My question involves an eviction in the state of: NC
I am renting a lot in a mobile home community. I signed a two year lease that does not end until May of 2015.
In September, our landlord made us aware of a website where we could go to make rent payments. I signed up for the website, and made my October and November payments there. Now today, I come home to find an eviction notice on my door. This is not a pay or quit notice, but a notice that a court case has been filed. Now, I will say that I am guilty at times of not keeping up with my bank balance very well. When I go back and review my bank account, I do not see where these payments came out. However, the payment did initially show up after I paid? I also have emails that I received back as payment confirmation. It is like the charges dropped off my account, and I should have noticed this before now, but I did not, as the lot rent is a fairly small amount.
My questions are:
I spoke to the landlord and he is refusing to accept the two late payments from me now, in addition to the late fees because he wants court costs which are more than double what I actually pay for lot rent.
My lease specifies a 7 day notice before filing in court. I have not received any such notice, and I do have the money to cover rent today, just not the excessive amount of court costs. Can he charge me these fees when he did not follow the correct procedure before filing? His defense to this is that the rules of the mobile home community (not our lease which is a separate document) say that the rules can be changed at any time.
I did receive a notice in the mail from landlord a few weeks ago that they would be increasing lot rent on the 1st of January by $25 a month. Can they do that if we have a lease? I actually sent him an email about this and again, he cited the rules of the park which state that rules can be changed with notice. In that correspondence it was never mentioned that the rent was late, but I was pretty resistant to the increase at that time, because I think it is illegal.

