These are just a few of the roughly $3,000 in fees charged to Katie Davis when it was time to move out of her duplex on University Hill. Davis lived in the property, owned by Four Star Realty, from August 2018 to August 2020 as a student at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“This is my first apartment that I had ever rented by myself and I think thatap pretty indicative of most students that move into Four Star properties,” Davis said. “This is their first experience living in an apartment so they don’t know exactly what to look out for, and I think Four Star really, really takes advantage of that.”
In January, Four Star reached a with Attorney General Phil Weiser after an investigation by the Colorado Department of Law exposed multiple instances of the company charging renters for unnecessary work, unrelated damages and other fees not outlined in their leases. Four Star denied the allegations made by the state. Rather than spend years of expensive litigation defending itself, according to a statement by Four Star, the company decided to put this matter behind it and instead focus on its business.
“Four Star Realty has always been committed to following industry standards,” Caldwell Sullivan, the CEO of Four Star Realty, said in a statement. “However, in a time of progressive tenant advocacy that is quickly changing the landscape of property management in Colorado, we experienced scrutiny in this investigation for practices that are widely used in the industry. Industry standards will undergo many changes as a result of these policy decisions. We look forward to leading the industry in adapting to those changes.”
The state plans to return $980,000 of the settlement to affected consumers. Weiser said the office is still in the early stages of the process. Four Star will pay the money to the Attorney General’s office in one-third increments at 60 days, 210 days and 360 days following the settlement.
People who have filed complaints about Four Star to the Attorney General’s office will be first in line for payment. Anyone who believes they may qualify is encouraged to visit to file a complaint and the office will put them in line for future restitution and consider their case.
Weiser said anyone who was harmed by Four Star at any time is eligible.
“If you are in this category of people who had Four Star take your money for an illegitimate reason, you’re eligible,” he said.
‘Pushed off our complaints’
Two months after Davis moved in, she said, a water pipe burst and it took multiple days for Four Star to fix it.
When a large tree branch was threatening to crush the cars in the driveway, it took two or three weeks of asking daily for its removal for Four Star to send someone out. By the time they came out, Davis said, the branch had already fallen.
“A lot of preventative maintenance was not occurring and it was only after something had happened that (they’d respond), like after the tree branch fell and damaged our power lines and could’ve damaged our cars,” Davis said.
The heat also didn’t work. Davis learned the air filters were so dirty that there was no heat coming out. Her room would be 45 or 50 degrees, but she still paid the heat bill blasting the furnace at full heat.
When it came time to move out, Davis was prepared. She deep-cleaned the apartment and took pictures and videos to document everything.
“Itap common knowledge across every student that Four Star would try to take your security deposit, so I was very, very adamant about cleaning thoroughly,” she said.
Davis said Four Star typically requires a security deposit worth two months’ rent, and for Davis and her roommates, that amounted to more than $8,300.
Despite her efforts, Four Star told them they would be keeping roughly $3,000 worth of their security deposit, which Davis said came as a shock. When she asked for a breakdown in pricing, she saw an “insane” amount of unfair charges for painting, cleaning, re-keying, trash and utility overages.
“The thing that really struck me as disingenuous or shady is that they didn’t tell us month to month ‘Oh, you’re going over these utility charges,’” she said. “They waited until the very end of our lease to tell us, so we couldn’t … adjust our usage. It was just told and charged to us at the very end of it. Same thing with trash.”
At one point during their lease, Davis said one of her roommates plugged her laptop into an outlet and it electrocuted her. She wasn’t injured, but when maintenance came out they simply wiped the soot off of the outlet and told them not to use it. At the end of their lease, they were charged for the faulty outlet.
“They just ignored or pushed off our complaints until it was time to take the security deposit,” Davis said.
Davis said she and her roommates visited Four Star in person, spoke to four or five people in the office and called them every day. They made it a mission to get the money back.
“(Four Star) did everything in their power to make sure that we did not receive the money back until we finally threatened legal action and they decided to refund about half of that $3,000,” Davis said. “So we received about $1,500 back, but that was still $1,500 out of our pockets when we hadn’t done anything to warrant that.”
Rachel Key, who graduated from CU Boulder in 2015, lived in the Buffalo Canyon Apartments in Boulder owned by Four Star.
Key and her two roommates left Boulder for winter break and received an email while they were away that some of the pipes had frozen in the building. By the time they had returned to campus, it had warmed up and the pipes in their apartment burst, gushing water until the drywall fell from the ceiling. Key said everything was wet, and she had to stay with a friend during the couple of weeks it took Four Star to fix it and clean up the mess.
The person who came to fix their pipes told them it wasn’t their fault and that he told Four Star repeatedly that the pipes were dangerous and in poor condition.
“(Four Star) ended up charging us for the pipes freezing,” Key said. “They told us that it was because they thought that we had turned the heat off in our apartment.”
Key said they couldn’t have turned off the heat because they didn’t have access to do so from within the apartment. Four Star tried to charge Key and her roommates between $2,500 and $3,000 for the damages from the pipes bursting.
“They argued with my parents for a while about paying that and threatening to send us to collections until finally, my dad convinced them,” she said.
Four Star did agree to remove the charges but instead kept the entire security deposit from all three roommates, amounting to roughly $2,700.
‘This all felt illegal’
Rohan Baishya graduated from CU Boulder with a master’s degree in 2022 and lived in Four Star’s Spanish Towers apartments from the fall of 2021 to the spring of 2022.
In the spring, the only toilet in the apartment got clogged. Four Star sent a plumber to fix it, but while the plumber was working, water came flooding out of the toilet into two of his roommates’ rooms, soaking through the floors, carpets and the wall. The plumber left and said he couldn’t fix it. Days passed before a clean-up crew was sent out, and a second plumber arrived the following week who fixed it in under half an hour.
The second plumber told Baishya that the previous plumber didn’t know what he was doing and that the pipes were very old and had been clogged for a while.
At the end of their lease, Baishya said, they were charged for both plumbers and the cleaning and carpet work, amounting to a few thousand dollars.
“That didn’t feel right,” Baishya said. “If they messed up by sending in a plumber who didn’t do a good job, it was their service’s fault that our apartment got wet, moldy, ruined and had to be re-carpeted. That shouldn’t have been our responsibility.”
When they tried to dispute it, they said no one would talk to them about it.
“This all felt illegal, I felt like I was being conned the whole time,” Baishya said. “Conned and ignored. I felt like every time there was an issue I wouldn’t get a hold of anyone. But, anytime I was calling to pay something, someone was always willing to take my payment.”
One of his roommates was able to file a claim with his renter’s insurance which covered the charges.
“You’ve got to keep these properties properly maintained if you’re going to have old properties so these things don’t happen,” he said. “I feel like not only did they neglect to do that, but then they tried to put the blame on us.”
Baishya said he’d heard “horror stories” about Four Star but signed the lease anyway due to a lack of other options. Four Star manages approximately 5,000 properties in Boulder, Fort Collins, Greeley and Denver, and the vast majority of their rentals are to students.
“When you have a housing crisis like the one we have in Boulder and rent is ridiculously high, you have a lack of options and you kind of have to settle for whoever will give you the best deal up front,” Baishya said. “You don’t think of the risks, especially when you’re young. The only thing you see is how much money you’re spending on rent when you sign the lease. You don’t really have experience.”
Davis said this kind of treatment is common across many other property rental companies in Boulder, especially with student housing. She knew friends who lived at a different property not managed by Four Star that were charged $400 for a broken fridge drawer at the end of their lease. They knew the people that lived there after them so they went over and found out the drawer was never fixed even though they were charged the money.
Weiser said anyone who feels they’ve been wronged by any landlord should report it to the Attorney General’s office.
“We’ve actually heard reports that other companies in Boulder, in Denver and elsewhere have engaged in similar behavior,” Weiser said. “Many tenants report, for example, that they never get any security deposit back even though there’s no legitimate reason to keep it. Thatap a violation of the law and we have authority to enforce that law and we fully intend to do so.”
Davis said lower-income students are especially affected because they have to pay high rent prices for a run-down apartment while also being “nickel and dimed” for every little thing just to live near campus and be part of the university community. No matter what, Davis said, companies like Four Star will continue to get business because of a lack of housing options for students.
“They know that scarcity is on their side so they can treat you however they want and you will still be in a bind and need housing,” Davis said.
Weiser said the settlement is a message to the entire industry that itap not OK to “play games” like withholding security deposits or charging unreasonable fees.
“I have no question that the fact you have a lot of desperate renters out there looking for any place they can live has created an environment where renters are more vulnerable and potentially more accepting of fraudulent activity,” Weiser said.
If other landlords don’t get the message, he said, then the Attorney General’s office will enforce the law against them.
Sets the industry standard
Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said he appreciates that Four Star took the initiative and revised several of their , including disclosing fees in the lease, minimizing carpet and repainting costs and stopping charges to tenants for re-keying. He said the settlement is a big step forward for tenants in Boulder County and throughout Colorado that sets the industry standard.
“It really is a roadmap and a standard going forward for every property management company to follow and for tenants to be better protected,” Dougherty said.
The Attorney General’s office partnered with the District Attorney’s office to investigate the substance of complaints they’d received, and when they were ready to take Four Star to court, the company settled.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Christian Gardener-Wood said there is now an established baseline for landlords’ behavior in dealing with tenants, security deposits and in complying with the Consumer Protection Act.
“A lot of the renters Four Star deals with … are college students that are somewhat vulnerable to limited availability of housing in our community and are sometimes hostage to whatever a landlord may require just because they need housing,” Gardener-Wood said. “This really sets the standard for the landlords.”
When Davis graduated from CU Boulder, she moved out of her Four Star property and into a new apartment. She was shocked when the apartment wanted a $500 security deposit compared to the nearly $8,500 deposit she and her roommates gave Four Star.
“It was that wake-up moment, like wow, I’ve really been taken advantage of this entire time,” she said.
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