Get rid of your credit cards. Don’t ever buy a new car until you own a house on land (not a Condo). Find a 20ft self-contained travel trailer that needs a little work. Put it in a park where you only pay $275 per month rent. Start saving money for a small fixer upper home with a big lot with no restrictions or HOAs. Never pay rent again…
Also, sometimes large towns and even small communities add new laws to the state laws, but they cannot nullify state law.
Here in King County (Seattle), the larger the rent increase, the longer the notice must be.
A 45% increase requires three months notice.
So you were paying less than $700/month for an apartment? Those NJ RE guys must have dropped their jaws—and then licked their chops—at that!
My homeowners tax has gone up 100% in 5 years and my home supposedly increased in value 184% in the same timeframe.
Doesn’t matter if you rent or own you’re gonna get screwed.
If the apartment already exists, which it does, why is the cost of drywall a factor?
In some states, it is against the law to raise it above a certain percentage.
Those yankees are doing this BS everywhere here in The South - not just in Alabama. Have you talked to your neighbors? Is everyone getting that increase? Like another poster said, contact a tenancy lawyer - get your neighbors together and get some representation.
You're precluding the best answers.
The options are, move or increase your income.
It's Alabama. The landlord can raise your rent. If it's an absentee landlord that's even harder to deal with. There are better landlords, maybe with less appealing apartments. There are better sources of income. There are better housing situations.
They won't come to you. You have to think outside the box of convenience and habit.
Any way you look at it you will be inconvenienced, and something will change a lot, so you can only decide the details. A lawyer (who doesn't give a fig about your situation, only your "case") or another place or another job or both. Waste your time fighting a phantom landlord or spend it pounding the pavement where there's a whole world of better.
There are, of course, irregular, creative, dishonorable ways to fight back, they're also "outside the box." Claim the place is infested or toxic. Don't pay the rent at all, drag it out, and finally take the savings and buy/rent elsewhere with it. There are books on how to screw the guy with the upper hand.
But what do you win if you're in the same place at the end, vulnerable to more threats from a now resentful opponent? Is the place worth getting underhanded about?
My elders always told me it's tough to tell a blessing from a curse. Don't rule out the possibility that this apparent problem might instead be a solution to a problem.
I am a landlord, and will respond as such.
1. First look at your lease. A landlord cannot raise rents in the middle of a lease.
2. If your lease is expiring, and this is occurring at renewal, your landlord is completely justified in raising rent to whatever they deem appropriate. The fact that it is under new ownership may explain the “why” it is happening now.
The reasons the increase may be deemed excessive by you could be for several reasons:
First, you say it was recently purchased by a new landlord. The old landlord may not have been fastidious in keeping rents at market rate. When the property was sold, the new landlord underwrote it assuming that they could get the property to market rates. In short, had the property not been sold, you were on your way to becoming a slum. By increasing the rent, the new landlord is investing in your complex which will improve not just the complex, but the neighborhood. Gentrification is slammed by socialists, but it is actually a good thing to have someone making sure the neighborhood does not become a slum.
Second, even if the previous landlord kept new leases at market, they may have given deals to longstanding tenants to renew that were below market, specifically to keep vacancies down. Whereas this was good for you at the time, the new landlord has a new business plan for the property and may be willing to let renters go during the conversion.
Third, the costs of the complex absolutely went up. First, the new landlord just bought it for a lot more than the old owner paid. This means their mortgage is a lot higher than it used to be. With the new mortgage, you can be sure property taxes are going up to match the new established valuation. Insurance also goes up with a new valuation. Depending on where in the country you are, commercial property insurance is increasing around 20% year over year on average. (I am in Florida, where insurance has increased 300% in the last 2 years). If you remember back when COVID hit, there was a lot of news about the cost of building supplies and the supply chain. The supply chain issues are resolved now, but the prices did NOT go back to where they were. So the cost of maintenance is now higher. Finally, it sounds like old landlord had a bad (i.e, cheap) property manager, so I would guess you now have a new property management firm. They probably cost more than the old firm. In short, the cost of providing you with housing just went up a LOT, and ultimately, you have to pay for it, or find somewhere else to live.
Typically, during conversion from one landlord to another, what the new landlord does is remodel the units. As a made up example, a unit with original finishes may only command $1000/mo, but an updated unit could get $1300. The new landlord targets converting 6 units per month. So, they up your rent on a original finish unit, and you either pay (so they get the rent they need without having to do the updates) or you leave, so they can remodel your unit and get $1300 from the next tenant.
Finally, for those telling you to get a lawyer to make their life miserable ... if your lease is up, you don’t have a leg to stand on. The courts will uphold the law, and unless there are laws about allowable increases that they are breaking, they are simply offering you a new lease at a higher rate to reflect the modern realities of the cost of housing. Even if there are laws about allowable increases, a new owner is not required to renew your lease, especially if they have a renovation plan (which I can pretty much guarantee they do).
In short, no sleazeball lawyer can stop them because the law is on their side. All you will do is waste a lot of money on a lawyer and get yourself a bad reference for any future apartments you want to rent. And ... Yes, when you fill out a lease, the landlord can call your previous apartment and find out if you were a good tenant. If you decide to sue them for no cause (which this is), be prepared to live in a cardboard box because nobody will ever rent to you again.
Even inflation isn’t this bad. This must be greedflation.
Yes it is legal and there is a good reason
During Covid, you could not evict people so many people quit paying rent. Insurance rates went up as did property taxes in many places. So you are now competing against people who will pay that amount and add a deposit of 1st and last months rent plus an animal deposit and additional animal rent. They are willing to pay this much because they have an eviction and bad credit on their record but they make good money.
Does Alabama have Rent Control Laws?
Gently, remember the owners are from New Jersey. They are in Alabama, a foreign land. gently I would advise you to cease doing business with greedy Yankee carpet baggers and move.
Your landlord is from New Jersey and therefore bad.
And gently, you have two courses....... pay the rent or move
Bidenomics.
It’s Democrat approved!
How does that song go? Make a new plan, Stan...hop on the bus, Gus...just drop off the key and get yourself free.
So your rent before now was less than $350 per month? Are you living in a storage facility? How many square feet? That’s 1980s crazy cheap, even for Alabama.
The real reason it went up is that some company from NJ now owns it. I am pretty sure Alabama law allows for rent increases. There may even be a clause in your lease allowing for such even if the terms are current. Not sure how that works without such language.
What you need to consider is this may be the first step to the new owners converting your building to condos. No doubt it was bought as an investment property. A far worse scenario would be if the new owners want to make it eligible for section 8 tenants. Either scenario is not good for you.
Would it be feasible for you to see if a smaller unit is available? That might be cheaper.
I saw a fairly recent article about how it will take at least 3-1/2 years for housing to become affordable again - that’s using a 7% pay increase each year (and no more inflation).
That means our own pay buys about 25% less that it used to and the “booming markets” are about 25% low on actual buying power.
As Dems say - it just shows that Bidenomics is working....
Migrants move in, willing to pay any rent they are charged, and two families move in sharing the rent. Once they leave, they strip the joint, and the owner charges it to insurance.
Do you own the property? Are they following what your lease agreement says? Assuming so, wouldn’t it be a Free Republic conservative position that the property owner can do whatever the hell they want, ‘cause it is their property?
As long as they raise everyone’s rent at the end of their lease it is legal in Alabama.