Seattle banned pet rent. Also package fees. Amenity fees. Roommate-swap fees. And the fee for paying rent by ACH. The council voted 8-0. Nineteen states have some form of fee transparency law. Only four require a true all-in price. All of them ask the same question: did you disclose the charge? Seattle asks whether the charge is allowed at all. The ordinance lists every fee a landlord may collect. Late fees, deposits, screening, pet damage deposit, utilities, key replacement capped at $50, lockout, NSF capped at $31, damage repair, lease default. Anything outside that list is illegal "regardless of the name or description of the fee." Optional services survive with written opt-in, free opt-out anytime, and no markup where a third party provides the service. Bundled packages have to be offered piece by piece. Folding the lost income back into rent doesn't work here either. HB 1217 caps annual increases at 7% plus CPI or 10%, whichever is less, and it counts rent and fees together. Commerce published 10% for 2027. Pet rent of $50 on a $2,000 unit burns a quarter of your allowance just to get back to flat. You can reset on turnover. On a renewal you are picking one or the other. The ordinance leans on a StubHub field experiment by Blake, Moshary, Sweeney and Tadelis. Showing fees upfront cut both the volume and the quality of what people bought. Tickets are not apartments. The mechanic still travels. Post $1,410 all-in while the building down the block posts $1,299 with a stack of surprises at signing, and you lose the lead. Same building, same real cost, quieter phone. Owners who price straight have been eating that for years. The rule levels the advertising field and tilts the compliance field. Greystar built its disclosure systems under an FTC consent order after paying $24 million. A 40-unit owner in Ballard now needs three years of retained records, an annual two-page disclosure, monthly statements on variable fees, and exposure to double damages, 12% interest and tenant attorney fees over a paperwork miss. Lose the records and you are presumed in violation for every tenant you can't document, rebuttable only by clear and convincing evidence. There is a cure: repay everyone plus double within 30 days and notify the city. Once every 24 months. So it rewards the honest owner with systems and squeezes the honest owner with a filing cabinet. This isn't staying in Seattle. The FTC opened rental fee rulemaking on March 13. San Diego city and county are drafting bans on pest control, valet trash and pet fees. Effective July 1, 2027. Every new lease, every renewal. Pull your other income line. How much of it survives a rule built like this one? And what would you charge if the building across the street couldn't hide its number either? https://lnkd.in/e9x45K3U