Apartment Hunting - Water/Sewer Budget

Submitted by TheOnlyThingAvailabl t3_11l2rja in lakewood

Fiance and I are looking for a new apartment and there’s a lot more variation in what utilities are covered at individual properties than I’ve noticed in the past. I’ve always rented from places that cover things like water, sewer, and trash. Can anyone share an average cost of these that we should budget for when comparing rent rates? We’re looking mostly at doubles in Lakewood proper, so I imagine variations depend more on usage than specific addresses.

Thanks in advance!

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LakeEffectSnow t1_jbbhzkm wrote

Landlords in Lakewood are not allowed to make tenants charge for water/sewer in multi-tenant properties unless every unit has an individual water meter (this is almost never true). It is totally fine for them to make you pay for sewer/water in single family homes.

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PjPantsPls t1_jbbq1at wrote

Mine has individual water meters, but decided to tally up everyone's water usage in my building and divide it by units. I was fucking pissed. Now it's a flat rate, after it being included in my lease for over 5 years that it was included.

They started sending water bills after years and so many people left. So many.

21 units 1 water tank. Have to sometimes run water for 5 minutes in sink before it's hot. It takes so long for hot water to come out, I literally just boil cold water faster when I cook.

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LakeEffectSnow t1_jbc0z04 wrote

Talk to the city. That may be able to put some pressure on the LL.

Fun fact! by the way - nobody usually stays long enough for this to matter, but state law says LL is supposed to pay you back statutory interest (currently 5%) on your security deposit. If they haven't done that, they owe you that interest no matter what happens with your security deposit. So example if your deposit was $1,000 and you've been there 5 years, they currently owe you ~$275.

You may want to share this information with the rest of the units in the building.

It's ORC 5321.16 (A).

https://law.justia.com/codes/ohio/2011/title53/chapter5321/section5321-16/

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peppermint_snowwolf t1_jbe45v0 wrote

That’s only if the deposit is over the amount of your (usually monthly) rent.

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LakeEffectSnow t1_jbem423 wrote

That wasn't my lawyer's reading of the statute. She said that it was written at a time when some rents may have been less than $50, and therefore that clause should be read as your security deposit must be at least $50 to apply.

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peppermint_snowwolf t1_jbemain wrote

Interesting. My father was a landlord for 20+ years and his attorney interpreted it as I stated (which follows the actual wording)

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LakeEffectSnow t1_jben2g8 wrote

Well my lawyer used to practice at Legal Aid specializing in landlord/tenant law and has won cases with the argument I made.

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peppermint_snowwolf t1_jbend5k wrote

Ok well you win but I vehemently disagree and in all my own years as a landlord I never paid interest on security deposits. Half the time they were lucky to get any deposits back at all because some people don’t have any respect.

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LakeEffectSnow t1_jbeuj96 wrote

Well probably because it rarely comes up. Most landlords and tenants are like you, and ignore/are ignorant of that statute. Most of the time the money owed the tenant isn't enough for it to be worth suing your LL over. The specific circumstances of below don't happen very often:

- tenant leasing for long enough term for interest to compound enough to be worth the time to recover.

- tenant simultaneously taking care of unit properly the whole time

- a LL engaging in behaviors that make said long-term tenant angry enough to want to recover these funds.

So in our case, we used ours deposit interest as leverage over the LL to ensure he returned our full security deposit fairly without having to sue - he tried to keep the full security deposit to repaint an entire unit after 8 years of continuous tenancy with zero updates.

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peppermint_snowwolf t1_jbex7wr wrote

My father paid interest on the difference over the monthly amount. As specifically stated in what you referenced. But thank you for calling me ignorant.

I’m not actually surprised that, even though the rule seems to clearly state the opposite of what you said, that courts may find in favor of the tenant, because in my experience, the tenant had far more rights than the landlord. And my tenants had no compunction with doing thousands of dollars of damage to my house and then moving out. In fact, I stopped renting, because of so many bad experiences with tenants. The money just isn’t worth it.

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TheOnlyThingAvailabl OP t1_jbcb1eo wrote

Does this apply to places that have a water/sewer fee added on to the rent? Example: a two unit house, vacant unit is $1450/mo and water/sewer trash is $75/mo for first tenant and $25 for each additional tenant.

Making the unit effectively $1550/mo for two adults

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HephaestusHarper t1_jbaeq9e wrote

In my experience renting here, water is generally covered by the landlord, especially in multi-family housing.

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John-Donne t1_jbaf822 wrote

Sewer will be double your water. But sewer will be less for an apartment than for a house, because the sewer commission has an aerial measurement of your roof and driveway that it uses to charge you extra for "runoff." I last paid $24 for water and $50 for sewer for my house. I have paid sewer as high as $75 during rainy months.

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