"Junk fees" are driving up the cost of rent in Richmond — and everywhere

• In some cases, the NCLC found, the fees are being charged for services that aren't provided.

Why it matters: The fees are often hidden in long, boilerplate leases. They're perfectly legal, but the tenants often don't know about them, and landlords are often exploiting loopholes in the law.

Meanwhile, there's no clear agency tasked with monitoring these fees or a place for consumers to report abuses, Christie Marra, director of housing advocacy for the Virginia Poverty Law Center, tells Axios.

These fees are making housing less accessible while exacerbating the region's affordability crisis — for everyone, not just lower income renters, she says.

Zoom in: The National Consumer Law Center found more than two dozen fees commonly charged as part of the renting process in nearly every state, including Virginia.

• Those fees can make the monthly rent hundreds of dollars more than the advertised price.
• The fees can include trash fees to use the trash cans, notice fees if the landlord has to communicate with you and pest fees to cover the cost of spraying for bugs, plus administrative fees and lease signing fees, which are cropping up more and more in Richmond.

Lease signing fees can run up to $200, due at the time the lease is signed, in addition to an application fee, security deposit and the first month's rent, Denise Thomas-Brown, VPLC's housing community educator, tells Axios.

• It's unclear what the fee covers, but it's non refundable.
• "It's near to impossible for a person to come up with the amount of money to move into an apartment now," Thomas-Brown says.

The application fee is the only one mentioned explicitly in the Virginia Landlord and Tenant Act, the law that dictates what landlords can and cannot do, or charge, and that's part of the issue, Marra says.

• Since no other fees are expressly mentioned in the law, landlords slowly began charging more and more of them.
• Even the application fee, which is capped at $50, regularly exceeds that cost with landlords pointing to a caveat in the section, which says the $50 is "exclusive of any actual out-of-pocket expenses paid by the landlord," like the credit check.

Historically, that fee was meant to cover the cost of the landlord's time to check references and likely run a credit check. Often, it was applied to a tenant's first month's rent, she says.

• Now it's one of the many fees driving landlord profits, NCLC found.

The other side: Rental housing is a "narrow-margin industry," and fees can offset other costs, the CEO of the National Apartment Association told the Associated Press this year.

• Plus, the fees can be optional and often cover services like utilities and renters insurance at a lower price because they can negotiate in bulk.

Worth noting: Tenants and watchdog agencies may call them fees, but in the property management world they're known as "ancillary income" — and the internet is littered with articles advising property owners on how to charge them.

• "Pets = dollars," reads one article from the National Apartment Association, which quotes the COO of one firm saying, "When it comes to pets, most will pay 'whatever's required.'"
• Got outdoor space? That could go for another $30 a month to use.
• In lieu of a security deposit, which must be returned, try breaking it up as a monthly "no deposit program," which doesn't have to be returned at the end of the lease.

What we're watching: Pushing state legislators to rein in fees and make property owners be more transparent about them is at the top of VPLC's agenda, Marra says.