Being Overcharged Rent

Location: Wisconsin

My fiancé and I are in a weird position right now with our current housing situation. We’ve been living in our apartment for over a year now and re-signed our lease last fall, the new lease beginning Sep 1st and paid our first month of rent. A couple weeks later, ownership of the building changed. At the time, I had the thought to go and save our digital copy of our lease from our rent portal app, but I had already been signed out and no longer had access to it as the new owners used a different portal. Didn’t seem like a huge deal, I figured I could just get it from the leasing office if I ever needed it.

Fast forward to January of this year. Suddenly our leasing office is telling us we need to sign a new lease with them beginning March 1st, which will be a new rate. We tell them that we already have an active lease that began in Sep and ends Aug 31st. They say they don’t have records of our lease, it got lost during the transition of ownership and we need to sign the new one with them to continue living there. At this point we also realized that they had been overcharging us $50 each month since taking over. Supposedly the only thing they received from the previous owners was the amount we were paying each month, so we are assuming that they took that amount and added $50 for our garage fee, even though our fee was already included in the total they received.

We did not sign the new lease, because although we don’t have a copy of our current lease, it still exists and is legally binding. We also have proof of our ACTUAL rent we should be paying in our bank statements from the first month we paid in September of last year with the previous owners. However, when March 1st came around, we were charged our new rate according to the lease we never signed. Although we don’t have a copy of our current lease, we do have a copy of our previous one and the new one was the exact same thing with different years on it and a new rate, and it does not say our rent can be changed mid-lease.

At this point, we have been double charged for our garage fee for 7 months ($350 total overpaid) and have paid two months of our “new lease” that we didn’t even sign ($60 total overpaid). Our leasing office lady claims she can’t do anything about it. We have reached out to the company several times and even spoke with the owner of the company who originally told us we would be refunded everything we overpaid and that she would “look for our lease”, then she later told us that there was nothing she could do because they do not have our lease. They ignore our emails. As far as I know, it falls on them to have our lease agreement.

At this point we just aren’t really sure what to do. We have been paying whatever they charge us because we don’t want late fees or to be accused of avoiding rent, etc. We have never missed a payment or been late. Do we stop paying? Go to small claims court? What are our rights here? At this point I’m worried they’ll charge us for moving out at the end of our lease and say we’re breaking our imaginary lease agreement with them.

TLDR: New ownership overcharging us based on our “new” lease with them that we didn’t sign (because we already have one), also double charging for garage and ghosting us