Deca Property Management, which manages roughly 1,400 residential and commercial properties in the St, Louis, Missouri, area, says its tenants “know we’re here to help.” In the company’s newer lease contracts, that help includes a mandatory $45.95-a-month “resident benefits package” that includes a fee to Deca for reporting whether they’ve paid their rent to various credit bureaus. In effect, tenants are paying for the privilege of their landlord hurting their credit scores.
This so-called benefit package is just one example of a menagerie of junk fees that landlords across the country are charging their tenants, according to a Lever analysis of approximately 400 court records from eviction and other civil cases. These fees significantly increase the costs of renting an apartment, experts say, and can be for services that landlords are legally required to perform as well as “benefits” that are not in tenants’ best interests.
It isn't just application fees. They are also charging an "administrative fee," which is also non-refundable even if your application is rejected. I have found administrative fees up to $450. By the time you pay that, plus an application fee plus a security deposit and your first month's rent (and sometimes, the last month's rent as well), you can be on the hook for thousands just to move in. I also encountered a "convenience trash fee," which was a mandatory $25 per month charge that was supposed to pay for someone to pick up your little bag of trash at your front door and take it to the dumpster. You were not allowed to do this yourself and save the fee. The last apartment I lived in also had a minimum lease duration. This is a university city, so these places get away with just about anything. You could start a lease in either January, July, or August. If the lease term was less than five months, your monthly rent was increased by $100. When I was looking to move in, it was March. They told me that I would have to sign a lease from March through June, even though I wanted to stay until June of the following year. So, they wanted to force me into a 4-month lease, thereby increasing the rent by $100 a month and THEN they wanted to force me to sign a second lease from July through June of the following year. They would not allow me to sign only one lease from March of one year through June of the following year. When it came time to move out, they provided a list of things that you could potentially be charged for, if you weren't careful. Among them: if you left a roll of toilet paper on the roller, they would charge you $25. A friend told me that she had been charged $100 for leaving something in the dryer. These complexes, run by absentee management companies are goldmines when they're in university towns, because students, for whatever reason, will pay whatever these places demand.