a variety of fees<\/a> to the monthly bill \u2014 and it can be difficult to fully evaluate those costs before you move in.\u00a0<\/p>\nAn investigation by The Guardian identified a wide array of fees charged by Greystar, which manages some 200,000 apartment units in Texas, including substantial numbers in Dallas, Houston and Austin. <\/p>\n
Reporter Tracie McMillan says some fee names, and their purposes, confuse renters. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.<\/p>\n
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:<\/p>\n
Texas Standard: Tell us about Greystar, especially their footprint in Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tracie McMillan: As the biggest owner and manager of apartments in the country, they\u2019ve got more than a million units that they oversee and almost a quarter of those are in Texas, where it has about just over 200,000 units. <\/p>\n
Houston proper\u2019s got about 44,000 units, Austin proper, 32,000 units, the Dallas-Fort Worth market area has about 57,000 units. So it\u2019s quite a lot of power over folks\u2019 housing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Well, tell us about these fees. What are they for? How much money do they add to a tenant\u2019s monthly rent?\u00a0<\/p>\n
So we found 125 different named fees across the country at various apartment listings. They can range anywhere from a dollar or two a month for something like pest control, all the way up to hundreds of dollars to cover utilities that are provided in common areas and in units of the complexes. So there\u2019s a real range, and there\u2019s a mix.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like there\u2019s going to be some that are mandatory. We found, in the in-depth analysis we did of about 18 leases, most leases had between five and 11 mandatory fees. The leases are usually written in a way where you can be evicted for failing to pay those fees that are on top of your rent. <\/p>\n
And then there will be optional fees, move-in fees, and then something that Greystar called situational, which is everything from you get locked out and need a new key to damage in the apartment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So you focus on an apartment complex in Addison in North Texas. What did you learn about the fees there?\u00a0<\/p>\n
So at the Addison Grove complex, we found 13 mandatory fees. About half of those are a set flat fee, so you\u2019re looking at things like $16.75 a month for boiler management, $2 a month per pest control, and then you\u2019ve also got a range of usage-based utilities. So that would be things like your electricity, third-party storm water and drainage. You\u2019re also looking at renter\u2019s liability insurance. <\/p>\n
And so when Greystar does their pricing, they roll those those flat fees into the rent, but not the usage-based fees. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Okay, so I just have to ask, what is a boiler management fee?\u00a0<\/p>\n
We did not get a clear answer on that from Greystar. We did ask about them. <\/p>\n
Our understanding is that it is related to maintaining the heating system. And in fact, there\u2019s a lawsuit in Colorado, arguing that boiler management fees are an unfair shifting of basic costs of running a building, like having a heating system.<\/p>\n
So you quote Greystar as saying the fees are disclosed to renters. Is that accurate based on your reporting? Do renters fully understand what they\u2019re paying for and why?\u00a0<\/p>\n
I think things are disclosed on the website, and if you read every line of the lease and know what to look for, I think you\u2019ll find most of the fees, if not all of them. <\/p>\n
I think there\u2019s also a real shift where property managers and landlords now pull out a lot of fees for things that traditionally have been included in rent, and so tenants don\u2019t necessarily know to look for them and sort of skim over them if they\u2019re not familiar with that being a separate cost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So are there any state or federal laws that address these fees? Or are those fees just, if you disclose them, that\u2019s how it works.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I mean we\u2019re sort of on the leading edge right now around regulating junk fees and housing. A number of localities around the country do have protections in place for renters around specific kinds of fees for renters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are a couple of efforts at the federal level to regulate this stuff. So you do have a bill from Democrats about ending junk fees in rental housing. Again, there\u2019s no Republican co-sponsor so that doesn\u2019t seem to be moving in any direction. <\/p>\n
Right now, the Federal Trade Commission is doing rulemaking around regulating junk fees in rental housing. So we\u2019re likely to see some kind of regulation come out of that agency this year. But it really remains to be seen how much they\u2019re going to regulate, what they\u2019re going to allow.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I do think Greystar\u2019s current pricing model \u2014 where they roll the cost of flat fees into the rent but leave out anything that\u2019s usage-based \u2014 that might be a model because it\u2019s based on a settlement that Greystar had with the FTC in December and is sort of what Greystar now is out there saying, \u201clook we know how to do this. We believe in transparency. Let us roll these fees into a total monthly leasing price. But we don\u2019t that anything that\u2019s usage-based should be included.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s often difficult to evaluate a potential place to live based on the cost of rent alone. That\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-350776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}