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This is going to be a long post because the last 2 years living in this apartment have been an absolute circus.
First and foremost, in October of 2014, I came home from work to discover a sheriff's sale notice on my front door. I didn't even know the house I was living in was in foreclosure, let alone coming up for auction. When my daughter came home, she made the suggestion that I go downstairs and photograph it, so I did. Good thing I did, because as soon as the landlord's wife came home, she ripped the notice off the front door and they didn't say a word to anyone. I went downstairs and informed the couple living on the first floor, and they promptly went and confronted the landlord who said there was nothing to be worried about. The couple also informed us (they share a mailbox with the landlord, who lives on the third floor) that they had seen notices in the mail for months. They also informed us that this has happened before, as they have lived here 4 or 5 years longer than us. That night, we waited up to see if the landlord would be contacting us with an explanation or any information and he never did.
A few months passed, and my husband saw that the house was listed in the newspaper as going up for auction. The landlord was still telling us not to worry and that they were refinancing and everything would be fine. When confronted with the fact that the sheriff's sale notice was in the newspaper, he came up with a story about how he would fix it and how it was an error. Unsurprisingly, the following month, he told my husband that the house would be getting put up for a short sale and thanked him for "sticking with him until the end." After that, there were multiple viewings of the house and eventually one of the owner's friends agreed to buy the house. The landlord moved out. For whatever reason, the house did not pass numerous attempts at inspection, and the friendship between the two men ultimately dissolved because the house was left in such disrepair and the owner stopped answering his friend/the new buyer's phone calls. The man trying to buy the house lost out on a lot of money trying to get things to pass.
A few months ago, a week before the sale was finally supposed to go through on the condition that the house would finally pass inspection, the landlord sent a text to my husband after abandoning the property/refusing to answer phone calls or text messages for over 3 months. We were trying constantly to get in contact with the owner because he left us without an oven for over 3 months. When we informed him that our oven broke, he told us to "ask the new owner for one" and disappeared. The text message he sent my husband stated, "I did you a favor by not charging you any rent for these past 3 months, but I need money to cover the cost of the insurance, water, and other bills... I'll only charge you $600." We didn't know what to do, so we contacted the man we were told was the new owner, and he said he couldn't believe that the landlord was trying to get us to pay him after abandoning the property. We sent a text message back informing him that until we sought legal counsel, we would be withholding the money. Within 3 days, we received a notice for eviction in the mail and he was seeking over $3,000 in back rent.
To make a long story short, when we went to court, he had a lawyer with him who tried to intimidate us by telling us that things rarely work well for tenants when appearing before a judge, and when we said we were willing to take the chance because we had proof that he had no grounds to evict us, they asked us to settle it out of court. They tried to run rough shot on us, but when we informed the lawyer that we had text message proof of everything and showed pictures of the condition of the property and how bad it was, they were suddenly willing to work it out. Ultimately, the owner of the house became emotional, literally crying on my shoulder and apologizing to us profusely and telling us he was having "personal problems" and took them out on us. He walked away with a whopping $600 for two months (a grand total of $1200), the cost of court fees, and the cost of paying a lawyer. He also was told he had to replace our oven. The sale of the house fell through, so the house is still in his possession, though it is listed on the Union County sheriff's sale website and has been for about a year now. The owner and his wife filed for bankruptcy and as a result, the date of the sheriff's sale gets "postponed due to bankruptcy" every month. We ask him every single month what's going on and it's always the same excuse with him telling us they're working on it. I honestly believe he is trying to buy time because they are living off of the rent money. I believe he lies to us (as he has done all along) to try to collect as much rent money as he can until the house finally goes up for auction.
Bringing this saga to current date, everything has been relatively decent. This place is not/never was Shangri-La, but we haven't really been in a financial position to move and rent in the area is outlandishly expensive. We were late with January's rent because my husband's job messed up on his check. We informed the landlord who said he had no problem with this. A week later we received a text message from him telling us that we are "habitually late" and he "can't take it any more," and that they've decided to "take the apartment back," and that the papers were on the way. We received the papers and will be going to court, yet again, this week. Strangely, he is trying to say that we didn't pay him for January despite the fact that we have text message proof that we told him we had the money for him and he just never responded and went and filed papers.
According to the New Jersey Anti-Eviction Act, when evicting tenants for "habitual late payment," a landlord is required to send a legal notice called a "notice to cease" 30 days PRIOR to filing for the eviction. Not only did he not give us any warning, but he informed us that he was evicting us after he filed the paperwork, which is illegal. He also checked off a box on the paperwork that states that we're living here without his consent, which I can't even begin to understand. This time we are not fighting it because clearly he doesn't want us here. On top of that, the front steps are basically collapsing and he recently came and put up pieces of wood to stabilize them, and there is always the fact that we never know what the hell the next month is going to bring with regard to the status of the house.... will we have to move if it gets sold? will it go for auction? We never know, and he's been nothing but dishonest about it.
It would appear that anytime this man has a hardship in his personal life, he takes it out on us. We have been treated radically different from the tenants below us. Over the summer, we continued to pay full rent when the landlord moved out while the couple below us lived here rent-free for 4 months. When we tried to withhold $600 he asked for after he abandoned the house, left us without an oven, and left the property littered with trash, he tried to evict us and get over $3,000 from us. The one time we are late, he once again drags us to court, but the people beneath us regularly smash and bang things and have violent fights that have resulted in the cops being called. The screaming and banging going on down there has always been outrageous--to the point that neighbors call the police on them regularly. We have asked the landlord to ask them to keep it down and he refused, stating, "what do you want me to do? throw them out?" We definitely got screwed here. I understand that NJ has laws that state that landlords don't have to use rent money toward the house, but I strongly disagree with that after dealing with this situation. In retrospect, so much makes sense now. I remember paying him rent and seeing him come home with new rims on his truck, or a difference in the suspension. I also babysat their dog for them when they went on vacation 4 times in a single year while neither of them was working. We now know that the house was in foreclosure at that time. What a slap in the face to have your living situation jeopardized because your landlord uses your money to go on lavish vacations instead of paying his mortgage. And it's perfectly legal! After looking into the situation, we found out that this man has been in foreclosure twice before.
I have a question for anyone in the know: how long can we continue to stay here while we put together the money to move? I have been searching online for apartments and even in Middlesex county, everyone states that it will cost around $5,000 to even get into a place. We plan on asking a judge/mediator at court this week if we can continue to pay him rent for a month or two while we find a place and get together the funds to go to what will hopefully be a much better place with a better landlord/neighbors.
If anyone has any information about how long you can live in a place when you have nowhere else to go, I would greatly appreciate it.
My advice would be to call any tenant lawyer you can and get actual legal advice pertinent to the situation. There's a lot of specificity here that they'll be able to advise you on. Consultation calls will be free. It sounds like you are deep into it legally and need a legal advocate on your side at this point, not advice from strangers on the internet.
Looks like that landlords rent the place for well below the market the price. $600 a month? Am I missing something? With many tenants are very careless at the use, and thus, house maintaining costs will double, triple, quadruple, or even more compared to owner-occupied houses, and considering many tenants like to take advantage as long as they can, as OP stated other tenants live there rent-free, and now they want to live there low-rent for a while despite the owner wants them out and they need to move out legally. So anyone renting out their houses well below market price is asking big trouble for themselves later on down the road, no wonder that landlord face foreclosure.
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