Last summer, Seattle renter Jake Thoennes received a written notice from his landlord demanding that he remove the potted plants from his balcony within ten days. That might sound absurd, especially given that Thoennes’s lease permitted planting flowers on balconies. But here’s the kicker: The notice came with a $75 “Notice Fee.” This hefty fee was charged “for preparing and giving the notice” that the plants had to go.
When President Joe Biden announced an offensive against “junk fees” in his State of the Union address, many renters around the United States must have been nodding their heads knowingly. The nation’s 44 million renter households, especially tenants of corporate landlords, are facing an explosion of bogus fees.
Like the hidden charges that appear when you buy a ticket to a sporting event, these fees are not correlated with any tangible service being provided, or with any special effort or cost incurred by businesses. They are predatory fees that landlords charge simply because they can, and today’s rental market appears to be amplifying rather than correcting for them.
Rental “junk fees” are arguably more noxious than those attached to consumer purchases. They can cause families to lose their housing and become homeless. They can tank people’s credit scores and imperil their ability to successfully apply for rental housing in the future.
Notice delivery fees like the one described above are becoming more common, according to Devin Glaser, an attorney who represents tenants in legal disputes with their landlords. “More often than not the landlords just surprise people with a fee after delivering a notice,” he tells The Progressive.
But sometimes a new policy is officially announced. “Hello Residents,” the property manager at Sorento Flats Apartments in Seattle began in an email to tenants in December 2022. “Sorento will now be implementing notice fees. This means that any notices given in regards to lease violations and or past due payments will accrue a notice fee. The notice fee is: $50.00 and will be issued per violation.”
This new fee, the email emphasized, is not the same as a late fee. Rather, “the notice fee will be in addition to the late fee and you will be responsible to pay both fees along with the past due balance. Thank you for your tenancy.”
Landlords, in addition to imposing notice delivery fees, are increasingly adding on nonrefundable charges when a tenant signs a lease. Renter Corina Pfeil paid a $300 “administrative fee” and a $162.75 “application fee” when she signed her second-year lease renewal last fall.
“They told me the administrative fee was for employee time and whatever it took to process the lease,” says Pfeil, who serves as a city council member in Kenmore, a Seattle suburb. How about the $162.75? “They were never really clear about that.”
Washington Democratic State Representative Nicole Macri, a longtime advocate for stronger renter protections, explains that fees like these can be used in a discriminatory manner: “People looking for rental housing have reported to me that a landlord said something like, ‘Normally I don’t rent to people like you, but if you pay this fee, we can work it out.’”
That means the most vulnerable renters—people with imperfect credit scores or criminal histories, as well as low-income and Black and brown families—may be the most likely to be stuck with additional fees.
Lease-signing fees like these are not a universal practice, as my own experience as a Seattle renter highlights. I’ve lived in one building since 2018 and signed five leases in that time. The property is managed by a company that oversees over 6,000 units in the Seattle area and is known neither as an especially good nor as an especially bad actor; it gets a measly two stars on Yelp. But never once have I been asked to pay any kind of administrative fee for the privilege of signing a lease. Why should I? I pay a lot of rent to my landlord every single month.
So does Pfeil. On top of the lease renewal fees, her landlord raised her rent from $1,793 a month to $2,043 a month—an increase of 14 percent. She did have the option not to sign a new fixed-term lease. Instead, she could have let her tenancy convert automatically to a month-to-month lease. But, she said, “if I went month-to-month it would be $817 dollars a month more.” Her rent would have jumped to $2,860, or a total increase of nearly 60 percent.
Month-to-month fees are not a new phenomenon, but Glaser and other attorneys I spoke with said they appear to be increasing in prevalence and magnitude. In part, this may be a response to regulation. In 2021, the Washington State legislature passed a Just Cause Eviction law, requiring landlords to cite a good reason when evicting a tenant. This law, however, exempts many fixed term leases, allowing landlords to force a tenant out at the end of a lease for no stated reason. The exemption creates an extra incentive for landlords to keep tenants on fixed-term leases, and charging prohibitive month-to-month fees is one way to do that.
Some landlords seem to be pushing tenants into month-to-month leases with outrageous fees.
But some landlords seem to be pushing tenants into month-to-month leases with outrageous fees. A landlord will simply let a tenant’s lease expire without offering a new one, and months later the tenant will be informed that thousands of dollars in month-to-month fees have been accumulating on the ledger. This is also illegal, since Washington state law requires sixty days written notice of any rent increase, and a number of local jurisdictions have established even higher notice standards.
Lynda Hardwick, a renter in the east King County city of Kirkland, found herself trapped in a different way. After losing a major source of income during the COVID-19 pandemic and falling behind on rent, she worked out a repayment plan with her landlord. When her lease expired last fall, with $1,800 left to pay off, she got a nasty surprise: She couldn’t renew her lease.
“The property management did not tell me [upfront]… ‘Oh, by the way, you will have to go month-to-month, you can’t sign a new lease,’” she says. And that meant paying an extra monthly fee of almost $600—on top of rent and the repayment plan.
“That should have been disclosed, because I would not have gotten into the situation I got into,” Hardwick adds. When she objected and sought legal assistance, “they pulled out of the repayment program and really just started messing with me.” Finally, after Hardwick made it clear she was prepared to go to court, the landlord offered what she considered a reasonable month-to-month rate and repayment plan.
Month-to-month fees, administrative fees, and notice delivery fees aren’t the only ways that tenants are being fleeced. The experts I spoke with named other creative strategies corporate landlords are using to squeeze extra money from renters—fees for turning on the HVAC or replacing an air filter, non-refundable pet fees and monthly pet rent, “service fees” attached to each monthly rent payment, and monthly “billing fees” on top of utilities charges.
All these fees have real impacts on people’s lives. Thoennes, Pfeil, and Hardwick all considered themselves to be relatively privileged and well-equipped to research and stand up for their rights.
“I’m a businessperson,” Hardwick says. “I feel bad for people who maybe don’t have jobs where they have to be savvy in business and how to negotiate. I feel bad for the average working person.” Nevertheless, she adds, “I’m working 24/7 just to try to get my bills paid. I’m not going to not pay my credit cards. I’m not going to not pay my rent or my car payments. So it’s a struggle. You never know who’s having issues.”
Pfeil’s family felt the financial pinch, too: “As a college student, my Pell Grant is two quarters past due of being processed by the college I’m attending. It was lean times. It was really difficult.”
Thoennes sees housing insecurity as contributing to the rising tide of mental stress and illness in our country. No matter how ridiculous the pretext, receiving a ten-day notice stacked with punitive fees makes you feel that eviction could be just around the corner.
“My anxiety level is through the roof, I’m not sleeping, I can’t make plans with friends because I have to prepare for the inevitable,” he explains. “I think this mental health crisis is directly connected to this abuse of power that landlords are legally permitted to use.”
So what can be done to contain the explosion of predatory rental fees? A couple of partial solutions are already being considered in Washington state. Lawmakers are now weighing House Bill 1389, sponsored by Representative Macri and other legislators, which would ban month-to-month fees in addition to limiting most rent increases to between 3 and 7 percent annually. And in Seattle, Councilmember Kshama Sawant is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit most notice delivery fees and cap late fees at $10 a month.
State and local governments around the country should take actions like these to ban or limit many rental fees. More broadly, President Biden should add these fees to his campaign against “junk fees” and address them through executive action or Congressional legislation. Of course, winning power and protections for renters is always a struggle. And it’s becoming more urgent, especially in tight housing markets where renters don’t have a lot of options.
Thoennes sees a way forward, especially if renters can make common cause with the underpaid property managers who are often caught between exploitative landlords and vulnerable tenants: “It’s the workers and the tenants, if we came together and put pressure on the system, maybe we could challenge the system to change.”