FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- Residents who live in a mobile home park on North College Avenue and Grape Street in Fort Collins are crying "foul" over eviction notices issued by their landlord.

The landlord has sold the property to a developer who plans to build a strip mall.

The dispute is over how long the tenants were told they could stay until the mobile homes would have to be removed. It is also about rent.

"He (the landlord) originally told people they would have 18 months," said tenant Laurel Thomas. "He said that it would be in 2009 that people would actually have to move out of here."

"I figured it would get me through the winter," said tenant Natausha Spenser. "So I decided to move in. Then all of a sudden everything went haywire and we had to move out."

Property owners Floyd and Ruth Barber said they notified every tenant that leases would be month-to-month. They showed 7NEWS a copy of one of the leases containing the hand written statement: Tenant is informed that park under is contract, month-to-month lease.

Ruth Barber said she and her husband told tenants they would notify them as soon as they learned about the closing date.

"We said that it could be one month, it could be five months. When we know, you will know," Barber said.

The Barbers said they found other places for the tenants to live and even introduced them to a new prospective landlord.

"He shook their hands and gave them space numbers to go look at," Ruth Barber said. "We told him, ‘Please keep the rents the same at least at the beginning and no deposits because these people will not have it.’"

But none of the tenants moved to the new park.

Then the city of Fort Collins and the developer offered the tenants $2,000 to pay for the first month's rent, deposit and moving expenses.

"It's allotted in a certain way which I don't like," Spenser said while loading her pickup with her belongings. "Most of these people cannot afford to hire a moving truck beforehand and then waiting to get reimbursed for it."

A shouting match erupted between the tenants and their landlord at Tuesday night's city council meeting when one of the tenants, who asked for help, was served an eviction notice.

"A little bit of dignity and respect is what I would like to have seen," said tenant Tanya Carlson. "I don't care that Floyd Barber sold his property. It's his to do with. But there is a better way to do this."

The Barbers said they have bent over backwards to help their tenants, allowing them to move in without paying a deposit, not asking for references and not asking for market rent.

But the tenants said the rent they pay is too much and they want more time before they have to move.

The eviction notice gives them until the end of November.