When Mallory Rutkoske moved her apartment in Salt Lake City, she did not expect a cleaning account.
Nothing in her lease said she was responsible for such a charges, so she was surprised and angry when the real estate management company sent her the invoice.
“I'm just not going to pay for something that I don't owe,” Rotkoske told Fox 13 Utah. “These are robbery.”
To make her point, she took Greystar-the largest manager of Multi-Family rental properties from the country to the court for small claims to dispute the indictment. And won.
Now Greystar has a larger lawsuit.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the state of Colorado jointly prosecute the company, claim that GRYSTAR has been obtaining more than $ 100 million in incorrect costs of its tenants in numerous states since 2019 and 2022, including Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, California.
The FTC and Colorado want victims to have compensated losses and forbid bad practices in the court on hidden rents and extra costs.
In response, Greystar has issued a statement stating that they have been following existing industrial practices for a long time and that no tenant does not pay compensation that they did not register in their lease.
The FTC does not accept this argument. It is of the opinion that Greystar wrongly hid extra costs for tenants because the costs were not advertised in rental lists. Tenants would not be aware of the extra costs until they sat down to read the small print in the lease – and not everyone does that.
The lawsuit quotes the case of a potential tenant of Utah who has applied for a Greystar unit online and only learned an extra $ 112 in monthly costs after clicking through by several links. The FTC said that there were many such cases and countless cases in which Greystar -tenants eventually charged hundreds of extra dollars, including at least seven in Utah.
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Tara Rollins, executive director of the Utah Housing Coalition, follows the FTC and Colorado adjusts closely. She pushes her state legislator to demand that all rents are included in the rental price in advance.
