The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
INVESTORS SLAM TENANTS WITH FEES, EVICTIONS
Private equity makes big push into metro Atlanta’s single-family homes.
Tawana Randall’s landlord charged her a $15 penalty every month for not having renter’s insurance. Under her lease, the insurance had to benefit not just herself, but also Progress Residential, the company that owned the four-bedroom home.
Randall said she sent proof of her policy. She emailed. She called. And month after month, the $15 fees kept hitting her account.
Finally, in August, a Progress employee called Randall about the policy, she said. Not to clear up her billing dispute, but because her house went up in flames, and Progress wanted to cash the insurance check.
The growth of investor-owned, single-family rental giants like Progress Residential has come at an extraordinary cost for many of the residents who live in those homes, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found.
Over the past decade, investor-backed firms bought more than 65,000 houses across metro Atlanta, transforming one of the most enduring symbols of American middle-class success, the single-family home, into a financial product for out-of-state and foreign shareholders.
The investor buying spree is pushing the American Dream of homeownership out of reach for many first-time buyers who find they can’t compete
with the flood of cash, the AJC found.
A number of families told the AJC they were outbid by investors for a home on the one hand, only to be stuck renting from them on the other. And while the largest firms compete for houses in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods, they disproportionately target starter homes in communities of color.
Progress, Atlanta’s second largest homebuyer, with more than 10,000 homes, is based in Arizona but is owned by Pretium Partners, a New York private equity firm with over $51 billion in assets.
Armed with technological and finan
cial advantages, Progress and other large single-family rental firms are more sophisticated than traditional landlords at scooping up homes, filling them with renters and maximizing profits. In their pursuit of higher returns, the largest firms aggressively increase the cost of housing through rent hikes and fees, while skimping on maintenance and passing many traditional landlord responsibilities on to the tenants themselves, the AJC found.
The reliance on computer automation that gives Progress a leg up in the buyers’ market can make renting from them — and a number of other similarly situated investment firms — a dystopian nightmare, renters say.
Minor problems that could be resolved with a conversation snowball into endless runarounds. Unanswered emails lead to infuriating phone calls. Two hours on hold leads to empty promises that someone in another department will call back.
“It’s like a game,” Randall said. “Why is it so hard to have a conversation?”
Over and over, Progress’ tenants described being trapped between two bad choices: Pay outrageous fees they believed were charged in error, or refuse and risk their financial credit when the company’s software locks them out of their account and triggers an eviction filing.
For this story, the AJC interviewed more than a dozen Progress Residential renters and reviewed lease documents, emails, court filings and other evidence provided by tenants. The AJC also spoke with more than a dozen housing experts, including tenant attorneys, government officials, real estate agents and academic researchers.
Progress is not alone. Experts say the company’s tactics are common among single-family landlords owned by private equity. But Progress stands out, filing more evictions than any firm in the country since the pandemic.
Progress officials declined an interview request. In a statement, a company spokesperson called eviction a “last resort outcome” and touted the company’s partnership with the city of Atlanta to house residents displaced from Forest Cove, a troubled low-income apartment complex.
“Progress is proud to serve our residents throughout metro Atlanta, and we are committed to working with partners in the community to create access to quality single-family homes in great neighborhoods,” the statement said. “We continue to invest in talented people, tools, and technology to enhance our resident experience.”
For Randall, the $15 insurance fees paled in comparison to what came next.
An unexplained $448 utility fee from the burned-out house in Conyers she had fled a month earlier. No credit for the $1,500 balance of her August rent, after she was forced to evacuate with her two children Aug. 12. A new $2,370 security deposit when the company relocated her. Plus, another $456 for moving in a few days before her transfer took effect Sept. 10.
Progress also kept some of Randall’s deposit from the home that burned. Randall didn’t have the carpet professionally cleaned, nor did she restore the walls “to their premove-in condition” as required by her lease.
After the fire, which Rockdale County inspectors blamed on faulty electrical wiring in a floodlight, the home needed much more than a routine cleaning. Randall’s ceiling collapsed, dumping black ash, insulation and drywall all over her bedroom furniture. For the walls, Progress’ move-out instructions suggest using Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.
Rather than protecting renters like Randall, Georgia law has enabled the most egregious profit-seeking behaviors, housing and legal experts say.
The AJC found that the same power imbalance that has long allowed landlords to profit from low-income renters living in deplorable conditions is now being exploited by some of the world’s wealthiest investment groups. In doing so, they subject middle-class renters, some of whom were priced out of homeownership by these same firms, to similar treatment.
In complaints to the state Attorney General’s Office obtained through an open records request, residents said their investor landlords rented homes in hellish conditions. One woman’s laundry room ceiling collapsed due to severe mold. A pregnant woman who has asthma said her air conditioning was out from June 17 to July 7. At one point during a record-setting heat wave, the temperature rose to 97 degrees inside the house.
A 2022 congressional survey found the average leaseholder with one of the top five single-family rental firms made an annual income of $84,852.
“The problems we’re talking about are not new; they’ve just been happening to poor people,” said Elora Raymond, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech who studies the finan
cialization of housing. “But now as homeownership is going away for a new generation, essentially, who are we talking about? That housing stock, that price point, it’s middle-class people.
“The limelight is going on: How can we shore up homeownership, how can we make sure that the wealth gap doesn’t increase?” Raymond said. “But also could we talk about why this isn’t OK, and (why) the 35% of our society who rents shouldn’t have to live like this?”
In September, Progress locked Randall out of her account.
After spending over $2,000 on deposits and fees to move in, the online portal wouldn’t consider her rent paid without also settling up $900 in new charges that no one at the company would explain. The software tacked on late fees, then placed her in eviction status for a home to which Progress had relocated her just a few weeks earlier.
“We have the rent. We want to pay it,” Randall said. “Just get someone on the phone who will talk to me and tell me what these fees are.”
In increasingly desperate emails and phone calls over the next few weeks, Randall pleaded with Progress employees for assistance. On Sept. 25, a leasing specialist seemingly came to her rescue, telling the customer service email and six other employees that Randall had “paid more than was required,” and to remove two eviction fees, which were an additional $500 apiece.
No one made the adjustment to her account. And later that fall, a final injustice appeared at Randall’s door: the eviction notice.
An artificial intelligence landlord
In 2012, when federal policymakers began promoting bulk sales of foreclosed homes to convert into rentals, traditional landlords scoffed at the idea. Scattered-site rental housing was simply too cumbersome to manage nationwide, said Hannah Holloway, the director of policy and research for the TechEquity Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on economic inequality.
“It was really just private equity that was like, ‘I think we can figure this out,’” Holloway said. “And the way they figured it out was through digital landlordship.”
Today, you can rent from large companies headquartered two time zones away without ever speaking to anyone, let alone meeting your property manager in person. Through online portals, renters apply for homes, submit paperwork needed for background checks, sign their lease and make payments.
Several Progress residents told the AJC they were never given an in-person walk-through of their home. Instead, they received a code to open a lockbox and let themselves in.
Digitizing everything from rent payments to maintenance requests cuts down on management expenses. But those savings aren’t necessarily passed on to renters. And leniency is out the window.
“If you’re a second late on submitting rent, you automatically get a fine,” Holloway said. “The automation of things that usually would’ve required a conversation with your landlord … that individual relationship just doesn’t exist with these companies when it’s just you and the website algorithm.”
Seth Ninger, an entrepreneur in Woodstock, started seeing $45 charges pop up on his Progress account for violating homeowners association rules. One was for overgrown weeds that predated his tenure by two months. Another was for painting the outside of the house. That’s the landlord’s responsibility under his lease.
When bogus fees pile up, renters say it’s impossible to pay only the rent while trying to resolve the dispute.
“Anytime you send Progress money, it goes to the oldest charges,” Ninger said. And then the late fees pile up. He said he called Progress at least 40 times in his tenure, often with hourlong waits.
“Everybody was like: ‘Man, that’s insane; I can’t believe that’s happening. Let me get you over to the right department,’” he said.
Then the transferred call would go to voicemail.
Problems lead to eviction court
Ninger says renting from private equity has transformed the landlord-tenant relationship from a mutually beneficial business transaction to something closer to extortion.
The threat is present in every interaction: Pay up, even if the bill is wrong, or face an eviction filing.
“Eviction is cheap in Georgia. It is fast in Georgia. And it is primarily a vehicle to get tenants to pay up,” said Becky Hudock, senior policy counsel at Georgia Appleseed, a nonprofit legal policy center.
Just one out of five eviction filings