Colorado landlords will soon be prohibited from charging fees for pest control and common-area maintenance under a new pricing transparency law signed into law Monday by Gov. Jared Polis.
The new law, which passed the legislature as House Bill 1090, bans several fees common in rental housing, and it also generally requires companies to show the total price of the product or service they’re selling. That includes the price of the product and any mandatory charges and fees included. The total price must also be shown as one complete number in companies’ advertisements.
“I continue to think back to (an earlier legislative) hearing, and my constituents who came out to talk about the abuses they were experiencing in their apartment complexes — and the good that this bill is going to do for them,” Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat, said Monday. She sponsored the bill with fellow Democrats Rep. Naquetta Ricks and Sens. Mike Weissman and Lisa Cutter. “This is a really important step forward for the state of Colorado to say ‘No more.’ ”
The law goes into effect Jan. 1.
It comes amid broader scrutiny of so-called junk fees at a state and federal level. Lawsuits have been filed against large landlords in Colorado for allegedly misleading their tenants about their units’ costs. Federal regulators previously took aim at hidden fees in other industries, but an official from the Federal Trade Commission wrote a January letter to Polis and Colorado lawmakers urging them to adopt a law targeting fees in the housing sector.
Any landlord or company that violates Colorado’s new law could face an investigation by the Attorney General’s Office. As initially written, the bill would’ve explicitly allowed renters or customers to file lawsuits against landlords or companies who ran afoul of the law. But that provision was struck in the state Senate.
Sirota argued that the bill still implicitly allowed individual Coloradans to file lawsuits on their own, should a company or landlord violate the law.
While the law generally requires price transparency, it explicitly bans several common housing fees that, advocates argue, should already be covered by tenants’ rent. Last year, nearly 50 Colorado renters told The Denver Post that they were regularly charged for fees they didn’t know about when they signed their leases or when they were apartment hunting.
Those fees are often tucked into appendices in lengthy leases and aren’t included in advertised rental prices. Property owners have argued that the fees are all disclosed in their leases and that the charges are important to cover landlords’ costs for providing housing.
The bill will likely lead to at least some of the fees being folded into rent, advocates and property owners have both said. But tenants’ advocates argue that alternative is preferable to surprise fees because it gives apartment-hunting tenants upfront transparency about the total cost of an apartment.
Once the law goes into effect, landlords can no longer charge higher fees for utility costs above the total utility bill, nor can they charge a tenant for paying rent online if that is the only way to pay.
Tenants have told The Post that they were often required to pay rent online, with a surcharge for each transaction, and that landlords would collect a similar fee for collecting utility payments.
The law does still allow a small surcharge related to utility costs.
Landlords will be prohibited from charging fees for services that the property owner is required to provide under state law. Those includes services like pest control, a common monthly charge that advocates and lawmakers argued was a core landlord duty that was improperly being tacked onto tenants.
They also will not be able to charge for services they aren’t actually providing. Some tenants said they were charged fees for security cameras or storage lockers that didn’t exist or weren’t in use.
The law would prohibit charging for common-area maintenance — another common fee that, property owners say, is used to clean and light gyms, hallways and lobbies.
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