The Junk Fee Machine: How the Drip Pricing Scheme Worked

Invitation Homes built a systematic, multi-layer operation to extract money from renters at every stage of the rental process, from the first click on a listing to the final security deposit dispute. Here is how the architecture of the scheme worked.

• Founded in 2012, formerly owned by Blackstone. Invitation Homes went public in 2017 and merged with Starwood Waypoint Homes the same year, becoming the largest single-family home landlord in the country. It now owns more than 80,000 homes across 16 markets.
• The hidden fee bundle. Since at least 2018, Invitation Homes charged a mandatory monthly fee bundle not included in any advertised price. Originally called a “utility management fee,” it evolved into the “Lease Easy bundle” comprising a smart home technology fee, an air filter delivery fee, and a utility management fee. This bundle added up to $60 per month, or $720 per year, to the true cost of rent.
• November 2023 escalation. The company added yet another hidden mandatory fee: an $85 monthly “internet package.” This was also excluded from advertised prices.
• $18 million in application fees. Since 2019, tenants paid more than $18 million in nonrefundable application fees for listings that were deceptively priced. Application fees ran up to $55 and holding fees up to $500, both nonrefundable under certain conditions.
• The gap between advertised and actual rent. In 2021, tenants paid $40–$45 more per month than advertised. By the time of the complaint, they were paying $60 to $145 more per month. On a two-year lease at the maximum gap, that is $3,480 above what was advertised.
• $60 million in Lease Easy fees alone. From 2021 to June 2023, Invitation Homes charged consumers over $60 million in Lease Easy fees as a hidden addition to monthly rent.
• Third-party sites were no better. Listings on Zillow and Realtor.com showed the same artificially low prices. Realtor.com has a dropdown specifically designed to show fees; Invitation Homes left it empty for every property.
• Tenants had no way to compare prices accurately. By hiding mandatory fees, Invitation Homes prevented potential renters from making apples-to-apples comparisons with competing landlords — a deliberate market distortion that benefited only Invitation Homes.

“We can’t show all additional fees, so we don’t want to show any.” — Invitation Homes Senior Vice President of Operations

The Cover-Up Inside the Company

This was not a miscommunication or an oversight in the billing department. Internal documents show a deliberate, executive-level decision to hide fees and reject attempts to fix the problem.

• The CEO personally drove the fee scheme. In 2019, Invitation Homes’ CEO told the Senior VP responsible for the fee program to “juice this hog” by making the smart home fee mandatory for all renters.
• The SVP pledged to the CEO directly. In 2021, that same SVP described a smart home fee price increase as “a tactical issue that has garnered the interest of one of the corner offices on the 20th floor” and told the CEO: “between you and I, I have not let this go. I will get it taken care of.”
• They actively chose not to display fees. When a VP asked why consumers couldn’t see Lease Easy fees before applying, the Senior VP of Operations confirmed the company’s policy: “we can’t show all additional fees, so we don’t want to show any.”
• A November 2021 internal slide deck instructed employees to “only disclose [the Lease Easy bundle] fee on website pages and other marketing collateral when critical.” The same deck described updating a landing page to “be more generic and remove pricing from header.”
• A September 2020 Board presentation estimated the “annual impact” of mandatory smart home fees at $24–$26 million, air filter fees at $4.3–$9.5 million, and utility management fees at $1.9 million. The Board knew exactly how much money the hidden fees generated.
• A transparency proposal was buried. In June 2021, the SVP of Operations internally proposed listing homes at the full asking price inclusive of all mandatory fees, calling it “the best approach.” In July and August 2021, marketing circulated a slide deck called “Bundled Price Transparency and Rent Calculator.” Invitation Homes rejected it and continued hiding fees.
• The SVP of Operations admitted hyperlinks were useless. Even after the FTC investigation began and Invitation Homes added more fee information behind hyperlinks, the SVP conceded the company was aware that “[m]ost people don’t look at the link.”

The Lease Was Built to Confuse You

The hidden fee architecture extended beyond advertising. It was baked into the structure of the lease itself, with known errors left unfixed and disclosures engineered to fail.

• The lease cover page said $0.00 for the air filter fee. From at least 2019 to 2022, the cover page of Invitation Homes’ lease explicitly stated that the monthly air filter delivery charge was $0.00. The actual charge of $9.95 per month appeared only in an addendum buried toward the end of a 60-page document.
• The fee wasn’t even added until after move-in. In many cases, Invitation Homes didn’t confirm the number and size of air filters in the home until after the lease began, meaning tenants had already moved in and paid rent before the charge appeared.
• A known software glitch was never fixed. For years, Invitation Homes used a software program to calculate move-out charges for carpet replacement and repainting. A known glitch in the program routinely charged residents hundreds or thousands of dollars for ordinary wear and tear. The company knew about the glitch and chose not to fix it.
• Disclosures were in gray microtext at the bottom of listings. The only disclosure of mandatory fees appeared five lines into microtext found only after scrolling past a map and photos of unrelated listings. Even that text used conditional, confusing language that did not clearly state which fees were mandatory for that specific home.
• The application portal buried fee language in blue text on a blue background. In the Rent Café application portal, Lease Easy fee disclosures appeared in small blue text set against a blue background — a design that made them functionally invisible.
• Holding agreements reinforced the lie. Invitation Homes’ holding agreements explicitly stated the monthly rental amount was the “Lease For” price advertised on the listing, with no reference to any mandatory add-on fees. Tenants paid holding fees up to $500 based on that number.
• Complaints were tracked but ignored. Since at least 2018, Invitation Homes tracked all consumer complaints and “escalations” in monthly “Resident Voice Reports” distributed to senior management. Just one month after making Lease Easy fees mandatory in January 2021, the February 2021 report documented a significant spike in complaints about additional fees. By April 2021, the company noted that fee escalations were “trending up.” The company did nothing substantive in response.

Straight From Their Own Mouths: The Documents That Prove It

The FTC complaint is built almost entirely on Invitation Homes’ own internal communications. These are not interpretations. These are their words.

“Juice this hog.”

— Invitation Homes CEO, 2019, instructing the Senior VP of the fee program to make the smart home fee mandatory for all renters.

“Between you and I, I have not let this go. I will get it taken care of.”

— Senior Vice President of Operations, 2021, to the CEO, regarding a proposed price increase for the mandatory smart home fee described as “a tactical issue that has garnered the interest of one of the corner offices on the 20th floor.”

“We can’t show all additional fees, so we don’t want to show any.”

— Invitation Homes Senior Vice President of Operations, confirming the company’s deliberate policy not to display or itemize fees on the application portal, after a Vice President asked why consumers could not see Lease Easy fees before applying.

“Only disclose [the Lease Easy bundle] fee on website pages and other marketing collateral when critical.”

— Invitation Homes internal slide deck, November 2021, instructing employees on fee disclosure policy. The same deck described updating a landing page to “be more generic and remove pricing from header.”

“At best…a contradictory lease in this format. At worst, we have something that has the appearance of intentional dishonesty.”

— An Invitation Homes employee, describing the practice of listing the air filter monthly charge as $0.00 on the lease cover page while hiding the actual $9.95 charge in a buried addendum.

“The non-maintenance escalation noise coming from the field right now is very loud. We are all feeling it, including [the Chief Executive Officer], [the Chief Financial Officer], and [the Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel].”

— Invitation Homes Chief Operating Officer, August 2019 email to senior operations executives, after escalations about security deposits composed 24% of all non-maintenance complaints.

“This is how we get upset residents but also make the numbers [the Chief Financial Officer] communicated investors need [to] see.”

— Invitation Homes employee, to the Senior Vice President of Marketing, describing the practice of overcharging residents at move-out under internal budget pressure.

“I think it’s wrong for a tenant to have had gone to collections and get dinged on their credit because we didn’t provide them with genuine care or doing the right thing. I’m sure I will have more examples soon but I wanted to send this one right away.”

— An Invitation Homes deposit accountant, flagging to a superior the case of a resident sent to collections due to improper security deposit charges in a region that had stopped all internal reviews of damage assessments.

“I have instructed my team that if it is 100% removable to credit/reverse it, but if it is questionable to leave it and we can negotiate the charge if challenged.” — An Invitation Homes property manager, email to Vice President of Operations

Who Gets Hurt and How: The Damage Beyond the Dollar Amounts

Public Health

The company’s failure to maintain habitable properties and provide genuine emergency maintenance created documented physical harm to residents across its portfolio of 80,000+ homes.

• Between 2018 and 2023, residents in 33,328 properties submitted at least one maintenance work order within the first week of moving in, for plumbing, electrical, and HVAC issues in homes that had been advertised as passing a quality assurance inspection.
• Residents documented moving into homes with mold, rat feces, exposed electrical wiring, broken appliances, and spider infestations. These are not cosmetic problems; mold exposure causes respiratory illness, and exposed wiring is a fire and electrocution hazard.
• A pregnant resident lost heat in winter and was told no technician could come for two days. The failure to provide emergency heating to a six-months-pregnant tenant represents a direct health risk to a medically vulnerable person.
• A tenant dealt with raw sewage backing up into their shower and bathroom, creating immediate contamination and pathogen exposure. They waited 96 hours for a callback and fixed the issue themselves to protect their children before anyone from Invitation Homes arrived on day six.
• Invitation Homes’ own Executive Vice President of Operations — the person responsible for the maintenance program — stated he would not accept his company’s repair delays in his own home, describing a 72-hour wait for broken heat as “excessive.”
• McKinsey’s 2022 assessment documented that Invitation Homes had 26% more recurring maintenance issues than competitors, confirming the chronic nature of the problem across the entire portfolio.

Economic Inequality

Invitation Homes’ practices did not harm a random cross-section of Americans. They targeted the specific economic vulnerabilities of people who rent single-family homes, including those who cannot afford to buy, those displaced by the 2008 financial crisis, and those struggling through a pandemic.

• The company emerged directly from the 2008 foreclosure crisis, when the private equity firm Blackstone bought thousands of homes at distressed prices. The people Invitation Homes rented to often included the same communities devastated by the crisis, now unable to re-enter homeownership and paying rent to institutional investors instead.
• Renters paid nonrefundable application fees up to $55 and holding fees up to $500 based on fraudulent advertised prices, losing that money before ever learning the real monthly cost. On tight budgets, these losses are not trivial.
• Nearly 48,000 residents had an average of $1,205 withheld from their security deposits between 2020 and 2022. Only 10% of Invitation Homes residents received a full deposit refund during this period, compared to a national average return rate of 63.9%.
• The company charged departing residents an additional $42 million in move-out charges on top of withheld deposits in just three years, for a combined total of nearly $100 million extracted from renters at move-out alone.
• Residents who disputed charges faced a system deliberately designed against them: no guaranteed response, potential collections referrals, and credit score damage that would follow them into their next housing search and affect their ability to rent again.
• During the pandemic, approximately 29% of tenants against whom Invitation Homes filed for eviction between March 15, 2020, and July 29, 2021, lost their housing — despite many of them being eligible for protection under eviction moratoria they were never told about.
• Residents who settled eviction lawsuits signed away their CDC moratorium protections as part of the settlement, leaving them with no legal shield if they fell behind again. This converted a temporary financial hardship into a permanent legal disadvantage.
• A study by the Atlanta Federal Reserve found that single-family corporate landlords like Invitation Homes were more likely to file eviction notices than smaller landlords, confirming the systemic economic pressure the company’s model applied to its tenant base.
• Invitation Homes filed eviction suits against former tenants who had already moved out, resulting in eviction records appearing in tenant screening background checks — making it harder for those people to rent from any future landlord.
• The company’s fee program padded its bottom line at the direct expense of renters’ ability to save money, build financial stability, or prepare for future housing costs. A family paying $3,480 more per year than budgeted over a two-year lease loses money they will never recover from a company generating billions in revenue.

How Invitation Homes Turned a Pandemic Into a Profit Center

During the worst public health crisis in a century, when the federal government specifically created legal protections to keep people in their homes, Invitation Homes ran a coordinated operation to neutralize those protections.

• The Hardship Affidavit was a decoy. Invitation Homes created its own online “Hardship Affidavit,” using legal-sounding language and promoting it across its website and in direct communications to residents. It carried zero legal protection under the CDC Eviction Moratorium. The real CDC Declaration, which did provide legal protection, was never mentioned or linked on the company’s Coronavirus Response webpage despite the company referencing the CDC Order in its FAQ.
• Staff were trained to avoid mentioning the CDC Declaration. Invitation Homes wrote a scripted response for employees to use when residents cited the CDC moratorium. The script told employees to say the rent still needed to be paid and that the company wanted to “work with you,” but the script contained zero mention of the CDC Declaration or how to file one.
• Employees panicked when the CDC Declaration was almost mentioned. When a resident reported that an external call center had instructed them to fill out the CDC Declaration, a regional employee immediately escalated the issue up the corporate chain with the message: “I am really hoping this is not the case” and “I just want to confirm that the [call center] team is not instructing our residents to complete CDC declaration forms.”
• Residents who did try to submit a CDC Declaration faced deliberate friction. The only way to submit a CDC Declaration to Invitation Homes was by email attachment or hard-copy drop-off at a company office. By contrast, the company’s own Hardship Affidavit could be submitted through a simple online form. The company had no systemized tracking for CDC Declarations received.
• Invitation Homes proceeded with evictions even after receiving CDC Declarations. Company policy, when a resident did submit a CDC Declaration, was to continue eviction proceedings and ask a judge to determine the Declaration’s validity. The company did not voluntarily halt evictions based on the Declaration.
• Residents who settled waived their legal rights. Tenants who settled their eviction cases entered payment plans that included explicit waivers of CDC moratorium protections, leaving them fully exposed if they fell behind on the payment plan.
• Invitation Homes filed evictions against people who had already left. During the pandemic, the company initiated eviction proceedings against residents it knew had vacated, causing eviction filings to appear in those individuals’ tenant screening background reports. One woman moved out specifically because the company promised her it would protect her rental history; the eviction was filed anyway.
• The SSCC’s July 2022 report found that approximately 29% of Invitation Homes tenants against whom the company filed for eviction between March 15, 2020, and July 29, 2021, lost their housing during a period when many were legally protected from that outcome.

What the Numbers Actually Mean

A Decade of Documented Harm: The Chronology of This Case

The misconduct at Invitation Homes did not emerge suddenly. It was built, expanded, and defended over many years while reporters, regulators, and tenants sounded alarms.

What You Can Do Right Now

The FTC has filed seven counts against Invitation Homes and is seeking a permanent injunction and full monetary relief. Here is who holds the power to act further, and how ordinary people can apply pressure and protect themselves.

The People at the Top

The FTC complaint documents that the following corporate roles were directly involved in or informed of the misconduct. These are the positions to watch, contact, and hold accountable:

• Chief Executive Officer of Invitation Homes: Personally directed the “juice this hog” fee program expansion in 2019 and received direct pledges from the SVP that the hidden fee agenda would be handled.
• Chief Financial Officer of Invitation Homes: Communicated investor financial targets to employees, which internal communications directly link to the practice of overcharging residents at move-out to “make the numbers.”
• Chief Operating Officer of Invitation Homes: Sent the August 2019 C-suite email acknowledging the security deposit complaint “noise” was being felt by the entire executive team, including the CEO, CFO, and CLO. No corrective action followed.
• Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel: Explicitly named as one of the executives made aware of the security deposit complaint “noise” in 2019.
• Senior Vice President of Operations: Confirmed the deliberate policy to hide fees (“we can’t show all fees, so we don’t want to show any”), instructed employees to hide fees except “when critical,” and told his boss the COO he “will not let this go” regarding fee increases.
• Executive Vice President of Operations: Responsible for the maintenance program. Privately acknowledged the 72-hour repair wait was “excessive” while the company continued advertising 24/7 emergency service.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Already the plaintiff. File your complaint at reportfraud.ftc.gov. Every complaint documented in that system can be used as evidence in ongoing enforcement.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): Covers unfair financial practices including illegal fee structures in housing products. File at consumerfinance.gov/complaint.
• U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ): If the FTC’s civil case produces evidence of criminal fraud, the DOJ has jurisdiction to pursue criminal charges against corporate executives.
• State Attorneys General: All 16 states where Invitation Homes operates have consumer protection authority. Contact your state AG’s office and ask what actions are being taken locally, particularly around security deposit laws and pandemic eviction violations.
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): HUD enforces fair housing law and can investigate practices that disproportionately harm protected classes of renters.
• Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): Invitation Homes is a publicly traded REIT. If the company misrepresented its fee practices or financial exposure to investors, there may be securities disclosure violations worth reporting to the SEC.

If You Have Rented From Invitation Homes

• Document everything now. Pull every email, lease document, move-in checklist, move-out statement, and payment record you have. Save them in multiple places. This documentation is your legal standing in any dispute or class action.
• File an FTC complaint. Go to reportfraud.ftc.gov. Describe the specific fees you were charged that were not in your advertised rent, any security deposit deductions you believe were improper, and any pandemic-era eviction interactions you had with the company.
• Connect with tenant organizing groups. National organizations like the National Housing Law Project (nhlp.org) and local tenant unions can connect you with legal resources, collective bargaining power, and other affected renters in your market.
• Contact your state AG. State-level cases can often move faster than federal litigation and may cover violations of state security deposit laws that go beyond the FTC complaint.
• If you were evicted unjustly during COVID, talk to a housing attorney. Legal aid organizations in your area may be able to help you pursue damages for evictions that violated the CDC moratorium, especially if Invitation Homes filed against you after you had already vacated or after you submitted a CDC Declaration.
• If you are currently a tenant: Read your lease in full before signing. Calculate the total monthly cost including all Lease Easy bundle fees and any internet package fees. Get every verbal promise in writing. Take timestamped photos of every room before you move in and before you move out, with the date visible.