Hello! Firstly, thank you for taking the time to read this and taking the time for answering if you do! I’m truly very grateful! 💕🙇🏻♀️ For context: I live in the state of Virginia.
To begin, we were renting a condo from a lady who lives overseas. Her realtor is her middlelady and helps communicate everything between the both of us. We have been living there for over a year. Our original contract was for 1 year. We decided to renew. Right before it was about to begin, our realtor (let call her Blaire), calls us and tells us about how the owner is having family problems. As a result, they need to sells the condo. They wanted to give us a chance to apply first. We tried, and unfortunately, we couldn’t afford it. So we were originally going to leave. We immediately started searching and found a place we liked and could afford. Right before we were going to sign the new lease, Blaire calls. She said, that the owner wants us to stay so they can still have income coming in. We originally had a roommate to help us afford the rent. She moved out. So we were going to find another roommate before the all this. But since we may have to move out in between, we didn’t want to have a roommate think they had a secure place when it wasn’t. That wouldn’t be fair to them. We told Blaire this and she said she’d talk to the owners. They reduced the rent so we could afford it and stay while they worked on selling. We were on board and happy to stay.
Fast forward 2 months later. They decided against selling since they really wanted a certain price (which was REALLY high for the area). So 2 weeks before the end of the month, Blaire calls us with the news. She said that the owner wants to go back to the original price agreed from before AND that we would have to pay that starting May. Of course, we couldn’t afford this with our roommate as mentioned before. Before we could say anything, she said how it was a nice break on payments.
We were appalled and so confused by this sudden change. We told her we would leave by the end of April, so the 30th as we couldn’t afford it. Then she told us we had to give 30 day notice of our departure. Yes, this is started in the contract. So she said she would talk to the owners. After almost a week later, she finally said that we definitely do need to give a 30 day notice. But we truly can’t afford this new rent increase. And according to Virginia Code: Section 55.1-1253 (D), it states they needed to give a 30 day notice on rental price increase. Then it would not take effect until 30 days AFTER the notice.
So here is the question: what do I do? Should I try to find a lawyer? Are we in trouble? We did ended up moving already because we didn’t know what else to do and we are so worried now…any help or insight on the matter would help TREMENDOUSLY! Even recommendations on attorneys would be appreciated! We struggle to make ends met as I’m disabled and just want to get by. 🙇🏻♀️