More Bad Practices
At least a few of the big corporate Boulder area residential rental management companies have a practice that I believe should be debated in a court of law. These companies don’t allow renters to sign up for utilities directly with the provider. In trying to make sense of why they do this, the only utility that would be an owner responsibility by law is the water bill. If tenants don’t pay it the owner is forced to pay if they don’t have security deposit or other funds from the renter, or suffer a lien on the property.
Years ago anyone could call Xcel, Boulder’s energy provider, tell them an address and get annual average bill information. Xcel stopped doing that because it was deemed (by them or by law, I do not know) that allowing others to know how much energy people use at home without consent is a privacy violation.
Any renter who will not accept the arrangement of having a property management company pay the Xcel bill as an intermediary and who demands to have a direct account with Xcel would have a darn good case to make about privacy. It’s not insignificant that these Boulder-area property management companies also charge renters a “convenience fee” for this “service.” Sometimes they even charge the owner a fee for it.
Washington State has a webpage listing the items a consumer has a right to see on their energy bill: dollar amount or percentage of the bill that is taxes or fees, basis for each charge assessed, last meter reading, due date, date bill becomes overdue. This info could help renters be better stewards of our energy resources. And yet with this bad practice renters don’t get easy access to such info. In fact with a manager as the intermediary Xcel won’t even talk to the renter living in a dwelling about the account for their home because they are not on the account with Xcel.
Perhaps the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines for protecting renters’ rights is a lead. Or maybe the American Data Privacy and Protection Act is a lead. It established consumer protections including the right to access, correct and delete personal data. Or maybe I’m just putting links here that are not so relevant because search engines like links. He he.
Whatever the recourse, this is a bad practice whose main purpose, as far as I can tell, is for these big-guy property management companies to amass money by giving a quasi-justification to charge fees to every single renter every single month. It adds up to a lot of ill-gotten money. At the very least, these companies would be wise to disclose to renters, prior to the renter signing a lease, the terms of how their Xcel bill will be administered and the amount of all anticipated fees to be collected from the renter for this dubious service. And I think they should give renters the option to opt out.