After a Loveland woman died, her landlord charged $5,000 for breaking the lease. A new bill aims to outlaw such fees.

Carlos Hernandez was on the way to a funeral home last year, making arrangements to bury his mother, when he received an “outrageous” phone call.

The 55-and-older community where she had lived was demanding $5,000 in early lease termination fees for her apartment.

It had been less than 24 hours since Hernandez discovered his mom, Leticia Farrer, 75, had died in her sleep when the company, Avenida at Centerra, called to ask if he had looked through the lease. It stipulated that even the death of the tenant would not excuse breaking the term of the lease.

“How outrageous it is — and how low it is, when a family is down at their lowest — to beat them up a little bit more,” Hernandez, of Johnstown, said in a recent interview. “Obviously, no one plans on dying, and that should not be a reason for charging an early termination fee for the lease.”

He hopes to be one of the last Coloradans to face such a problem.

After Hernandez blasted out his story on social media, it caught the attention of state Rep. Ron Weinberg. Weinberg, a Loveland Republican, introduced House Bill 1108 this legislative session. If passed, it would specify that residential rental agreements couldn’t require any penalties for an early lease termination due to the tenant’s death.

The bill cleared its first committee hearing on Wednesday night in a bipartisan 11-2 vote.

Weinberg said he was “disgusted” when he first heard Hernandez’s story. He recoiled, he said, at the idea of having to work through the grief of a parent’s death, attend to their estate and then get hit by a “bloated bill.”

“I’m all for free markets and capitalism, but there’s right and wrong at the end of the day,” Weinberg said.

Greystar, the international rental company that owns Avenida, did not respond to a request for comment.

The company has also been sued by a former Colorado tenant over alleged “junk fees” and by state and federal regulators for allegedly colluding to keep rent prices high through the use of an algorithm and allegedly misleading tenants about the cost of rent at its properties.

Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat and a housing attorney, is co-sponsoring the bill with Weinberg. He said he had a client who was renting die earlier this year, and the landlord tried to collect rent through the person’s siblings.

Mabrey and Weinberg won the support of the Colorado Apartment Association, which wanted clarity that apartment owners would not need to pursue eviction to retake possession of the unit.

Rep. Dan Woog, a Frederick Republican and a property manager, was one of the two votes against the measure last week. He said he worried the measure would take flexibility away from property owners and potentially leave otherwise leased units vacant for months at a time, though he called the aims of the bill good overall.

“Sometimes it’s holidays (or) there’s issues just getting properties ready,” Woog said before the vote. “I just like the aspect that I, as a good actor, a good property manager, can work with the family — let them know I’m doing everything I can to get someone in there — so they don’t have to pay rent.”

Hernandez said the fees his mother’s landlord wanted to charge were eventually waived, though he felt it was more about “saving face,” following a series of media reports by 9News and CBS News Colorado, than doing the right thing. In the interview with The Denver Post, he wondered how many other people faced similar situations but didn’t make a public fight about the charges.

“It didn’t make me feel any better about them as a company or as humans, and also it wasn’t satisfying — because they’re still free to do this to other people, legally,” Hernandez said.

By preventing other people from going through the experience, he said, “that’s where the real satisfaction will come in.”

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