Franklin Ramirez felt duped.

When he moved to Denver a little more than a year ago, he was told monthly rent at his two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in the downtown Civic Lofts building cost $2,355.

Then came the monthly fees.

Ramirez pays nearly $25 a month for “valet trash,” in which someone collects garbage outside the apartment doors of the 14-story, 176-unit building and walks it to the dumpster. Then he pays nearly $60 more for waste-management employees to drive the garbage to the dump.

There’s also a nearly $20 monthly boiler management fee. A $1 pest control fee. Close to $80 for a community electric bill and fluctuating charges for community gas, sewer and water — fees he said appear to cover utilities for communal spaces, too, and not just his unit.

Then there’s a $6 service fee. That fee, Ramirez was told, pays for a program that adds up all the other fees at the end of the month.

Including the $100 monthly parking fee he agreed to upfront, Ramirez’s total payment in October grew to $2,761 — more than 17% higher than his base rent.

Long an irritant of other services like cellphone contracts or concert tickets, so-called “junk fees” have increasingly found their way into Colorado’s rental housing, attorneys and advocates told The Denver Post, further exacerbating an already cost-burdened and supply-strained housing market. Often buried in lease agreements that run dozens of pages, millions of American renters pay monthly charges that advocates say should be covered either by rent or by the landlord. Some, they argue, are outright deceptive and illegal.

David Bennett, community manager at Civic Lofts, told The Post his team is upfront about any costs residents may incur during their tenancy. He said the complex is billing back what they get charged.

“We’re not aiming to make money off these things,” he said.

This summer, nearly 50 renters wrote to The Post about the fees they pay. There are fees for pest control and fees for “common-area maintenance,” fees for parking and package delivery, fees to pay utility bills and fees to process rental payments that can only be made online. Some wrote that they pay fees to cover their buildings’ property taxes. Former tenants of CBZ Management — the troubled owner of now-infamous Aurora properties — previously told The Post they paid fees for security cameras that didn’t work or didn’t exist.

The growing prevalence of the fees has drawn the attention of a group of Colorado lawmakers, tenants’ advocates and lawyers, who’ve tightened laws and filed lawsuits against large property owners in a bid to use the Colorado Consumer Protection Act to crack down on housing fees.

Attorney General Phil Weiser’s office has also taken notice: Earlier this year, Weiser announced a $1 million settlement with a property owner for improperly charging tenants, and Weiser told The Post that his office wants more tenants to come forward.

Still, attorneys and advocates argued that enforcement and oversight hasn’t kept up with landlord practice. Some legislators are also now weighing additional changes to state law to more tightly regulate or outright ban certain charges.

Junk fees “are in line with deceptive and unfair trade practices because landlords are advertising a fake price to get consumers interested, but it’s not what they’re actually going to pay at the end of the day,” said state Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat. “And I think we should ban those practices.”

Landlords argue that any fees charged to tenants were mutually agreed upon when the tenant signed the lease; advocates counter that tenants have often already sunk money into a potential rental, in the form of application or administrative fees, before they see a lease.

The fees are also necessary, property owners contend, to cover routine building costs and optional services that tenants use.

“If (the cost of a service) varies, you have to have a fee and a formula to capture it,” said Drew Hamrick, the general counsel and a vice president of the Colorado Apartment Association. “Like electricity costs. That’s got to be something outside of rent. If it’s optional, it’s got to be outside rent — like covered parking. If a landlord is offering valet trash and residents have the option to use it, that’s got to be a fee.”

Hamrick acknowledged landlords may be better served by folding some fees into the rental price, which would be more transparent for residents. But he defended fees generally and said he would oppose any effort to ban the charges outright. Nor should judges, he said, get into the business of deciding whether a tenant agreed to pay too much.

Ramirez said he didn’t even realize he should ask about fees or check for them in his lease.

“It’s a bait-and-switch,” he said. “They get you in on this ‘low rent’ but then make up for it on the fees. The law should be (that) rental units need to have transparency in fees, saying this is how much the rent is and this is how much the average fees for that unit are. There should be an audit of the fees, too. That’s something I should call my legislator about.”

“That’s not fair”

The scale of the junk-fee problem for Colorado renters is unclear.

Zach Neumann, the executive director of the Community Economic Defense Project, said the practice is ubiquitous among corporate landlords, rather than more locally based “mom-and-pop” providers. But while the state’s largest rental housing providers are out-of-state corporations, there’s also not good data for how much of the state’s rental housing market is run by them.

The National Consumer Law Center estimates millions of renters nationwide are impacted by junk fees. The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers projects that application fees alone generate $276 million in excess revenue — meaning more than it costs to perform background checks or process applications — every year.

Attorneys and advocates say collusion is also shaping the issue. Large landlords, they argue, often get form leases from trade organizations, ensuring fee practices are shared while limiting tenants’ ability to find a provider who hasn’t tucked an extra $100 worth of monthly charges into the fine print.

Hamrick said his association doesn’t provide form leases, though he said its national parent organization does.

“If someone is hiding this fee that they stick in later, and someone else discloses it up front, (a renter) might choose to go to the irresponsible company who has hidden the fee and is engaged in this deception because they think they’re going with the cheaper option,” Weiser said. “…That’s not fair.”

Aaron Schultz tried to do his due diligence.

When he toured One City Block Apartments in Denver’s North Capitol Hill neighborhood, he specifically asked how much he would be expected to pay in monthly fees for a studio apartment with rent advertised at $1,650 a month. He said he was provided a handout with costs like parking and a few other additions.

However, when Schultz prepared to sign his lease in February — after paying a $270 application and administration fee — he was met with 27 lease addendums, including a host of surprise monthly fees not mentioned during his tour, he said.

A $5 stormwater fee. An $8 “trash administration” fee. Not to mention finding out parking was $50 more a month than the $100 advertised to him online and during the tour.

Schultz found his monthly cost to live in One City Block was closer to $1,900.

In a February email Schultz provided to The Post, he contacted his property management, Greystar, and complained about the surprise fees.

A Greystar employee responded to his email saying the fees are standard, but that they will do a better job conveying them to prospective tenants.

“I don’t like feeling taken advantage of,” Schultz said. “Unfortunately, it seems like I have to be very vigilant to not be taken advantage of. It feels dishonest.”

Greystar — the largest property management company in the country — did not respond to a request for comment from The Post about its fee practices.

Hamrick, from the apartment association, said the last-minute disclosure of fees — if they’re openly disclosed at all — “would be a problem,” and he reiterated that landlords may be better served folding some fees directly into rent. Still, he argued that individual fees can be transparent because tenants can see what they’re paying for.

But Neumann argued the current approach is opaque, and that the opacity is particularly harmful for tenants on a fixed income or who can’t absorb frequent price fluctuations. Even higher up-front rent is preferable, he said.

More than a third of Colorado residents are renters, according to Census Bureau data, and a 2022 study suggested that half of them were cost-burdened, meaning they put more than 30% of their monthly income toward rent.

“That’s the worst-case outcome,” Neumann said, of reformed fee practices leading to higher up-front rent. “And the worst-case outcome is transparency and predictability. One of the things that really harms our clients is signing a lease and then finding out they owe dramatically more money every month. One month is $1,500, then $1,600, then it’s $1,450. People can’t plan, and, obviously, you need to be able to plan and avoid volatility when your cashflow is really limited.”

Legal challenges

Laurie Rudyk noticed when Greystar took over management of her Westminster apartment complex a couple of years ago.

Rudyk’s $30 water bill shot up to nearly $80 per month. She noticed items on her rent bill that hadn’t been there before. A few dollars for a pest control fee. Trash fees. “Community” fees. Rent went up, too, and there was a fee to tally up the rent each month.

All of it stacked up to an extra $100 per month on top of her nearly $1,400 rent.

“It’s like people don’t appreciate good, paying, long-term tenants anymore,” Rudyk said.

Fed up with fees and lackluster housing, Rudyk moved out of the apartment building this month after buying a house.

In January, a former tenant at a Greystar building in Lakewood filed a class-action lawsuit against the company. She accused Greystar of violating the Colorado Consumer Protection Act by charging her for fees that weren’t advertised in her rent.

That lawsuit, which is ongoing, is just one of several legal and investigative avenues underway in the state to address housing fees. State law already limits late fees on rent and prohibits landlords from charging more for application fees than is necessary. But lawyers — and potentially lawmakers — are pursuing legal avenues to ensure consumer protections cover housing fees.

They argue rental prices can be falsely advertised if they don’t include fees and that some common charges — like for pest control or common-area maintenance — are illegal. Pest control, they contend, is required under the state’s safe-housing laws as a base-level requirement of a landlord to ensure a habitable living space, and common-area maintenance fees should already be covered by rent.

Hamrick, of the Colorado Apartment Association, acknowledged that pest-control fees “are a little close to the line” of legality. But he argued the state’s safe-housing laws require landlords to respond to infestations, not that they have to pay for preventative pest control themselves. As for common-area maintenance fees, he said those cover lobbies, gyms, elevators — areas outside of a tenant’s unit.

“Generally speaking, the owner of a building wants to recoup all of the costs of providing that building to its tenants,” he said.

Another ongoing lawsuit accuses Home Partners of charging illegal fees and including illegal provisions in lease agreements. (The company did not return a message seeking comment.)

That lawsuit is awaiting arguments before the Colorado Supreme Court, with a significant possible outcome: Attorneys are arguing that it’s illegal to even include unenforceable provisions in a lease. Depending on the outcome of the appeal and the lawsuit, that could rule some fees as illegal outright.

“You’re signing the contract, but we’re saying it doesn’t matter. This is illegal, you’re deceiving people in the fine print. You’re telling people you have to pay $5 for pest control — you’re lying to them because it’s part of the warranty of habitability,” said David Seligman, whose nonprofit law firm Towards Justice is working on the Home Partners case. The warranty of habitability is the formal name for safe-housing laws. “You’re lying to them because you’re not doing $5 a month of pest control for every person.”

Challenges to come

Mabrey, the Denver Democrat, said he’s working on legislation related to housing junk fees, though he said he didn’t know the scale yet. He likened it to work legislators did earlier this year, seeking to limit surprise fees in concert ticketing.

Hamrick said he would oppose any such bill. As for the legal challenges playing out in court, he said he was “very saddened to see that everything (legislators) didn’t get in the statute, they take a second bite at the apple by suing somebody to try to get the courts to expand the statutory protections.”

Earlier this year, state legislators reformed the warranty of habitability law and in recent years implemented tighter regulations around late fees and application costs.

Seligman and Jason Legg, another attorney, said enforcement of consumer protection laws needed to be improved. Most tenants, Seligman said, can’t afford an attorney and don’t know their rights. Many will look at relatively small fees, stacked against the larger sum of rent, and shrug them off.

In January, Weiser’s office reached a $1 million settlement with Four Star Realty after a state investigation “found numerous instances of the company illegally charging tenants for routine repairs and other services,” such as fees. In response to that settlement, Four Star’s CEO blamed “progressive tenant advocacy” for scrutinizing “practices that are widely used in the industry.”

Weiser wouldn’t confirm whether his office has any other ongoing, fee-related investigations. In July, he spoke in Denver with Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, about junk fees and the need more for more action.

Under Khan, the FTC — charged with antitrust and consumer protection enforcement — has also proposed a rule to ban junk fees and require businesses like housing providers to disclose them upfront. Last month, the FTC reached a $48 million settlement with America’s largest rental home provider for, among other things, “lease costs (and) charging undisclosed junk fees.” But Khan’s tenure at the agency is in doubt, even if Vice President Kamala Harris should win the election next month, amid opposition from business groups.

As for Ramirez, he doesn’t expect to stay in the Civic Lofts for long. He enjoys the city views, but he wonders if he would feel nickel-and-dimed by a less corporate landlord. His parents are landlords in Illinois, he said, and they don’t partake in added fees.

For now, he and his teenage foster son try to lower their cost of living however they can. Ramirez walks around the building turning lights off in empty common spaces.

“If I have to pay for the lights,” he said, “they’re going to be off.”

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