They Found a Way to Charge You for Paying Rent on Time

A lawsuit says Entrata auto-enrolls renters in RentPlus, a $10-a-month credit-reporting fee, and pays landlords a cut to keep them in it.

A company called Entrata sells apartment landlords a product named RentPlus. RentPlus takes the rent you already pay, on time, every month, and reports it to the credit bureaus. For that, it charges you about ten dollars a month. Nine ninety-five at a market-rate building, straight from the company’s own rate card. A hundred and twenty dollars a year to have someone tell Equifax you did the thing you already did.

Strange enough on its own. But the fee is the small part. The machine is who gets paid to put you in it.

On that same rate card, under the price, sits a three dollar “revenue share.” That is the cut the landlord keeps for every resident enrolled, every month. So three of your ten dollars walk straight back across the table to the person who signed you up. Your landlord makes money when you carry the charge.

That is where the lawsuit comes in. A proposed class of tenants sued Entrata on June 1 in federal court in Colorado, a case called Fish v. Entrata, brought by the nonprofit Towards Justice. The complaint says Entrata pays landlords to auto-enroll their tenants, and that RentPlus moved from opt-in to opt-out, a setup the suit calls negative-option billing. Saying nothing gets treated as saying yes. When a charge only survives if you cannot find the off switch, that tells you what the charge is.

And they built the off switch where you would not look for it. RentPlus gets folded into the lease as an “in-lease amenity.” No pitch you can decline. You sign the lease to get the apartment, and the credit subscription rides along inside it, in the same slot as the gym you will never use and the valet trash you never asked for. A monthly charge dressed as a perk, built so that noticing it is your job and refunding it is a favor.

The thing you are buying is thinner than the brochure. RentPlus marketing says it reports your on-time payments and leaves out the skipped or missed ones. So the months you might actually want explained are the months the sales pitch tells you it ignores. The suit says this runs afoul of the Credit Repair Organizations Act, a law from the nineties built precisely because credit-repair products have always billed people for outcomes they cannot promise. There is even a cheaper tier for affordable housing. Six ninety-five a resident. The model reaches hardest into the renters with the least room to take the hit.

Here is the part they say out loud. To you, RentPlus is sold as credit building. To the landlord, it is sold as ancillary revenue. Entrata’s own IPO filing pitches rent reporting to operators as exactly that, a revenue stream. So spare me the guessing game about motive. They wrote it down and filed it with the SEC.

Then they took the check. Entrata pulled a 200 million dollar investment from funds run by Blackstone and just announced plans to go public. One of the landlords named in the case is Independence Realty Trust, a publicly traded apartment REIT. A few dollars a month feels like nothing. Multiply it across thousands of doors, every month, and it is the kind of quiet, recurring money that makes a software company shine on a stock exchange. Every auto-enrolled tenant is a coin in that machine, skimmed off a payment that was already going to happen. The renter is not the customer here. The renter is the yield.

Well, fuck that fee.

Here is what you can do, today, before you sign anything.

Read your lease for the words RentPlus, rent reporting, credit reporting, or resident amenity, and ask the leasing office, in writing, whether you are enrolled and what it costs. If you are in it and did not choose it, ask to opt out and ask for the refund. Some tenants report getting them. If you want your rent to build credit, there are services you sign up for directly, on your own terms, with no landlord skimming the fee.

Before the next lease, the move is the one it always is. Sort by total cost, not the sticker rent. The charge that gets you is almost never the number on the sign out front.

I laid out the full junk-fee architecture, the valet trash and the resort fees and the lease-addendum theater, in this episode. If you want to see the machine this one crawled out of, it is here: