Purposefully letting lease expire to raise rent?

[Carl Fredrickson]

My lease expires at the end of the month, but I hadn’t heard anything from the management about renewal. I contacted the front office today and the person I talked to let it slip that they’re about 2 months behind on sending those out. 

My monthly payment is a combination of rent and water surcharge. 

They said since I’m initiating the renewal before the lease terminates, the rent and water surcharge will stay the same, but if I had waited to receive the paperwork from them, both would have gone up, which to me makes sense because the lease had expired and so I would be signing a new lease. 

The thing is I’ve lived in this unit for 13+ years. When I first got there,  there was only a rent payment and it went up the first couple of times I renewed. Then it was split out into rent and water surcharge; the rent has stayed the same but the water surcharge has increased a few times over the years. So there’s a history of having to pay more through a renewal process rather than letting the lease fully expire and then signing a new one. 

I do get the sense that the current set of owners is doing a value add, and I would expect the rent and/or water payment to go up over time anyway due to inflation. 

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it almost seems like the new owners are purposefully letting the leases expire. Even if there is a 30-day notice for rent increase (another thing the person I talked to mentioned), why not communicate the renewal with the new terms 30 days before the lease expires like they used to? 

Is there a benefit to doing things that way compared to just doing a conventional renewal (e.g. rents can be increased faster).

It may depend on state; this is in Kansas.