![]() ![]() “Can I opt out of ‘all bills paid’ and just get utilities on my own?” Alabama, 502 W Alabama, 1901 Richmond - as well as any larger units in those buildings), our studios in midtown (1624 Holman), a few of the units at our Bryan+Brady property, and our property in SE inner loop at 2606 Beatty. The list changes as we buy and sell properties but as of this writing, all of our studios in Montrose (219 W. Which properties have this ‘All bills paid’ feature?” Many tenants could pay over $100/month for this alone), gas (on properties with gas), trash, and at some properties, wifi (though at our wifi properties we offer it as a non-guaranteed amenity) “So what’s included in ‘All bills paid’?”Ĭurrently our “all bills paid” properties include: Water/sewer (often billed back to by other management companies to their tenants via a RUBS system as a separate bill), electricity (that’s a big one. It’s not fair to count the full price paid for our all bills paid properties against the price of a non all bills paid property which is why we break out the utilities in much of our advertising. Just as if you found another apartment for $800/month that didn’t offer ‘all bills paid’ and you had to spend about $100/month on all your own utilities. You’re paying $800/month for rent and $100/month for utilities. The downside to this is often we’ll list as “$800/month rent + utilities” and explain that it’s $100/month for all the utilities and a prospective tenant will so “So rent is $900/month?”. the tenant paying them to various utility companies. The $100 for utility simply gets paid to us for all their utils vs. But if they see it for $800, they’ll realize it’s in their range. In that case, if they saw our $900 listing that had the ‘all bills paid’ baked into the price, they’d think it was out of their range since they’d not realize that price included all utilities. Often tenants tell us they have a budget for rent of, say, $800, because they need to budget for utilities as well. “So is it $800/month rent? $900/month rent? I’m confused” Or, in some listings, the all bills paid one will specifically say “$900/month, all bills paid” So since we assume a cost of $100/month for utilities, we’ll list the one property that has all bills paid (using the example rent above) for $800 + utilities. If one rents for $900 and that price includes the “all bills paid”, and one is $900 but the tenant is responsible for their own utilities, it’s misleading to list them both as $900 since one of them comes with a large benefit (utilities paid) that the other doesn’t. Since we have similar properties that are all bills paid, and some that are not, it’s made advertising the price challenging. traditional ‘get your own utilities’ units. The advertised price of “All bills paid” units vs. what they were paying before, and gave them a consistent known amount to pay each month. ![]() So we had the great idea of simply adding $100/month for utilities for all tenants. We found that, on average, the cost per unit (in our studios) for utilities (gas, water, trash, electricity) was just over $100/month. So we took the time to review the previous 12 months of utilities. Not only that, but it meant that the tenants didn’t know exactly what their bills would be, making auto draft for rent (which we strongly encourage ) difficult. When we first bought a building that was “master metered” for electricity, the owner used to take all the bills each month (electricity, water, trash, gas), divide them up to all the tenants, and add these individual charges to their rent ledger. A question we get often is “What do you mean by ‘all bills paid’?” Or “can I opt out and pay my own bills?” So to help with this common question, we decided to type up a quick article on just what “All Bills Paid” means ![]()
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