With all of her wheeling and dealing this summer, real estate investor and developer Jolin Kish seems bent on turning Hanover into her personal Monopoly board.

Kish started by selling four of her residential properties on West Wheelock Street to Dartmouth College for $23.5 million. While not Park Place, the properties are within walking distance of campus and help Dartmouth ease its undergraduate housing crunch, which explains why the college paid top dollar. (The town has the four properties assessed for a combined $4.9 million.)

In a side deal, Kish got Dartmouth to sell her an aging eight-bedroom house on West Street, where she already owned two properties, for $1.5 million. Dartmouth will now lease the Foley House back from Kish so undergraduates can continue living there.

Filings with the Grafton County Registry of Deeds also show Kish gave her alma mater options to purchase three other properties on West Wheelock, which serves as a gateway into Hanover from Ledyard Bridge. (Kish told me that she has “no intentions” of selling at the moment.)

But Kish, 57, was far from done.

Two weeks ago, she finalized the purchase of two adjacent apartment complexes — almost 60 units in all — off Lyme Road for $19.8 million from an Upper Valley family that had owned the properties for several decades.

Before the paperwork on the agreement with the Penfield Family Partnership had appeared in Grafton County online property records, tenants at New Hampshire House Apartments and Curtiss Court were finding notices tacked to their front doors announcing big increases — often 20% or more — in their rents.

For retirees living on fixed incomes, like 82-year-old Dan Leggett, it was a bit of a shock. Starting Sept. 1, Leggett’s monthly rent will jump from $1,535 to $1,900 month — a $365 increase.

When the Penfield family owned the building, the “largest monthly increase I can remember was $100,” Leggett said.

He’s lived at New Hampshire House Apartments, a three-story brick building at 8 Reservoir Road, for 31 years. He recently signed a 10-month lease that Kish’s company, Kish Consulting & Contracting, or KCC for short, required of tenants who hoped to stay past August.

In a one-page letter that Leggett and other tenants shared with me, Kish hinted that even bigger rent hikes could be coming. “You probably realize that your rent is far below comparable rents in the area,” she wrote. She put the market rent for Leggett’s apartment at $2,400 a month.

“I don’t know if I can afford to stay here much longer,” said Leggett, who was a chemist for 33 years at CRREL, the federal research institute a short walk from his apartment. “There are only a few of us old-timers left.”

Bob Field, 79, has lived in the building since 2018. “Most of the people here are easy-going folks,” he said. “We try to take care of our places and pay our bills on time.”

Under his new 10-month lease, Field will go from paying $1,300 to $1,700 a month for his one-bedroom apartment.

As Leggett and Field pointed out, New Hampshire House, which was built in 1972, is by no means a luxury complex. The 42 units don’t have central air conditioning and the building lacks an elevator. The only washers and dryers are coin-operated machines in the basement.

Next door at Curtiss Court, which has 16 units, tenants are getting hit with big rent hikes as well. A tenant told me that her two-bedroom is going from $1,675 to $2,100 a month. Unlike their neighbors at New Hampshire House, however, most utilities aren’t included and there’s no carport at Curtiss Court.

Since Kish’s real estate investment and property management company, which she started in 1999, has taken control, the complexes have lost their “small-town, community feel,” a Curtiss Court resident said.

For Kish, “it’s just a business, and I can’t fault her for that,” the resident added.

“The Penfields offered their apartments at significantly lower rents than market rate for over two decades and many people have benefited from their actions,” Kish told me via email. “Now that they have sold the property for its full market value, it is not sustainable to operate it at a loss based upon the newly reset costs of ownership after the sale.”

The statewide median for a two-bedroom was $1,764 a month, according to New Hampshire Housing’s 2023 residential rental cost survey. Grafton County’s median cost of $2,082 a month for a two-bedroom was the highest among the state’s 10 counties.

The Upper Valley’s high rents are frequently blamed on the area’s housing shortage.

But that’s not the only reason.

Kish and other landlords can raise their rents simply because they can. Efforts to protect tenants from hefty rate increases through rent control have gone nowhere in Concord, including a bill this year that would have allowed towns and cities to enact their own rent control ordinances.

This week, President Joe Biden pitched a form of national rent control, requiring large landlords to cap rent increases at no more than 5% a year, or lose federal tax breaks.

When I asked Kish in a phone interview about the president’s proposal, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s a bad idea,” said Kish, who along with her 1988 undergraduate degree from Dartmouth has a master’s degree from the college’s Thayer School of Engineering and a doctorate from Stanford.

Faced with increased expenses — from building supplies and maintenance costs to property taxes and insurance rates — landlords have to raise rents to stay in business, she argued.

It’s a domino effect,” she said.

Dominos? Monopoly?

The games that big landlords play.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.