Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in Washington

Re: raise in land rental

Under the Manufactured/Mobile Home Landlord-Tenant Act, if your landlord wishes to raise the rent at the end of your one year lease, he must give you a 3 month advance notice of such intention, as well as the amount by which it is going up.

Since there are 50 of you, my suggestion is to get together and pool your resources to hire one law firm to represent you all. By way of example, my hourly rate is $225, which would make it $4.50 per hour per tenant to represent all of you in a such a limited way. At the same time, the lawyer will spend more time on the case in general, just because each tenant is a separate client requiring individual attention to some degree, but overall, you would all do well to hire one firm to represent you.

Having said that, and assuming that you are all under one year leases which are set to expire soon or month-to-month leases, what would happen is that we'd force the landlord to give you proper written notice of 90 days, but if you do not agree to the new rates, you will all have to leave. There is no rent control rule or statute that limits how much a landlord can raise your rent at the end of the lease.

Additionally, if your landlord wanted to convert the property for use other than a mobile home community, he could evict you all with a minimum 12 months notice.

So, overall, while my short term suggestion will get your landlord to comply with the law requiring proper notice, in the long term, so long as the landlord complies with the notice requirement, there is no law or rule against raising the rent to anything they want.

I hope this at least helps you get an idea of what you are facing.