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Walk the OPTECH floor this year and count how many booths list fee transparency as a feature. You'll lose count.
Here's my problem with that. Showing renters what they'll actually pay isn't a feature. In a growing list of places it's the law, and it's becoming the expectation everywhere else. Calling it a feature is like a car company advertising that its cars come with brakes.
The direction is set
Look at the dates:
- Massachusetts, September 2, 2025: the total price has to be shown more prominently than any other pricing information.
- Connecticut, October 1, 2025: recurring fees have to be included in advertised rent.
- Colorado, January 1, 2026: advertised prices include all mandatory fees.
- Austin, October 1, 2026: larger providers give renters an itemized fee list before they apply.
- Illinois, January 1, 2027: a tenant isn't liable for a non-optional fee missing from page one of the lease.
- Seattle, July 1, 2027: any fee not on the City's allowed list is prohibited.
Federally, the FTC opened its rental fee rulemaking in March 2026, and 26 attorneys general, including D.C., urged it forward. In December 2025 the FTC also sent warning letters to 13 property management software providers about leaving mandatory fees out of the total price. The direction is set. What's left is how operators get there.
Where the number changes
A common approach treats transparency as a display problem: add a fee table to the listing page and move on. That misses where the number actually changes.
Follow one fee through a typical stack. It's defined in a pricing system. It's advertised on a listing site. A leasing agent quotes it from memory. An application tool charges it. A lease template writes it in. That's five steps and four handoffs, and the number can change at every one. When it does, the renter feels misled, and the operator is left explaining a mismatch that more rules now address directly.
You don't fix that with a better fee table. You fix it with one source of truth: a configured fee catalog that defines what each fee is, who it applies to and where it has to appear, with every step of the leasing workflow reading from it.
What gets built on the floor
If transparency is the floor, here's what operators should expect on top of it:
- Rules configured by property. The same fee can be optional in one city and mandatory in the next. The change is made once, in one place.
- One Total Monthly Lease Price from listing to lease. Configured charges carry into the disclosure, the application and the lease instead of being re-keyed.
- An audit trail you can pull. A timestamped history of what each renter was shown, what they acknowledged and when. (See Audit Trail)
That's the bar we built NOVY to clear. Our team ran properties before we built software, and we kept hitting the same problem: no single system owned the path from application to signed lease. So we built one governed leasing workflow that does.
The honest version
Here's the part that doesn't usually make it into a booth pitch. Transparent pricing changes the number on the listing, and some operators worry the higher all-in figure will cost them leads.
In my view, a renter who walks away at the real price is often one who would have walked away at lease signing anyway: later, more frustrated, and after your team spent hours with them. Showing the real number early lets your team spend that time on renters who can say yes.
If you're at OPTECH, find me at Startup Booth K6 and tell me where you think I'm wrong. Or catch my fast pitch in the Marketing, Leasing and Resident Engagement session on Monday, November 16, 1:00–2:00 PM, in Boulevard 170, and see what the team has built.