L.A. renters are billed for shared utilities. Some won’t pay until they can see the math behind the charges

Joe Porter toured the squat apartment building in L.A.’s Koreatown five years ago, excited to be leaving his parents’ house in Arkansas. The rent on the studio was cheap — about $1,500 a month — and the leasing agent, he said, told him he’d probably pay only an additional $50 for utilities.

But three years after Porter moved in, his monthly bill for trash, sewer and water had more than doubled, to $182 from $86. He couldn’t figure out why; water rates charged by the city utility had not increased at the same rate. When Porter and his neighbors asked to see the math behind what they owed, the property management sent them a general overview of how the charges are calculated, but did not provide copies of specific bills.

Unlike traditional utility bills, Porter wasn’t being billed by the provider but by a third-party company — Conservice, in this case — that uses what’s called a ratio utility billing system. This means that the landlord does not charge each resident for their individual utility usage but sends them statements based on a formula applied to the building’s total usage.

So Porter asked Conservice for a breakdown of his individual bill. “Can I please see the proof that this is money that I actually owe you and see how you got [to] it?” Porter recalled asking the company. According to an email shared with The Times, a representative directed him back to his property manager.

Amid growing national scrutiny of how companies price what they sell and the services they offer, tenants in L.A. have described mounting frustration as their utility bills have climbed and they struggle to see the math behind what they owe. The Times spoke with renters at six apartment buildings in L.A. whose landlords use a formula to split up shared utilities.

Some renters are now demanding that this kind of billing practice — often handled by outside companies, which add on their own fees — be banned outright. But representatives for landlords say doing so would leave them with few desirable options for recouping the cost of utilities and would hurt conservation efforts.

Splitting the bill

Olivia Wein, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, first heard about ratio utility billing systems 20 years ago. Since then, she said, she’s fielded more and more complaints about the practice from tenants and advocates.

“This practice just kept emerging,” Wein said.

When utilities aren’t included in the monthly rent, landlords have two main options.

Tenant Chris Guillaume, 26, is one of many residents at the Virgil Square Apartments who are refusing to pay utility bills until their property manager shows them the calculations being used.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

If the building doesn’t already have them, submeters can be installed so that tenants receive bills for their individual usage of electricity or water. Or landlords can take master-metered utilities and split them up based on apartment size or number of occupants, as in Porter’s building, a practice called RUBS, short for ratio utility billing system.

It’s hard to say how common it is for tenants to pay utilities through RUBS. Two of the largest organizations that represent landlords, the National Apartment Assn. and the National Multifamily Housing Council, said they don’t track these numbers.

But they used to. Two decades ago, researchers working on behalf of the National Apartment Assn. and city governments surveyed roughly 8,000 properties in the U.S. and found that renters living in 1 out of every 4 apartments were billed using RUBS.

A more recent report provides a picture of how landlords bill for utilities in L.A. In December, the Los Angeles Housing Department recommended that city officials outlaw RUBS in rent-stabilized homes, as West Hollywood and San José have done. The department estimated that 19% of homes subject to rent stabilization had master-metered utilities and were therefore likely to use RUBS; that amounts to roughly 123,000 apartments in the city.

A pedestrian walks past the Virgil Square Apartments, a master-metered building.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

A department spokesperson said they didn’t have an estimate for RUBS usage across all rental units, but there are probably tens of thousands more apartments that use this kind of billing and are not subject to the city’s rent stabilization law.

Wein said it’s common for these kinds of billing systems to show up in older apartment buildings, where individual meters were not installed during construction. In the last decade, states have started mandating individual meters in multifamily buildings; in 2018, California began requiring that water submeters be installed in newly constructed residences with two or more units.

Hanna Yoseph, a hairstylist who runs her own business, lives in a two-bedroom unit in a towering glass building in downtown L.A.

While her $3,400 rent is the same each month, her utility bill, which includes charges for shared utilities including water, wastewater, hot water and HVAC, fluctuates by hundreds of dollars.

In March 2025, Yoseph owed $332.50 for the utilities split and billed to her from a third-party company, Yes Energy Management. Three months later, her bill rose to $417.99. By October of that year, she was being charged $541.

“I don’t know how to budget for it,” Yoseph said.

Yoseph said she called Yes Energy Management and asked to see a copy of the bills that led to her individual charges. She said she was told she needed permission from the property management company.

Tenant Angie Jahja at the Virgil Square Apartments.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

According to emails shared with The Times, Yoseph and the tenants association emailed management multiple times before being told they could set up an in-person meeting to view the bills used to generate their individual charges. But tenants responded saying they wanted digital copies so they could have the time to do their own math; they have not received a response.

Last week, Yoseph said she spoke with a representative from Yes Energy Management who told her she was going to try to get her copies of the master bill calculations. (Attempts by The Times to reach Yes Energy Management for comment were unsuccessful.)

In 2022, attorneys in San Diego sued Conservice, a major third-party utility billing company. In a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of California renters, lawyers alleged that Conservice’s policy was to deny tenants the right to view specific bills or formulas used to calculate their individual charges.

In an email, a representative for Conservice said the company does not have a nondisclosure policy. “Our goal is to provide residents with clear, accessible information so they fully understand how their individual utility charges are calculated,” said Brett Kraus, senior counsel for utility services.

But tenants represented in this lawsuit claimed the company “uniformly” failed to provide exact calculations. Lawyers alleged this practice was not only unfair but violated state law and a tenant’s common law right to review bills they were expected to pay.

In a settlement agreement reached last year, Conservice agreed to provide any California tenant disputing their bill with copies of invoices and formulas used to determine their specific charges. (Porter’s communication with Conservice was in 2023, before the company was subject to the settlement agreement.)

This kind of bill transparency is something landlords and tenants say they agree on.

In December, L.A.’s housing department recommended that city officials adopt rules making it clear that tenants have a right to review master utility bills and create a process for tenants to dispute charges.

“If your customer is paying for it, they should know what they’re paying for,” said Daniel Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles.

Going on strike

Tenants were threatened with eviction for hanging signs outside their balconies calling attention to the utility billing method.

(Virgil Square Tenants’ Assn.)

After Porter’s failed attempts to see copies of the master bills at his apartment in Koreatown, he started talking to neighbors having the same issues. Last summer, roughly four dozen residents of Virgil Square Apartments sent a letter to the owner of the property, Equity Residential, saying that since they could not see the specific calculations used to determine their bills, they would refuse to pay them.

Tenants also said it was unfair to be subject to a billing system that stripped them of control over their own utility costs. “None of us has control over how much water our neighbors use, or whether the pool stays open in the winter when no one uses it,” the letter read.

Tenants have been threatened with eviction for hanging signs outside their balconies calling attention to the utility billing method.

Equity Residential, which owns about 15,000 apartments in the L.A. metro area, did not respond to a list of questions.

Tenants at other buildings across the city said that with little power over what they were being charged for shared utilities, they felt few incentives to conserve — in a state whose water sources are quickly drying up. Collectively, that inclination could lead to bills soaring ever higher.

“If we’re going to be charged for people’s water and they’re not going to pay attention to what they’re doing, I’m going to do laundry more often during the week because you’re already overcharging me,” said Caitlin Moran, a tenant living with her partner in a studio apartment downtown.

But people in the apartment industry say that, unlike charging utilities as part of the monthly rent, RUBS gives tenants some sense of the cost of taking long showers or leaving the lights on.

Fred Sutton, senior vice president of public affairs for the California Apartment Assn., said tenants paying utilities via RUBS have some “skin in the game.”

“In older, master-metered buildings where individual meters may be impractical or cost-prohibitive, RUBS can connect residents more closely to the cost of shared utility use and encourage conservation,” he said.

In marketing videos, Conservice promises to increase landlords’ profits while also lowering utility costs. In emails, Marc Treitler, Conservice’s general counsel and president of sustainability, said the company helps all parties save on utilities by auditing the bills it receives directly from providers before passing charges on to renters.

“We have found tens of millions of dollars in overcharges,” he said. “Correcting these bills usually lowers the charges for the tenants.”

In 1999, researchers looked at 32 multifamily properties across Texas, Florida and California, in an attempt to determine the effects of different billing methods on water conservation. They found that renters at submetered properties, where tenants were charged individually for their water usage, used an average of 39% fewer gallons per year than those living in apartments where water was included in the monthly rent.

Renters billed via RUBS used 20% less water.

A 2004 study also found that submetering led renters to conserve more water. But this time researchers found no statistically significant difference between the amount of water used when a utility payment was included in a tenant’s monthly rent and when they were charged using RUBS.

Peter Mayer, a Colorado-based water use consultant and one of the lead researchers on the 2004 study, said RUBS may in fact have an anti-conservation effect.

“It becomes in your own economic self-interest to use as much water as you can,” he said. “You want to be the highest water user in that building because then you have maximized your investment.”

As for Porter, who is refusing to pay his RUBS bills in Koreatown, he said he’s been setting aside the money owed so he’s ready to pay when he can see exactly how these bills are calculated.

“I’m willing to pay it if someone will show me it’s legitimate,” he said.

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.