – you can raise rents as often as you like, unless you are currently bound to the terms of a lease.Once you and your tenant sign a contract agreeing on a specific sum for a specific duration, you would not usually be able to change those terms while that contract remains in effect. That is one reason why a typical residential lease won’t be for more than a year or two, because a landlord needs to be able to raise rents in response to inflation or changes to the market or their own circumstances. It’s reasonable to lock yourself in for a couple of years when in return you receive a guaranteed income, but I wouldn’t want to bet on my costs staying the same for any longer than two years.If you rent your property out under a fixed term lease, you can raise the rent by as much as you like whenever it is time to renew it – assuming you aren’t subject to rent control. Your state and municipality will likely require you to issue advance notice of the increase to your tenant, and they will obviously have the right not to renew if they can’t accept your proposed terms. If you rent on a monthly basis, or without a lease, you can raise the rent at any time, though you would again need to provide at least thirty days advance notice.The bottom line is that you own the property, and you are entitled to rent it out as you see fit, as long as you don’t violate any laws or regulations. You could raise rents by 100 percent once a year if you liked, as long as you could find someone willing to pay. On some of my apartments I have had to raise rents by several hundred dollars every year, because I continued to have more applicants that I needed, and they were all willing to pay more than I had anticipated. At that point it would have been sheer stupidity to keep the rent the same.

Yes, you can lie. I once lied about my in come while completing a rental application. I even went as far as creating fictitious pay-stubs for a 6 week period, that looked so perfect not even my Human Resources would know they were fake.But, do you want to claim to make more, or less than you do? If you claim to make more, will you be able to afford the apartment?In my case, I lied in order to claim that I earned LESS than I did. And I did not lie because I was trying to cheat my way into low income housing. It was regular housing, no government subsidies included..but..I knew from a friend that this place would try to raise my rent to the maximum that I could afford come lease renewal. They had a habit of getting an Attorney to work his magic, and being released from the NJ rent control laws. So, when I moved in I let them think that I was barely making ends meet as it was. That saved me a lot of money when the renewal came around.