Landlords and Broker Fees

Effective August 1, 2025, Governor Healey signed a law that states that whoever hires the broker to rent an apartment, pays for the broker. This is a pretty simple rule: if the landlord hires a broker to market an apartment to find a tenant, then the landlord has to pay the broker. The landlord can no longer pass that fee onto the tenant to pay.

We received a call this week from one of our landlord clients explaining that her tenant was breaking the lease and she now had to re-rent the property. She wanted to know who was responsible for the broker fee to re-rent the property? This is a two-part question. First, pursuant to the new statute, the landlord has to pay a broker if she chooses to hire a broker. The new tenant is not responsible for that fee. However, the landlord may be able to seek payment from the current tenant – the one breaking the lease.

To determine the answer to whether the landlord can re-coup the funds from the tenant breaking the lease, one has to go to the lease. If the lease provides that the tenant must reimburse or indemnify the landlord when the tenant moves out of the property prior to the end of the lease term or for abandoning the apartment, then the landlord can seek payment from the current tenant. If there is no provision that allows the landlord to seek these costs from the tenant breaking the lease, then the landlord would have to try to argue that the broker’s fee constituted damages recoverable under common law.
Given this substantial change in the law, landlords should review their existing leases, as well as their model lease and consider making changes to make clear that if a tenant breaches a lease, or wants to terminate a lease early that they will have to pay the broker fee.