Next week’s annual “move-in day” in Boston is the first under the new state law saying that renters can no longer be required to pay a broker’s fee, unless they hire a broker themselves.
But some advocates and renters are concerned about how the enforcement of the ban will play out as the city’s traditional Sept. 1 lease date approaches.
“As with every law, people are going to try to get around it. That’s just a fact of life,” said Mark Martinez, housing staff attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. “The easiest way for this law to be enforced is for tenants to know their rights.”
Martinez said the MLRI is partnering with local grassroots organizations to spread the word about what is and isn’t allowed with broker’s fees.
The new law bans residential landlords from requiring renters to pay the broker’s fee incurred by the landlord. A renter is only responsible for paying a broker when they have hired one to help search for an apartment.
The state says the change is expected to save renters “thousands of dollars in upfront costs.” However, some expect that the new law won’t stop landlords from creating new fees for renters to pay.
Doug Quattrochi, executive director of MassLandlords, said that the 2,500 dues-paying members of the organization have always adhered to the prior law, which only allows for the charge of first and last month’s rent, security deposits and changing of locks.
But with this change, he said, he suspects some landlords outside of his group will be looking to recoup costs. “It should be expected that landlords will make up new costs to address this broker’s fee change.”
“My fear is in a really tight market, you’re gonna have people still doing non-compliant stuff like instead of charging a broker fee, they’ll charge a pet fee, they’ll charged double security deposit,” he added. “There’s a whole lot of stuff that you can’t do.”
Shreya Mani is a graduate student at Boston University and she says she’s already seen a variation of one of those fees in the form of a $500 application fee.
“Even if I say that I won’t be paying this fee, then they’ll just say that your application got rejected,” she said. “And I want to live here so I have no option but to pay that fee.”
Mani moved to Boston a year ago from India and said the reason why these fees exist is because of Boston’s position as an education hub.
Many international students move to the area, unsure of how to find housing and deeply concerned about getting scammed, Mani said.
“When we [international students] come from outside, the first thing in our mind is like, 'What if we get scammed or something?’ So even if we have to pay this broker [fee] or something, at least we are getting that place,” Mani said. “On Facebook, when you see some listings … they’re like completely scams.”
So the students may pay unnecessary fees just to avoid risky online transactions. “We get scammed, but to avoid a bigger scam, I think,” she said.
Martinez said broker’s fees used to be more of a negotiation between the landlord and renter. But as the housing market has gotten tighter and more competitive, tenants have lost bargaining power, Martinez said.
“Landlords knew that if you didn’t want to pay the broker’s fee, there were six other tenants lined up behind you that would,” they said.
Quattrochi said he would like to see stronger enforcement measures for the new budget language. He also fears that the new broker’s fee law won’t make much difference in the overall housing crisis in Massachusetts.
“They write these two sentence bills together, they chuck them into something else like a budget and they just hope for the best, hope nobody notices that it’s not doing anything,” he said. “There’s a lot of lip service done to addressing the housing crisis in Massachusetts, but there just isn’t a lot of actual change.”
