The assault on rentals marches on, adding to the mounting reasons the supply of the nation’s housing remains behind demand. This time, the weapon of choice isn’t new legislation debated in state capitols—it’s decades-old consumer protection laws that activists and plaintiff’s attorneys have suddenly discovered can be twisted to destroy standard business practices that have worked for generations.
Property owners across the nation are waking up to a harsh reality: fees they’ve charged for years—pest control, trash collection, community amenities—are now being labeled junk fees by federal bureaucrats and portrayed as predatory schemes by class-action attorneys.
Take Virginia. A federal class action, Rios-Dalvior, is challenging something as basic as a $9 monthly pest control fee and a $23 community amenity charge. Rios-Dalvior is the lead plaintiff in Valencia Rios v. Belvedere NRDE, LLC et al, filed June 23, 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia by Kelly Guzzo, PLC, a law firm founded in 2014 by Virginia attorneys Kristi C. Kelly and Andrew J. Guzzo. Belvedere Apartments are part of the Pegasus Residential portfolio, an NHMC top 50 manager with 46,264 units last count—of which all are included in the suit.
The lawsuit claims these fees—clearly disclosed in lease agreements—somehow violate the Virginia Consumer Protection Act because landlords should be providing pest-free units as part of their “warranty of habitability.”
After decades of law moving landlords toward transparency, from energy consumption to the cost of trash, in order to elicit conservation, the pendulum has swung. Lawyers are now arguing that separate billing for pest control services—a transparent practice that lets residents see exactly what they’re paying for—is illegal because pest control should just magically appear, buried in base rent where nobody knows what it costs.
California: Where property rights go to die
If you thought Virginia had gone the way of paid activist, let’s not forget what California does best: lead the race to the bottom.
In April 2024, federal Judge Jeffrey S. White ruled that Equity Residential’s late fee policy—5 percent of monthly rent with a $50 minimum—was void under state law. Never mind that late fees serve the obvious purpose of incentivizing on-time rent payment and compensating property owners for the administrative burden of chasing down delinquent residents. A court decided the fee didn’t bear a “reasonable relationship” to actual damages, and just like that, a standard industry practice affecting 190,000 California renters became illegal.
But it gets worse. Greystar Real Estate Partners—managing over 946,000 apartment units and owning over 122,000 units, making it the largest in the nation in 2025—is now facing multiple class-action lawsuits alleging their fees for trash collection, pest control, and utility administration are somehow “hidden” or “junk” fees that violate California’s Unfair Competition Law.
One plaintiff complained that a unit advertised at $3,434 per month came with additional charges: a $20 new trash account fee, $5 trash administrative fee, $35 monthly trash fee, and $3 monthly pest control fee. Not long ago rent was a single, all-inclusive number. The move toward public transparency was derived from case law and government regulation. Now the same march toward transparency is deemed confusing.
The lawsuit claims these fees—totaling about $60 monthly—should have been included in the advertised rent price. Because apparently, transparency on rental fees is now considered deceptive.
The FTC joins the pile-on
In September 2024, the Federal Trade Commission—an agency that should be focused on consumer fraud—extracted a $48 million settlement from Invitation Homes over what it deemed inadequate fee disclosures.
The FTC alleged that Invitation Homes didn’t prominently disclose mandatory fees that added “up to more than $1,700 yearly” to rental costs. The settlement now requires property managers to disclose a “total monthly leasing price” more prominently than any other pricing information.
How does this translate in application: The federal government is now dictating exactly how property owners must advertise their units, down to the font size and placement of pricing information.
Then in January 2025, the FTC filed a lawsuit against Greystar—which manages nearly 800,000 rental units nationwide—making nearly identical claims. The agency alleged Greystar failed to adequately disclose fees for garbage collection, pest management, and package handling.
Most interesting, the FTC vote to sue Greystar was unanimous, 5-0. Even the Republican commissioners—including President-elect Trump’s nominee for FTC Chair, Andrew Ferguson—voted to prosecute a private business for how it disclosed service fees to customers.
Preamble to rent control
The impact of these lawsuits seems clear. This isn’t about “transparency” or “protecting consumers.” The result is forcing property owners to bundle all services into a single base rent figure, making it impossible for residents to see what individual services cost and creating the foundation for rent control.
When everything is rolled into one number, politicians can cap that number. When services are billed separately property owners can price services based on actual costs and consumers may be given the choice to opt out of certain services.
The activist understands this perfectly. That’s why state after state is passing “fee transparency” laws that sound reasonable but are designed to make it illegal to charge separately for anything.
Massachusetts implemented regulations in September 2025 requiring total price disclosure before collecting any personal information from prospective tenants. Connecticut is following suit with automatic renewal restrictions taking effect in 2026. Colorado’s HB25-1090 has created such confusion about whether ratio utility billing systems (RUBS) are even legal anymore that property owners are being advised to simply stop using them until courts clarify the law.
The rental housing market has always been split into two groups: large, sophisticated operators like Camden and Greystar who have spent millions implementing compliance systems to navigate the regulatory minefields across multiple states, and smaller traditional operators who are just trying to keep their heads above water while the rules change daily.
Major operators have invested heavily in technology to push accurate pricing information to listing services like Apartments.com and Zillow; update fees in real time as regulations change; verify compliance across multi-state portfolios; and implement new marketing data standards.
Meanwhile, family offices and mom-and-pop landlords—those who own duplexes, fourplexes, and small apartment buildings—are getting crushed. They don’t have teams of lawyers and compliance officers. They’re small businesses trying to provide housing and earn a return on their investment.
And ultimately, that may be the point. The regulatory burden seems designed to drive small operators out of the market. Large portfolios are easier to regulate and control.
The rental housing industry occupies a unique position: until now it had been moderately regulated at the federal level, but it is one of the most heavily regulated industries when accounting for the cumulative effect of state and local requirements. The 40.6 percent regulatory cost burden on multifamily development and the patchwork of over 300 different local regulatory regimes already create compliance challenges that rival or exceed many industries with higher federal restriction counts. The FTC seems intent on changing this.
Here’s what makes this entire crusade particularly illogical: The stated goal is to make housing affordable by eliminating junk fees. But what happens when all costs are forced into base rent?
Rent goes up. Transparency disappears. Renters who would have opted out of certain services—maybe they don’t have packages delivered—lose that choice.
Housing is unaffordable not because landlords charge $9 for monthly pest control. It’s because regulatory compliance costs three to fourteen percent of retail electricity prices according to research by CLOU Global. It’s because permitting and environmental reviews delay construction for years. It’s because restrictive zoning laws make it illegal to build affordable housing in most major cities.
But solving those problems would require politicians to admit that government is a main source of the problem, not the solution. It’s far easier to demonize landlords for charging transparent fees for actual services rendered.
What’s next?
The battle for the soul of the apartment industry has fundamentally shifted. It’s now about new legislation that must be intensely lobbied against or ballot measures that owners must campaign to defeat. The pressure for change is coming from activist attorneys general, federal bureaucrats, and plaintiff’s lawyers using existing laws to retroactively criminalize standard business practices.
Jay Harris, partner at Hudson Cook, LLP who specializes in residential property management law, has been sounding the alarm for the industry. He’s watching cases like Rios-Dalvior and the Greystar litigation closely, knowing they could establish precedents that ripple across the entire rental housing industry.
The smartest operators are already adapting—”verifying pricing across all marketing channels, ensuring disclosures happen earlier in the rental process, and building compliance systems that can flex as regulations change state by state,” said Harris at a recent UMCA (Utility Management & Conservation Association) meeting in San Diego in October.
Harris, the California Apartment Association, UMCA and property owners on the frontlines of the threat already choking housing supply are sounding the alarm. The uncomfortable truth is that no amount of compliance will satisfy the activist left bent on controlling formerly free markets. Compliance is not the goal. A long game of punishment by process and encroachment on property rights portrayed as virtue are the path to rent control and government-controlled housing.
Basic physics dictates that the world does not tolerate a vacuum. America’s housing supply is a clear and present vacuum both man-made and intentional. Who fills it—market or government—is a matter of will.
