Renters Face Additional Fees on Top of Record-High Rent
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Here's your money briefing for Tuesday, September 12th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. For many tenants, their monthly rent has crept up to record high levels. On top of that, many are dealing with a list of fees tacked onto their monthly bill.
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.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal reporter Will Parker after the break.
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Monthly rent is already squeezing the household budget of many tenants, but a growing list of fees levied by landlords is adding to that pain. Wall Street Journal reporter Will Parker joins me. So, Will, let's start with just the monthly rent. You were with us on several occasions in the middle of the pandemic talking about how rents were rising in some cases as much as 25%. What's been the track of rents since then?
Over the last year, rents have started to flatten out a little bit, and they're not growing nearly as much as they were. And in some places, they're shrinking somewhat. But overwhelmingly, rent is so much more expensive now still than it was three years ago, even given that kind of contraction happening now. And it's especially notable in suburbs where the rise in rents was even greater than it was in cities. And so we're seeing that trend sustained as well.
And as you've reported, landlords have begun tacking on an assortment of fees on top of the monthly rent. Fees for what?
How are landlords adding extra fees on top of record-high rent?
Fees for anything that they can put a name on. A lot of fees have been around in the apartment industry for a long time. There have really been a handful that you would commonly see. Things like a pet deposit. or a fee for management of the utility is usually pretty small. But over the years, there's just been more and more of these tacked on, and a lot of tenants are starting to get really fed up with them. And many of the services are not optional. One of the most common ones is what's called valet trash, where instead of walking your trash to the dumpster, you're required to set it out in front of your unit and pay $30, $40 a month for someone to then carry it to the dumpster for you. And it can add a lot of extra money on to the rent every year.
Yeah, how much money are these fees adding to tenants' monthly bills?
So a lot are pretty small, but if you put them all together, it's not uncommon for them to add hundreds of dollars a year or more to people's rent. 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.
In some cases, the services that landlords are charging for with these fees aren't new, like the garbage fee. I mean, taking the garbage out to the curb is not a new service. Why are they charging for them now?
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.
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