<prompt> Human: My lease contract stipulates that without negotiating, my rent was set to increase 10. I wrote them a letter saying weve enjoyed our first year of living here and that weve been pretty ideal tennants rent on time, no complaints or damage. I also cited stats about my towns vacancy rate and home appreciation from a site called Sperlings Best Places. I also inquired about a 2 year lease if it could lock in our rate for another year.They responded today saying theyve enjoyed having us and our rent is only going up 2! A few factors make this less impressive than it seems: 1. I live in cheap ass upstate NY, where housing demand is low. I doubt this would work in more high demand housing areas. 2. Maybe they were already gonna raise it 2 and the 10 was just part of their default contract. Either way, according to my contract, they could definitely have raised my rate 10 if they wanted to. Never hurts to ask!  <response>: Theres only 1 reason not to counter when you get a rent increase; you cant find somewhere else to live for that price. Its the job of the leasing agents to push rent as much as possible, and they assume that people either wont counter, or will get too busy with other things and miss their deadline to give them notice.There are several reasons why theyd much rather keep an existing tenant thats in good standing. Downtime - invariably when you move out there will be some time where theyre not collecting rent Turnover Costs - they will have to do something paint, clean, new carpet, etc to make your apartment ready for the next person Tenant Risk - Theyve already done a credit check on you and youve hopefully got a history of paying on time. Although they will generally charge a perspective tenant for the credit check through application fees, theres still the risk in a new tenant Admin Costs - A renewal is practically zero work for them. A new tenant has a lot of paperwork that needs to be filed.Lets just say your rent is 1000 a month and they want to raise it 10 to 1100, theyre looking at and additional 1200 in revenue from your apartment. If they account for 2 weeks of down time, thats 550. If they have to clean and paint, that might be another 300. With those costs, theyre only making and additional 350 by raising your rent 10. Why not just raise your rent by 3, make the same money, and not have to deal with the hassle of turning over the apartment.One thing to know about this is that after a handful of years of doing this, you may be significantly below market, in which the leasing agents will probably hold firm on that increase. At this point, youve got to think hard about whether you really want to move or not. Do some research and figure out if it makes sense. Talk to other leasing agents, as they will likely have concessions that may not be advertised. Sometimes the only way to keep your rent down is to move, but its not something you should be doing every year.Source: work in Real Estate 