Rental lease dispute regarding renewal - Wisconsin

Wisconsin
We live in a tourist area and have a rental lease that states lessee shall have first option to renew lease. The lease ended December 31st 2009. The Lessor has signed a contract for 2010 with a third party and we were never contacted regarding renewal. Is there any way we can still rent these premises?

I don't understand. Your lease ended months ago. If you had wanted to renew, why didn't you contact your LL then? You allowed your agreement to go month to month instead of taking advantage of your right to renew. You had the option to renew when it expired in December of 2009. You didn't do so. You also had the option to sign a new lease in January, February or when rent came due this month, in March. You didn't serve notice of your intentions in any of those months. Now you are merely a month to month tenant and you can be terminated with only 28 days notice. Sorry, but if you had wanted to renew you should have notified your LL of your intentions before the lease ended. While you had the first option to renew, you failed to take advantage of it. Now you will have to move if he has signed with a new tenant. You let your lease run out and failed to renew it.

Lease dispute? What dispute? You DON'T have a lease any longer. It ended back in December. Should have renewed it back then. You snooze, you lose.

[sunlover]

You have no lease you are a "tenant at will"

Unless you had a written agreement with the landlord to rent month to month after your lease was up, then you lost your right to your tenancy.

If you did have a written agreement to rent month to month, I suggest that you read this page:

Tenant Resource Center

That resource center deals with retaliation or discrimination. Great resource for tenants dealing with those issues. But this isn't one of them. This tenant just allowed their lease to expire and they became a tenant at will. Since no lease was signed for the next year, the LL chose to obtain a tenant for that year who would sign a lease. Had they wanted to stay in the rental, they needed to guarantee that with a lease. Since they failed to do so, the LL can ask them to vacate with only 28 days notice.