Will Parker

speaker

780 appearances 18 recordings 1 series first heard May 2019 last heard Nov 2024

Will Parker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

WSJ Your Money Briefing · Renters Face Additional Fees on Top of Record-High Rent · 12 Sep 2023 podcast

At a time when landlords are not able to raise rents quite as much as they were, there are some that see ways to increase their revenue through different fees, adding new fees, increasing the price of fees, and seeing if they can still keep tenants if they'll just pay them instead of moving.

What the landlords themselves say is that this is a way for them to account for their higher operating costs and the fees help them meet that.

Other skeptics say with rents pushing these new levels and going so high, there's a lot of sticker shock happening among tenants.

So there's a certain utility in being able to advertise a house for rent for $2,000, but then really being able to get something closer to like $2,150 through an assortment of fees.

And that there's a kind of a game being played with the consumer psychology here that they'll be more comfortable taking that $2,000 house with maybe some fees on the side than if you simply charge $2,150.

So that varies wildly right now.

So sometimes you'll see an apartment listing on the website of a certain landlord and it will list all the fees, but other times it won't.

And many times tenants don't really find out about all the fees themselves.

that they'll be required to pay until they're ready to sign a lease.

And that could be a problem because by that point, they've often paid a lot in application fees, sometimes something called a holding fee, which can be several hundred dollars.

And then they're stuck in this place where they're ready to move and didn't quite realize the unit is going to be a little bit more expensive than they thought it was.

Fees have been poorly received by tenants.

And you've even had cases where tenants try to sue landlords over the way they charge fees.

There have been class actions against large property owners over fees, most commonly late fees and how those are charged.

How much you can charge for a late fee is regulated in some states.

And many tenants have alleged that

The fees that they've paid are just disproportionate to whatever damage they've done to a multi-billion dollar landlord by paying rent one day late.

And so we'll continue to see those kind of complaints as fees become increasingly common in this industry.

You can try your best to make sure you know what they're going to be up front, asking the listing agent or the landlord if there are any fees that will be charged.

In addition to that, visiting the owner's website if they have one to see what kind of fee information might be detailed there.

Showing 101–120 of 780 · page 6 of 39