Without warning, Le’Toya Garland’s landlord tripled the common area maintenance fees she owed on her hip-hop dance studio in Aurora.
In June 2024, the $300 to $500 a month she had paid throughout her lease jumped to $1,693.
And while she managed to scrape together the funds to cover her new monthly tab — including the $2,900 she already owed in monthly rent — she couldn’t afford what came next: a $9,000 bill for back-charges she’d never been told she had to pay.
“It just showed up in our account,” said Garland, who co-owns the School of Breaking. “It was the first time ever that we’ve gotten a bill like that, and it was a very large amount of money for a small business to have to come up with in a short period of time.
“And,” she added, “there was no clear explanation of what the fees were for.”
Common area maintenance fees, or CAM fees, long a staple of commercial real estate leases, have become a focus of consumer protection efforts at the Colorado Capitol, as legislative Democrats look to crack down on hidden charges they view as anti-competitive and predatory.
Under a new law passed earlier this year, residential landlords will be banned from charging CAM fees starting Jan. 1, 2026, while commercial property owners will be subject to new transparency rules aimed at helping small business owners like Garland understand what they owe — and why.
But while advocates say the new law should help, it remains to be seen whether it goes far enough to address what consumer protection experts say is the fundamental challenge faced by renters and small business tenants alike: an imbalance of power and knowledge.
“We would not have signed the lease if we had known that this would have been part of our experience,” Garland said.
What are CAM fees?
Common area maintenance fees are just that: fees to cover the cost of maintaining common areas shared by tenants of a property.
Each tenant is charged a share of what the landlord spends to maintain shared spaces, such as a lobby or a swimming pool. And they’re typically split based on how much square footage each tenant occupies.
But unlike rent, which is spelled out in a fixed dollar amount in every lease, CAM fees can vary wildly from month to month or year to year. And most leases don’t put a limit on what a landlord can charge. Instead, the fees are tied to whatever the landlord spends to maintain shared spaces — no matter how much those costs go up or down over the course of a lease.
“In commercial real estate, they’re very, very, very prevalent, especially if you look at the two big categories, which is office and retail,” said Vivek Sah, a real estate professor at the University of Denver. “Especially indoor malls: there’s a lot of that common area that has to be maintained, whether it’s summer for air conditioning, or in winters for heating, those are costs that are borne by the tenants.”
The School of Breaking is in an industrial park with no shared lobby or communal space — stretching the definition of what many people would think of as a “common area.” Garland’s lease, a copy of which was shared with The Colorado Sun, includes more than a dozen allowable expenses, including parking lot and sidewalk repairs, snow removal, utilities and property taxes.
In recent years, tenant groups have seen CAM fees spread to residential leases, as corporate landlords look to pass on the costs of maintaining apartment lobbies and community amenities. These often change seasonally, as swimming pools open and close, heating and cooling costs rise and fall, and snow removal needs fluctuate with the weather.
But sometimes, there’s no clear pattern — at least not one discernible to a tenant, who only sees a dollar amount on their bill with no explanation. Zach Neumann, co-founder of the Community Economic Defense Project, which represents tenants in eviction cases, said he’s seen residential CAM fees that jumped from about $20 a month to nearly $200 with no warning.
On the commercial side, CAM fees don’t necessarily change month to month — instead, leases have what’s known as a reconciliation clause. If a landlord spent more than expected on maintenance, they can send their tenant a bill at the end of the year like the one Garland received.
Commercial real estate groups say CAM fees can make for a more efficient market, with benefits for both sides.
“Whoever’s bearing a cost risk economically has to have some padding, some contingency, because a landlord’s not going to want to take a loss because the gas bill was higher (than expected),” said Tyler Carlson, who chairs the Public Policy Committee for NAIOP Colorado, a commercial real estate association. “They’ve got to factor that into the rent in a more expensive way.”
Neumann says CAM fees may make sense in a commercial setting — when both sides go into a transaction with eyes wide open.
“In the commercial world, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing,” Neumann said. “Sophisticated parties represented by counsel with a lot of money can reach agreements that work for them.”
But for tenants living paycheck to paycheck, a variable fee that rises without warning can be the difference between affording their monthly rent and eviction.
An uneven playing field
Earlier this year, Neumann’s group partnered with the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research group, to study the prevalence of fees in tenant ledgers. They found that CAM and other mandatory fees charged by Colorado’s three largest landlords, Greystar, AMC and FourStar Realty, added 10% to 30% to the listed monthly rent price.
“I think they’re a deeply deceptive practice,” Neumann said. “They can list lower rents and get people to sign leases, and then they’re surprised by these big CAM fees that functionally add to rent and weren’t included in the sticker price. They’re buried in the lease — if they’re there at all.”
Earlier this year, the legislature’s Democratic majority agreed, banning CAM fees in residential leases through House Bill 1090. The measure also requires businesses of all kinds to advertise the full cost of a service up-front, fees included. Republicans opposed the measure, arguing that new regulations would drive up costs for businesses and consumers alike.
The legislation doesn’t prohibit CAM fees in commercial leases, but community advocates hope it will lead to more transparency.
“A lot of businesses, they don’t know what they’re paying for,” said Helen Tekle, business campaign manager at the East Colfax Community Collective. “We’re not saying don’t pay your CAM fee. We’re just saying, we need more transparency so our small businesses know how to budget correctly.”
Tekle and other small business advocates want the legislature to go further in protecting mom and pops. Hunter Nelson, Colorado’s outreach director for the Small Business Majority advocacy network, says they’re working with lawmakers to introduce legislation next year to require transparency for other costs that landlords pass on to tenants, including insurance and property taxes.
Such disclosures are commonly spelled out in so-called “triple net” commercial leases — but small businesses may not know to insist that those provisions be included.
“All the small business owners we work with are microbusinesses or self-employed,” Nelson said. “They have a lot more in common with consumers than large businesses.”
That’s why Sah, who leads the Franklin L. Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management, always recommends that business owners consult a lawyer before they sign a lease.
Uneven power dynamics, he said, commonly skew contract terms in favor of larger firms. In malls, for instance, anchor tenants like grocery stores and big box retailers usually negotiate deals to reduce their CAM fees, leaving smaller businesses to bear more of the costs.
Some leases have accounting clauses allowing commercial tenants to audit whether their CAM fees were spent on allowable expenses. But tenants often have to insist that they’re included in the lease. When they don’t, it can make it that much harder to fight fraudulent charges in court, according to the Business Torts Journal.
“The recourse is always in the lease,” Sah said. “The lease is the bible, even in litigation, even if it goes to court. You have to be very careful, especially on the commercial side, reading these leases, because they tend to be complex.”
Garland’s lease doesn’t say whether she has a right to inspect the CAM charges.
Attempts by The Sun to contact the property’s owner, California-based Preferred Properties LLC, were unsuccessful. But Garland said the landlord’s explanation — that her CAM fees should have gone up when she expanded into a neighboring unit six years earlier — shouldn’t have added up to such a large increase.
“We’re trying to figure out what kinds of action can we take?” she said. “Do we have any rights in relation to this?
“We don’t know that at all.”
What happens next?
When the new law takes effect in January, the bill’s sponsors say renters should see immediate relief from CAM fees, which residential landlords will no longer be allowed to charge.
But it could take longer to see how the market adjusts to the new playing field.
The Colorado Apartment Association didn’t oppose the bill, and commercial real estate groups said it shouldn’t change much for them or their clients. Carlson, a managing principal at Evergreen Devco, said the transparency that small businesses are seeking is already standard practice at his firm.
“Every business we sign, they’re all sophisticated: they’ve got attorneys, they’ve got accountants,” Carlson said. “I’ve never seen a lease that doesn’t allow an audit, that doesn’t require full transparency.”
On the residential side, he said base rents are likely to go up when community area maintenance costs can no longer be broken out as a separate line item.
“It’s not the end of the world that this law changed, but it will definitely impact rent, because the utility costs are not going to go away,” Carlson said.
Consumer advocates concede that more maintenance costs may get passed through to the base rent. But eventually, they expect overall prices to go down in a more transparent market. Landlords that charge more fees will have to compete more openly with the prices of those who don’t.
Garland, meanwhile, told The Sun earlier this year she plans to move when her lease is up in January.
“This doesn’t help us to be stable financially when these kinds of fees are subject to change without any notice,” Garland said. “If we can avoid it, we don’t want to put ourselves in that situation again.”