Landlord trying to increase rent, question for you -located in NJ

[Matthew Palmer]

Hi everyone,

I've never posted on here before so I hope I'm in the right section.  My girlfriend and I are going on our third year in our NJ apartment, and our landlord has been pretty terrible the entire time.  Nothing worthy of going to court for, but let's just say with what we've had to put up with as tenants, we don't feel like rent should keep increasing every year.

For the record, my girlfriend and I are very good tenants who pay early every month and will leave our apartment much cleaner than it was when we moved in.  Last year our landlord wanted to increase our rent to 5%, and we asked that it would increase by 3% instead, which he agreed to.  This year, surprise surprise he wants to increase it to 5% again.  Last year we had a long conversation with him and he agreed that for any future years, our rent would only increase by 3%.  He even signed our addendum to the lease stating that, because we crossed out the 5% and wrote in a 3%, as he suggested.  So we wrote him back with that information and a copy of what he signed.

Our lease ends in a little over a month, and we haven't heard back from him about if he'll agree to the 3% or not.  What do you think we should do?  I did some reading up on tenant laws and I know NJ is a tenant friendly state, but we don't want to move.

Any advice would really help!