Greystar and Invitation Homes are stealing from renters through mandatory junk fees hidden behind the advertised rent.
The kitchen table spreadsheet is supposed to be the place where the math gets honest. I know this because I lived at that table for six years as a renter, staring at numbers that refused to line up until my grandmother’s estate helped my husband and me put a down payment on a rowhouse in Fishtown. The privilege of that is named. For the roughly 44 million American renter households, per Census estimates, that table is where the math gets rigged before they have even signed the lease.
The rigging has a name now. It’s the “utility fee,” the “application fee,” the “amenity fee” you never use. It is the mechanism by which a $2,400-a-month apartment becomes a $2,500-a-month obligation, not through rent increases but through the fine print of a lease you cannot afford to not sign. This isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the business model.
I read Shaun Cordeiro’s story on a Tuesday morning with the coffee still hot. He is a behavioral economist in Boston who moved into a Greystar-managed building on Boston Harbor in 2022. The water bills — calculated by a Utah-based company called Conservice using a formula Cordeiro says he never saw — did not line up with his usage. When he brought it up, management told him “it all comes out in the wash.” Cordeiro’s response, because he is who he is: “I’m an economist. It does not just ‘come out in the wash.’” A health crisis later, the couple fell behind on rent. Greystar began charging them eviction and legal fees. The fees created a negative balance on his account that meant he could never catch up on rent unless he paid the fees. He filed a class action in federal court in November 2023. It is still pending. Greystar denied any “unlawful or unfair” conduct and said in court filings that Cordeiro and his partner owed more than $5,000 in unpaid rent and fees.
Greystar is the country’s largest owner and manager of apartments. Invitation Homes is the country’s largest landlord of single-family rental homes. In December, the FTC and the state of Colorado announced a $24 million settlement with Greystar over allegations of junk-fee practices. In 2024 Invitation Homes paid $48 million to settle similar allegations. Neither company admitted wrongdoing. Greystar described its practice of advertising base rent and then adding mandatory fees as a “longstanding, industrywide practice.”
Longstanding. Industrywide. The two words, in that order, are the sentence every regulator should read twice.
The industry’s argument, in full: the fees must stay invisible, because if you saw them you would not sign the lease. The advertised rent is the loss leader. The fees are the actual price. The National Apartment Association — 113,000 members, the industry’s largest trade group — told the Federal Trade Commission that “fees and charges are a necessary part of pricing structures that keep rental housing communities financially stable.” Local affiliates of the NAA, submitting comments based on an NAA template, argued that rental transactions are too complex for “all-in pricing.” The NAA told the Guardian that all-in pricing could “artificially inflate rental housing costs.” This is the linguistic equivalent of saying a lobotomy alters personality. The cost isn’t artificial; it is the cost of the apartment.
The math, for a renter, looks like this. Take a two-bedroom in a professionally managed building, advertised at $2,400 a month. The lease arrives with a $35 amenity fee, a $20 trash fee, a $15 pest fee, a $9 smart-home fee, a $5 utility-billing fee, and a RUBS — ratio utility billing system — charge that bills each tenant for water and sewer based on a formula the building works out with Conservice or one of the other third-party utility-billing companies. The unit is not metered. The tenant cannot audit the formula. The fees add $84 a month on the low end and frequently more on the high end, depending on what the building has decided to bundle. Over twelve months that is $1,000 to $3,600 that the advertised rent did not contain. The unit is not $2,400 a month. The unit is $2,484 to $2,700 a month, and the renter does not see the higher number until the bills arrive.
Look at how Taylor Swift writes the unrequited-labor song. tolerate it sits near the back of evermore and is what happens when the narrator knows the labor is unacknowledged, knows what leaving costs, and knows the alternative is worse. That is what the song sounds like when the renter opens the second water bill calculated on a formula she never saw — the moment of recognizing the hidden price and absorbing fees the lease never disclosed, because the cost of moving exceeds the cost of staying. The performance of solvency — the smile at the leasing agent, the digital signature on the doc, the $300 application fee paid because there is nowhere else to go — is the labor of appearing stable while the math underneath you is collapsing.
Farah Momin, a renter in Seattle, told the FTC in April that “the rental housing market is one where consumers have little power. Landlords can impose fees through take-it-or-leave-it lease terms, and the cost/disruption of moving means that tenants may absorb unfair charges rather than leave. Federal baseline protections are needed to level this playing field.” Of the 471 public comments the FTC received on its rental junk-fee rulemaking, nearly 400 supported regulation. Most of the 60 or so who opposed it were members or representatives of trade groups.
The asymmetry is structural. The NAA has a 113,000-member trade association, a comment template, and a multi-year litigation playbook. A renter has a lease and a paystub. When Greystar adds an eviction fee that was never authorized by a court — which is what Cordeiro alleges — the renter’s options are pay, dispute, or move. Disputing requires a lawyer. A lawyer requires money the renter may not have, because the dispute exists because the renter does not have money. Matthew Desmond, who has spent a career documenting why poverty survives in a country this rich, names the mechanism in Poverty, by America: poverty persists because the non-poor benefit from it. We get cheaper apartments because somebody else is paying the difference between the advertised rent and the actual rent through mandatory junk fees that get litigated one class action at a time.
The state-level map is a patchwork that proves the need for a federal floor. Only four states — Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Nevada — require landlords to advertise a total monthly leasing price. Another 17 have partial rules addressing specific charges. A coalition of 27 state attorneys general submitted a comment in April urging a “clear minimum federal standard.” Representative Maxwell Frost, Democrat of Florida, has introduced the End Junk Fees for Renters Act in both the 2023 and 2025 sessions. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon has a companion bill. Neither has a Republican co-sponsor.
The fix is boring but necessary: federal “all-in pricing.” If the apartment costs $2,100, advertise it as $2,100. Stop selling the base rent and then charging for the air the tenant breathes in the hallway. Following its settlement with Greystar, the FTC sent warning letters to 13 of the nation’s largest property management software providers — including RealPage, Yardi Systems, and Turbo Tenant — threatening penalties up to $53,088 per violation for advertising incomplete prices.
What would actually work, beyond disclosure, is bigger than any of these bills: build enough housing that the take-it-or-leave-it lease stops being take-it-or-leave-it. But the supply answer has a concentration problem. When one operator runs a quarter of the units in a metro, new construction does not break their pricing discipline — it just hands the same fee template to a new building. Buildings run by property managers have grown their share of the rental market by 47 percent in the last decade. Professional management is most common in complexes of 50 units or more — the only segment where it is used in more than half of all units. That is the scale at which the junk-fee model works. The renter’s “leave it” option is to move to a building owned by the same operator.
My parents’ generation rented, too. They paid a security deposit. They paid first and last. They didn’t pay a monthly “technology fee” for a router they didn’t request, and they didn’t pay a utility bill calculated by an algorithm that had never seen the inside of their kitchen. The gap between their lease and ours isn’t just inflation. It is the financialization of the roof over our heads.
In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII wrote that “to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine.” He wasn’t talking about “amenity fees.” But when a corporation sets its sights on the last few hundred dollars a family has left at the end of the month, and constructs a labyrinth of mandatory charges to get it, that is pressure upon the indigent. That is the pressure of a stick too short to reach the prosperity it was promised, but swung anyway, because it is the only lever left.
Greystar itself, in its public comments to the FTC, urged the agency to require the apartment industry to follow the same rules Greystar agreed to follow in its $24 million settlement. The renters in 400 of the 471 comments are not asking the FTC for permission to be angry. They are asking the FTC to do its job. The rest is a comment template.