by Graham Dyer A renter filters for apartments under $1,700, finds one at $1,650, tours it on a Saturday and loves it. On Tuesday the application arrives.
| Line | When the renter sees it | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Rent | Saturday, in the listing | $1,650 |
| Valet trash | Tuesday, on the application | $45 |
| Pest control | Tuesday, on the application | $25 |
| Package lockers | Tuesday, on the application | $30 |
| Amenity fee | Tuesday, on the application | $60 |
| Mandatory parking | Tuesday, on the application | $80 |
| What the apartment costs | Tuesday | $1,890 |
Nothing about the apartment changed between Saturday and Tuesday except the number, which rose by $240.
What a teaser rent is
We call the first number the teaser rent. Like the two-tab problem, it has become the default way to market an apartment. Every fee is disclosed eventually. By then the search, the shortlist and the tour have all happened against a price that does not exist on any lease.
Why the website drifts from the lease
The base rent lives in the PMS, where revenue management adjusts it daily. The fees live somewhere else: in the lease template, in an ancillary-services agreement, in a spreadsheet the regional manager keeps. The website was built to show the number the PMS publishes, because that was the number a website could reach. Each listing channel then recomputes ‘the price’ in its own way, and the same unit ends up wearing three different numbers in three places.
Renters compare screenshots in group chats and read the application line by line. And increasingly, as we wrote in our piece on AI search, they ask an assistant to do the math for them.
The cost of the discrepancy
Brent Steiner, Engrain’s founder and CEO, said: ‘Pricing discrepancies are one of the biggest trust breakers in the renter journey.’ Trust breaks at a particular moment, when a renter learns that the number they planned around was never the one they would be asked to sign.
The business cost of that moment is easy to underestimate because it is spread across the funnel. A prospect who walks away at application has already consumed a tour, a follow-up and an hour of leasing-agent time. Someone who signs anyway starts the lease trusting you a little less, and that shows up again at renewal.
State total-price laws and the FTC rulemaking
In December 2025 Greystar agreed to pay $24 million to settle a case brought by the FTC and the State of Colorado over advertised prices that excluded mandatory monthly fees, and committed to displaying total monthly leasing prices clearly and conspicuously (as summarized in Arnold & Porter’s February 2026 advisory; the settlement is a resolution, not a finding of wrongdoing). In March 2026 the FTC opened a rulemaking on unfair or deceptive rental housing fee practices, asking, among other things, whether advertising rent that fails to include all mandatory fees should be prohibited outright.
Several states require the advertised rent itself to include mandatory fees, and others have taken the disclosure route:
| State | In effect from | What it requires |
|---|---|---|
| Minnesota | January 2024 | Mandatory fees included in the advertised rent |
| California | July 2024 | The Honest Pricing Law bars hidden mandatory fees in most consumer transactions, though its reach into long-term residential leases is still contested |
| New Mexico | June 2025 | All costs of the rental, itemized fees included, disclosed in the published listing |
| Virginia | July 2025 | Fees itemized before or at the lease |
| Massachusetts | September 2025 | Mandatory fees included in the advertised rent |
| Nevada | October 2025 | Mandatory fees included in the advertised rent |
| Connecticut | October 2025 | Mandatory fees included in the advertised rent |
| Colorado | January 2026 | Mandatory fees included in the advertised rent |
| Oregon | January 2026 | Fees itemized before or at the lease |
| Illinois | January 2027 | Mandatory fees included in any advertised price, and every recurring fee listed on the first page of the lease |
The details differ by state and this is not legal advice, but every one of these laws moves the same way, toward a first price a renter could sign. If you operate across several states, our 2026 compliance guide has a state-by-state checker and covers the two compliance fronts operators most often overlook, cookie consent and accessibility.
How AI assistants read your price
When a renter asks ChatGPT or Perplexity what an apartment costs per month, the assistant assembles its answer from whatever your website publishes. If your site shows $1,650 and your neighbor across the street publishes $1,890 all-in, the comparison the AI hands back is wrong in your favor exactly once, and then the renter finds out at application, with your name attached to the disappointment.
The AI-visibility checklist makes the case for facts a model can read, and the price on the page is one of them. Because WP FloorMap builds the price a visitor reads and the price in the structured data underneath it from one calculation, an assistant reading the markup quotes what the visitor was shown.
Where the all-in number comes from
Until recently no single system owned the fee-inclusive number itself. Engrain, whose SightMap the site’s map runs on, closed that gap in two steps. In January 2025 it shipped fee transparency in SightMap®. Renters can toggle between base rent and the full monthly cost, and Engrain’s rent calculator, which lives in their product, builds the total from lease term, move-in date, number of applicants, pets and rentable items. In September 2025 it launched an All-In Unit Pricing API endpoint that publishes one fee-inclusive monthly number per unit, so every channel drawing from SightMap can show the same price. The stated goal is consistent all-in pricing, everywhere renters look, and the system publishing that number is the same one that already knows which units are available this afternoon.
WP FloorMap renders it. All-in Pricing is a per-property switch, off until you turn it on, and switching it on puts the fee-inclusive total on floor plans, in search, in the unit modals and in the structured data search engines and assistants read. Where a property has configured all-in numbers in Engrain, the page prints those exact per-unit figures. The map shows the same ones.
Where it has not, WP FloorMap does the arithmetic itself, folding every recurring charge marked required into the advertised rent, whether you entered it in WordPress or it arrived from your SightMap expenses. Weekly, quarterly and annual charges are prorated to a month, and a charge set as a share of rent is applied against the unit’s own rent. That fallback is what makes the toggle usable now, without waiting on a data project upstream. The unit modal’s lease-term selector then shows how the total moves with the term.
Rents and availability arrive from SightMap in real time, so nobody has to retype the website on a Tuesday morning to match the PMS. Point the fee source at SightMap and the fees refresh with them. Leave it on the manual table and that table is kept by hand.
The worry about scaring renters off
Operators worry that putting the all-in number first will scare renters away, and it will scare some of them. The rest arrive at the tour having already accepted the price the lease will name.
The demo sites show both sides of the switch: the base rent a renter compares and the figure the lease will say.
