After six years of living in our apartment, our former landlord (who had owned several units in our co-op building) sold our apartment to a new landlord in june 2011. This new landlord never came to assess our apartment.
We have some minor problems that needed fixing; mostly cosmetic with the exception of a leaking faucet and broken smoke detector. We asked our last landlord to fix these but consequently it was the same time he was selling so it never happened.
Our lease was up in August 2011 but we didn't receive a new one. Our new landlord continued to send us monthly invoices at the same rate so we just figured he was taking a while to send us a lease. We continued to pay our invoiced amount on time every month.
This January, our landlord contacted us and told us he was increasing rents 5% across the board. We said that was no problem but would like to have the items that needed fixing fixed first. After a few weeks his contractor came to assess the problems. Then after another few weeks, he informed us he got approval from the board to fix our apartment. He then said he would fix them and raise our rent the 5% but the increase would be retroactive to the date of August when we would have signed a new lease.
We told him that we didn't agree to this since he just mentioned the raise in January and invoiced us the old amount each month which we paid. We told him we would agree to pay the increase retroactively as of January which is when he told us about it for the first time.
Can anyone tell me if the landlord has a legal right to ask for a retroactive increase after 7 months, especially when he invoiced us the old amount each month? Also, when he told us it would be retroactive, he said he would understand if we needed to relocate which we feel was a passive aggressive "retaliatory eviction" threat.
Any help in regards to our rights, would be greatly appreciated.