Peter Lohmann covers the FTC's push to regulate rental fees, a Florida property manager arrested for stealing $600,000 from condo associations, and national apartment rents hitting a four-year low of $1,353 with vacancy at a record 7.3%.
I'm Peter Lohmann, and this is your property management news for the week. The FTC announced they intend to regulate rental housing fees. This is brand new, just came out last week, and it's separate from some of the other actions that the FTC has been engaged in. Let me read you this comment from FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson. He said, quote, "We will be soliciting public comment on the need for a new rule to prevent the imposition of deceptive or unfair fees on renters seeking long-term housing options," end quote. So that's squarely aimed at us and our friends in the apartment industry. Don't really have any details yet. This is, you know, just the beginning of the process. They have to submit an intention to solicit public comment, which is what they're doing right now. Yeah, this is definitely one we're going to be keeping an eye on. I know the NAA published a nice article on this at the end of last week and they're obviously well aware of it. They're all over it, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, this could get really interesting. So let's keep an eye on it. In other news, Rentvine's user conference is coming up. They just opened registration recently. It is gonna be May 13th for a couple days down in Tampa, Florida. Those guys do a great job with their conferences. I've heard great things. So if you're a Rentvine customer or if you're interested in learning more about Rentvine, probably wanna jump on that and go down there and check it out. Property managers behaving badly. A Florida property manager was arrested in conjunction with theft from a condo association. In excess of $600,000. So I, I read the article, basically this guy was arrested twice for similar charges in other condo communities, which is mind-blowing. You'd think that these condo associations would do a little bit more due diligence before hiring a property manager. He was accused of forging signatures on more than 350 checks and legal documents, even redirecting some insurance payouts to him personally. So yeah, it's crazy out there. And I like surfacing these news articles from time to time just so we understand what some of our peers are doing out in the industry. And this kind of highlights some of the need for state regulation and licensing requirements. Not all 50 states require property managers to be licensed, which is pretty interesting. Majority of them do. Even here in Ohio, condo association management companies are not required to be licensed at all. And I don't think that's right. So I wish that our condo association management buddies would kind of get on the ball here. In other news, apartment rents are at their lowest level in 4 years. So of course we're mostly managing rental homes, but the apartment market kind of mirrors pretty closely what we've experienced as well. National median rent for apartments was $1,353, which is down about 1.5% compared to a year ago, which is pretty surprising. I mean, normally you would see rents go up just about every year., but right now they're declining and that's due to more supply entering the market. All of the folks who are screaming about fair housing need to take note here because the fastest way to make housing more affordable is just to build more of it. It's a simple supply and demand issue. Make it easier to build and manage housing and you will see the price of housing come down. And you're seeing a little bit of that happen right now due to all the supply that was in the pipeline for the last few years. I thought this was really interesting. Vacancy is up to 7.3%. Again, this is the apartment market. That's a record high since Apartment List started tracking this in 2017. So record high vacancy. And I know a lot of you are, are feeling that in your leasing timelines as well. And we are to a certain extent, although for whatever reason here in Columbus, it's been not quite as bad as what I've been hearing from other folks. So yeah, you're not alone if you've been having trouble leasing some of your properties. And this might be something you could share with your property owners if they're kind of skeptical on, are you really giving your best effort at leasing? And finally, excited to announce that Peter and the Wolf Live is returning on Thursday. So Peter and the Wolf is a live property management show I do with Wolfgang Kroski. We do it once a month for just about year round, and we're kicking off here in February for 2026. We're excited to bring this show back. It's a bit of a casual, more of an informal show. We do a lot of call-ins. We just kind of banter back and forth about, you know, whatever's going on in the industry. And on Thursday's show, we're going to be kind of giving a preview of the year ahead, talking about what we're excited about, some of the plans for our companies, and just what we're going to be doing in the upcoming year. And we'll talk about some of the topics for upcoming shows as well. So I'd love to have you register for that. You can register for that if you click the link in my newsletter, and I hope to see you there. Have a great week.
