Three month lease extension?

he wants more money and will get more money in june then frigid march.

ask for a 15 month lease

15 month lease, he's full of BS, he wants more money. Call his bluff...

I did. He wants to add 11% to my rent. In this economy. When I have a semi-illegal duplex (there is a full bath in the basement level AND I have to pay myself to heat that level even though the lease and law say he has to heat the whole unit to 55/68). Problem is I really, really can't hack moving right now.

If you aren't ready to walk on a deal then you have to take what is offered. he will get 11% more this time and ask for more in June when the market is much busier.

If you aren't ready to move you had better have a great poker face if you are going to bluff.

if you can't move "right now", but can by end of June, then sign the 3 month for same amount of rent and start looking. otherwise, bite the bullit.

Since the LL was BS'ing with the OP...
What would happen if she take the following action?
1. Signs the 3 month extension.
2. When it is time to talk about the 1yr lease, negotiate as slowly as possible.
3. When the LL gives her the 1yr lease, do not sign it.
4. When the LL follow-up, tell the LL she is still going over it. Drag it as long as possible.
5. At the very last minute, tell the LL that her lawyer is still reviewing it and is concern about the heating arrangement.
6. Pay the old rent and say the lease should include language about the heating arrangement, specially the LL should pay for the heating.
7. When the LL formally threaten eviction because of difference in rent, pay the LL the difference.
8. Still do not sign the lease, but PAY the new rent
9. Continue negotiating and look for a new place at the same time.

Right now I asked how he feels about a 7% increase (instead of the 11% he asked for). Can't hurt to ask. Will see how it goes...

If the landlord is in breach of the lease, and possibly in violation of the law, how 'bout you pay him NOTHING for a couple of months and save your money to move out.

move

I recently extended my rental lease for 3 months in a doorman bldg in Lincoln Square to try to close on a purchase. My LL just sent me a proposed lease with a 17% increase as of February - thankfully, my place closed but they thought they had me where I needed to extend again.

The law says the landlord has to provide heating. This does not mean he has to pay for it. If the unit does not have heat capability it is against the law. If it has heat capability but you pay for it than it is within the law. The lease may provide otherwise.

Move. First, you are only getting heat for half the apt you were expecting to have. Second, putting yourself on a summer cycle is going to result in you paying higher rent not just for 3 or 15 months, but rather for the next many years. Do NOT give up your winter rental cycle placement for anything. I personally think there is at least a 10% peak-to-trough summer vs. winter cycle. In my segment of the market (higher-end), pricing is very weak right about now (lots of places on the market for months finally giving in and applying heavy/frequent chops).

FYI, you are playing a really bad game of poker right now. You're rushing things, acting pretty desperate. Your first mistake was to ask about a renewal now. You should have let the LL come to you. Your second mistake was to respond to his setup. He brings up some song-and-dance about the bank wanting a June date. You fall into the trap of calling the bluff that he set up for you with a response of "well how about 15 months". He agrees to "your" terms and gets the first of what he wanted, which is to put the apt on a summer cycle. He then asks for the second item he wanted, which is a hefty rent increase. In your words, "in this economy". Your response? "OK, but maybe you do 7%, but if not that's OK."

All this in a matter of a few hours, all instigated by your request. You know what his response is going to be? "Let's split the difference and go with 9%". You have no actual credible threat of an alternative right now. Bad idea to go into a negotiation with no alternative. Worse yet, you've effectively declared that you have no alternative given your actions.

I'm sorry to be negative here, but I'm just trying to point out some problems with how you've been handling things as far as I could tell here. Obviously, you may not care about the summer term and higher rent as you may have more pressing issues in your life. However, it just seems between this negotiation and the heat issue that you might not always represent your interests in the best way possible.

I am happy to provide constructive ideas here if your tactIcs do not leave you in a situation you are happy with...

Hello inonada. Good advice.

Hey Truth. Stop wasting your life away up at this late hour on this board ;).

Yep., inonada:
I'm wasting my off-time here. But, we're both here, and getting along very well.;)

Inonanda,

Please, I'm happy to hear constructive tactics! I DO NOT WANT TO MOVE and would rather pay the 11% increase than move. But I also don't want to pay the 11%. What should I do?

I agree, I'm impatient. I have a small child and four pets and a lot of stuff and very little free time, and the thought of losing my lease makes me nervous enough to act impetuously.

So far this has all been an informal email exchange with the landlord. What do I do now? I'm so afraid that if I'm too firm he'll just say forget it, you're out as of Mar. 30.

Tell me your suggestions!

Jennifer

Jennifer

As long as you continue to pay the rent, the LL cannot kick you out easily, especially since you have a small child. You can move when you are good and ready. It is renters like you that cause some LL's to act so cocky. You are being bullied and you will always be a victim unless you stand-up for yourself. Know you rights. In this particular case, I bet the LL would want to avoid the courts more than you.

I am not anti-LL or pro renters. If a LL was asking for help dealing with a bad tenant, I would give suggestions on how to deal with that just the same.

Assuming you've been a good tenant and have paid rent on time, when push comes to shove your landlord would be a fool to enter into an unpredictable business relationship with an unknown individual for either a small increase in rent (if he can even swing that) or a more favorable lease cycle. Call his bluff. And when it gets down to the wire, you can remind him of what I stated in my first sentence.

Sunday,

I did forget that they can't kick us out with a kid...good thought, that!

Alanhart,

I did remind him of that, in nice polite wording though. Our rent is auto-paid a few days early each month, our apartment is immaculate, and we handle all small repairs ourselves without bothering anyone. We have secure jobs and perfect credit. We have also helped out with a security problem on our own time, and our presence (youngish couple with child) has helped in renting the other units to tenants (they are graduate students whose parents are reassured when they see us coming in and out).

inonada,

I spoke to a good friend who is a premier real estate broker in Harlem. She said we do not need to be concerned about going June to June instead of April to April in our area, especially since by June 2013 the new rental construction around Columbia is going to oversaturate the market. Right now our building's tenants are primarily Columbia graduate students. She said negotiate, but don't use the summer/winter thing as part of it.

What new rental construction is coming online near Columbia?

By the way, it seems preposterously unlikely that a bank employee micromanages the timing of your landlord's leases.

Our landlord lives overseas and does try to consolidate as much as possible. But also, he's probably full of bull.

No clue on the new rental construction but several brokers in the area have mentioned an expected glut in the semi-near future.

Oh, and he offered a small reduction because he "heard you are very nice." (His sister met us several times.)

A small reduction of what for what, jen?

With all due respect to your broker friend, that sounds idiotic. Why do you think your landlord wants a July 1 vacancy? In your words, "Right now our building's tenants are primarily Columbia graduate students." Guess when new graduate students tend to come get settled? Sometime in the mid-July to mid-August timeframe, putting your June 30th expiration square in the middle of prime season to be turning a tenant after a 15-day period for fixing a place up. If you leave April 1, the landlord is looking at a potentially empty rental for 3 months.

I think you should tell the landlord that you need to think about it: you are not interested in a lease that puts you in the market in the middle of summer, and that you think an 11% increase is way over market, and that on the whole even if the term & amount could be agreed upon, you feel that the lack of heat in the basement is not what you signed up for, and you'd rather find something with the whole place heated. Tell him/her that you'll discuss the options with your spouse, and that you'll get back to him/her.

Don't get back to him/her for a few weeks. During that time, noises will be made about how he/she will need to start looking for a new tenant if you can't decide. Tell him "fine, do what you need to do, but I can't make a decision right now". During this time, remember that you'll be the first to know if someone actually is interested in the apartment because scheduling will have to go through you. You also have open the option of paying up the 11% and the 15-month term later because it is unlikely that a new tenant will agree to anything better from the perspective of the landlord (I doubt a new tenant would give in on the 15-month thing at all). Given equal-sized offers, the landlord will prefer you given that you are a known quantity.

Note that the landlord will say "I'm going to look for a new tenant" early here. He'll probably say it this week to get you worried, but by doing so he will have started the clock on making a credible threat earlier than he perhaps should since people may not be in the market for a Apr 1 rental yet on Feb 1. When you say "fine" and time passes without him having anyone who's interested, this is leverage in your negotiations. If someone does come along, you can choose to pay up then. Either way, you are not in a worse position than you are in now.

During this time, you should be proactive about figuring out what's in the market, and you should quantify for yourself the words "I do not want to move". Let's say your rent is $2000 right now, and we're talking about an increase to $2200 plus a July 1 rental cycle. Suppose you find a place that you like better than your current place (with the whole place heated and above-ground, say), and it costs $2200 with an April 1 rental cycle. Would that be enough to incentivize you to move? How about $2000? How about $1800? How about $1500? Every pain has a price.

The point here is that you have ZERO alternatives at the moment. You have (in your mind and fully telepathed to everyone on SE and your landlord who sniffs the family-with-kids-and-4-pets situation from a mile away) created an absolute with no alternatives. You have fully declared that you have no other options regardless of pricing/terms. If you've ever played poker with any level of seriousness, you'd know that bluffing is extremely hard work and mentally strenuous. Waiting for good cards and playing them right (patience), on the other hand, is much easier. The first order of business here is for you to figure out for yourself what your alternatives are.

The only way you can do that is to go out in the market and research alternatives. You're a bit early at the moment, so you should wait a couple of weeks here and play delaying tactics with the current landlord. In 2 weeks or so, do all the work to find alternatives and negotiate in 1 crammed week. First, spend a few hours determining a set of places you'd be interested in. Once you have your list, email everyone and see all the places in a matter of a few days. Once you have done this, open negotiations on your current place plus a couple of your other favorites simultaneously, and spend a few days negotiating.

The key is to negotiate them all at the same time so that you can, in real time, look at your alternatives and play them off one another. For example, suppose you find that your landlord is asking $2200, and the other places are asking $2100 for something equivalent to you. At those prices, you decide for yourself that you'd rather just stay put and not deal with moving. But you don't go with that. You first put in low offers on the $2100 places, low enough so that you'd be willing to move at that price and then some. Say you do $1800. One of them says "I'm not budging", but the other one counters at $1900. Now, your choice is between $1900 for a different place vs. $2200 for your current place. You'd be willing to move for $1900 vs. $2200, so you go to your landlord now and say "Well, I have another option at $1900 with a 12-month lease. I know you want $2200 with 15-month, but that doesn't work for me. I don't want to ask you to go down to $1900 because that's lower than what I'm currently paying, but I'll do $2000 with a 12-month lease". He comes back at $2100 with a 12-month lease. Now you counter each of them by another $50: $1850 in the new place, $2050 in the current place. Both, or one, or none will bite. Regardless, at this point you have your options, you make your choice. All this negotiation is done in a couple of days.

Jen, one other thing to consider in your negotiations. Because you don't like moving, make sure that the lease terms reflect this. By this, I mean that you should be aiming for longer-term leases with pre-known prices. I personally always ask for 3-year leases with the option for me (and just me) to terminate any time after the first year with notice. In my market segment, it's accepted about half the time, and about half the time it gets morphed into something like a 2-year lease with an option only at the 1-year point.

Now suppose a new place is willing to do a 2- or 3-year lease, but the current place is only willing to do a 1-year lease. It makes moving more attractive: not only are you getting a lower price, but you're getting it for multiple years. Perhaps more importantly, you won't be sitting in the same situation again in 1 year where you'll be deciding between a 12% increase on top of your current 11% increase vs. moving and finding a place in the middle of the summer rental season, when you won't have anywhere near the negotiating power you currently have.

inonada, I appreciate it, but some of that is over the top.

I spoke to two 20-year brokers in the area where I live. Neither found the summer thing to be problematic--although there are many students looking for apartments, there are an equal number leaving. They both said that "prime season" is one of those media myths that has never played out here in reality. (Their best months last year were November and December.) Last summer, three of the units in this building were vacant from June through September. Many lookers, no takers, because of the glut of inventory. Even in July. They recommended negotiating strongly on the rent but leaving the June thing off the table as the type of "over-negotiation" that can ruin a negotiation. They also offered to help me find a new place at no charge if this falls through.

The landlord apparently needs to get a new lease signed immediately for "banking reasons." I spoke to a broker who said there is probably a mortgage or loan that hinges upon building occupancy, and having the most expensive unit vacant for April would be a problem. There is probably also a June to June fiscal year. We told him we would only sign immediately if he reduced it another $100. Otherwise, we would sign after he had the basement insulated better. (Two months isn't that far ahead for a renewal lease, but then again a new lease is usually two weeks before so I don't buy that he HAS to have it right now, two days after he even offered the renewal.)

I've also never had a landlord show an apartment while I was in tenancy. I know it CAN be done, but they never do it.

Accepting the current rent will put me at $3000 more a year. Moving will cost at least that. My apartment has some features that uniquely suit us, as well, and would be difficult to duplicate. (Although they don't necessarily make it more valuable to other people.) So we're staying unless they kick us out. I appreciate any help in making our stay more affordable, and warmer, but I'm not moving unless they refuse to renew.

No one can predict where the market will be in 15 months...it very well could be lower than now, summer or not! I'm only worried about cost and heat, not length of lease.

>inonada, I appreciate it, but some of that is over the top.

Like negotiating for the Chinese to devalue.

"inonada, I appreciate it, but some of that is over the top."

Thanks, I'll take that as a complement ;).

You & the brokers obviously know more about the area than me. Even if the "prime season" issue is a myth that doesn't apply to your area, it doesn't mean you can't use it in your negotiations. It can be an issue you can "give in" on, and it is more plausible than the "fiscal year" line you are being fed. In any case, I like the tone of your latest post much better.

Oh, over the top is a compliment! You covered all bases! It's just that some don't apply to me, or aren't ones I can be concerned about now. We are in a complicated place in our lives right now and moving would seriously, seriously suck, so we have to make this work.

Yeah, I did like my tone better too...until my landlord sent me an email this morning saying we sign by next week or he doesn't renew our lease. He "may" have someone interested in paying $150 more per month. He told me straight out that he has to have a lease in place next week because he needs a new loan, and he will deal with an unknown person paying more, than a known entity who won't sign in time to get him his loan.

That said, management called last night and they are sending someone to re-insulate the basement. So we are going to go with the small reduction he offered earlier, plus the basement re-insulation, as a basis for a 15-month lease.

I'm glad it all worked out. The "may" have someone is of course complete BS. The place has not been marketed, no one has seen it, etc. It is time for you to take a nibble now. Figure out something small you want that he cannot really say "no" to, and ask for that. BTW, put make sure reinsulation of the basement is added to the lease's rider.

Of course the "may" is BS. And the landlord had, a few hours previously, sent a pleading email saying that he needs a loan that is dependent on our unit NOT being vacant in April, which is why he needs us to sign ASAP. (Our unit is the only one that has a lease ending before June.) I think the threatening follow-up email was because he felt he'd shared too much about his financial situation and given us way too much power.

The problem ultimately is that our apartment looks great on paper, and on paper it seems like our rent is already really low. But once you live there, you realize that the room sizes/configurations, the basement temperature, and the crime rate on the block make it a worse deal after all. The rent we are agreeing to is fair, not a bargain like it would seem if you just looked at the square footage and amenities on a broker's listing. So he probably COULD rent it for a lot more if he waited a bit...but he'd have the same problem as he had with the tenants before us, who broke their lease and moved out early. (For two reasons: the temperature downstairs, and a break-in.)

He did make a lot of improvements after they left, including stellar security features. And in the name of cooperation, we agreed to sign ASAP with a $50 reduction, and if the insulation was guaranteed in writing. In any case, this landlord has been extremely fast and proactive with improvements and repairs prior.

So now lets see if a lease with the agreed rent and rider shows up...it's bothersome that he switched from nice/pleading to nasty/threatening in a few hours based on a "maybe" sight-unseen higher offer.

jennem, i'm a little surprised that with a small child you feel it is a good idea to live in a block with, what it seems, lots of crime.

moving is definitely difficult with children, did it twice. taking 2 days off to get it done and having your child raised in a safe environment would take precedence over anything in life. just my opinion though.

We do not have the income to allow an apartment bigger than a one-bedroom, with a reasonable commute to her excellent public school/my job/my husband's job, anywhere else. And we did try the one-bedroom thing and it was awful.

We have many friends who have been successfully raising their kids in this area without incident for 10+ years. As long as you can put up with the kids dealing weed on the sidewalk, and you've got good window guards, you just keep your eyes open and enjoy the square footage and easy access to transportation.

Financially, it's Harlem or the suburbs, and the suburbs would pretty much destroy our quality of life through a horrific daily commute.

Safety takes precedent over everything except using a credit card to pay my rent. Or trying to cram three people into 600sf without being miserable.

your 4 pet status limits the rental supply you may shop--i hope, at least, one of your pets is a gnarly-assed (looking) dog, with you and your little one living alone on a rough block

When I was in elementary school, our apartment was broken into twice before we finally decided to move. I still have nightmares about it once in awhile, decades later.

It's not that rough. We're not talking 139th and Lenox or anything like that.

And we don't live alone...we have a 6'5" dad and husband in residence.

Our apartment on 88th and York was broken into. These things happen.