Help Us Fight for Tenants' Rights in MA

THE STORY:

We currently owe over $2000 to our property management company for electricity we’re still not even entirely sure we used.

Since pretty much day 1 of living in this building, we’ve had problem after problem with the property management team. We were told, in the welcome packet we received upon moving in (in December 2022), that we needed to put the electrical service into our names (as up until til that point, the unit had been vacant, so the service was in the name of the management company). After a few weeks of living in the new apartment, we were still making our best attempts to do just that…to no avail. We didn’t receive the prompt help or attention that we needed, as evidenced in the screenshot below (which Barbara sent to Connie, the real estate broker who gave us the tour of the apartment, when she reached out to check in).

January 18th rolls around. Still, no update or any communication attempt at all from management, when we’ve expressed numerous times that we’re having difficulty putting the account in our name.

Fast forward to mid-February. We STILL haven’t heard back from the property manager, and therefore still haven’t been able to put the account in our name. FINALLY, we get this:

Wait, stop right there, hold up. After months of waiting for some assistance with something that should’ve gotten taken care of at the very beginning, something that was literally preventing us from paying the bill on our own, now all of a sudden it’s “oh hey yeah so instead of helping you do that thing like you asked, we just did it for you & now here’s what you owe us. You’re welcome.”

Here are the attached bills:

It is important to note:

⁃ The unit is roughly 700sqft.

⁃ Not once, not a single time during that 2-month period between moving in and receiving that email with the 2 bills, did we turn either of our 2 living room thermostats past 70. In fact, the majority of the time we had them set below 60. We could still feel warm air coming from our kitchen baseboards, though, which was our first inclination that our heating system may not be working properly. We’ve tried explaining this to management.

⁃ My bedroom, at the time we received the 2 backdated bills, did not even have working heat. So, it was actually only really XXX square feet of living space using electric heating.

So naturally, of course, between the fact that the thermostat settings did not seem to match the level of heat we were getting, and the fact that these bills are absolutely asinine for 2 people living in a 700sqft apartment, we’re thinking to ourselves, nah, son, something’s gotta be wrong here.

Mind you, we weren’t able to actually get the service transferred into our name until the first week of March. So, now, when we log into our online tenant portal, we’re seeing a balance of $1039 due in addition to our regular monthly rent balance. The combined total of the 2 electric bills the management company had so kindly & conveniently paid for us (y’know, instead of just helping us figure out how to do it ourselves).

We were obviously taken aback seeing this enormous balance on our ledger; we paid what we could afford at that time (about half of the total), more out of panic than anything, but we were still suspicious & confused as to how the bills could’ve been that high when we weren’t even using much heat (and especially since one bedroom didn’t even have working heat, which, by the way, is illegal!). Like I mentioned earlier, we had already suspected that there may be something wrong with our unit’s heating system in general based on the fact that hot air was coming out of our kitchen radiator even though the thermostat was turned all the way down to 60, so surely we had a right to dispute or at least get some clarification on this huge amount we were being asked to pay…right?

Over the next few months, with this mindset, we tried reaching out to management numerous times to express our concerns; we were told by our property manager, Cameron, that he could help us interpret the two outstanding national grid bills and hopefully figure out why the charges were so high, so we tried our best to set up a meeting with him. I’d explained once over the phone that we weren't even sure given the thermostat issue that we even had proper control of the heat, and he didn't take that seriously.

I could go on, but anyway, as you can probably conclude, it's now March 2024 and the issue has clearly still not been resolved. The heat *still* doesn't seem to be working properly, as my bedroom thermostat is currently set to 70 and the insides of the baseboards are ice cold, while our living room thermostat is set at 60 and is hot to the touch. More recently, I called the management office to see if there was any way we could be at least partially reimbursed for our December 2023 - January 2024 bill (a whopping $584 - which, thankfully, the electric company gave us an extension on until March 15th, but we simply cannot afford that & likely will still not be able to afford it when the 15th does come, so our anxiety about this bill is mounting) since the heat not working correctly is *their* responsibility, not ours. They were not only unwilling to accommodate or even discuss this request; they also pretended they had no idea our heating system wasn't working despite the YEAR-LONG back & forth about it.

We were really hoping it wouldn't come to this, but we need some outside help.