Submitted by swxrice t3_125ux9y in personalfinance
My apartment landlord, a large publicly traded company, clearly wants me to renew my lease for more than one year. My lease runs up in June. I will have lived here for three years. The curve of the terms is:
| Term | End | Percent Increase |
|---|---|---|
| M-to-M | N/A | 73.8% |
| 3 mos | Sept | 26.2% |
| 4 | Oct | 26.7% |
| 5 | Nov | 26.7% |
| 6 | Dec | 36.2% |
| 7 | Jan '24 | 35.1% |
| 8 | Feb | 37.4% |
| 9 | Mar | 41.2% |
| 10 | Apr | 21.2% |
| 11 | May | 38.1% |
| 12 | Jun | 33.2% |
| 13-15 | Jul-Sept | 9.0% |
It's pretty clear that they want to funnel me to the longest-term leases, but it feels weird that it's not a linear decrease in cost with length of term. They want me to either come for renewal in Sept-Oct this year with a less than 6-month renewal for about 26%, April next year for 21%, or, their most obviously preferred, July through September next year for 9%.
Is this about trying to railroad my next renewal into some seasonally bad time to be on the market? I don't know why else they would indicate a preference for a term ending in April which would be cheaper than ones ending in either March or May.
E: Thanks for the responses. I'm inclined to think it's mostly to make the longest terms more palatable with scary big increases short of 13 months. Hopefully my next CoL raise is somewhere near this 9% figure.
E2: I'm seeing some replies asking about whether it's a college town. I live in a major metro. There's a few four-year schools within a short drive of me, but they're a drop in the bucket of the city's economic activity. My complex doesn't cater to them. In my three years here, I think I've seen two or three tenants who might have been students.