Cody Recker and Jessica Perez loved their Boyle Heights rental — warts and all. Lots of warts.
The plumbing broke, spraying raw sewage puddles on the floor. The floor and foundation were falling apart, inviting hordes of mice and fleas. The basement flooded 14 times, and there so many leaks in the attic that mushrooms sprouted through a bedroom ceiling.
They made these allegations in a lawsuit against their landlord, Invitation Homes. Over the course of the decade-long tenancy, the pair said they pleaded with the company to fix the litany of problems. But after years of bare-minimum patch jobs done by what they contend were unlicensed contractors, the home was verging on uninhabitable.
In 2023, Invitation Homes acknowledged the damage and urged them to move out, claiming repairs were necessary, Recker said. At the time, L.A. allowed evictions for substantial remodels.
But the house was never fixed. When the couple moved out last March, the home was listed for sale the same month.
“We were being betrayed left and right,” Recker said.
Invitation Homes and its attorney in the lawsuit declined to comment for this article. They have not yet responded to the allegations in the lawsuit.
The couple’s complaint is one of thousands against Invitation Homes, the nation’s largest single-family landlord. Just last year, the Dallas-based property management company — which owns or manages more than 100,000 homes in the U.S. and more than 11,000 in California alone — agreed to pay $3.7 million to settle a price-gouging case and $48 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission investigation into alleged undisclosed junk fees, withheld security deposits and illegal evictions.
“It’s really horrifying how Invitation Homes treated Recker and Perez,” said Joseph Tobener, a tenants rights attorney representing the couple in the lawsuit. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years and the conditions are as bad as I’ve seen.”
Tobener said the situation is a direct result of the corporatization of housing, where large companies and investors buy up as much single-family housing stock as possible in attempts to rent out the homes.
After the 2008 housing crash, companies such as Blackstone Inc., which created Invitation Homes in 2012, began buying up foreclosed single-family homes and converting them into rentals. The situation grew to new extremes during the pandemic, when the hot housing market became a feeding frenzy for investors; in the second quarter of 2021 alone, the number of residential properties bought by companies hit an all-time high of 67,943, according to Redfin.
“These companies are doing whatever it takes to report high earnings to their investors” at the expense of their tenants, Tobener said.
Recker and Perez’s lawsuit, which is set to be heard by a jury in June 2026, hurls a litany of accusations at the corporate landlord including negligence, wrongful eviction, tenant harassment, breach of contract and unfair business practices.
When Recker first moved into the home in 2014, everything looked great. Built in 1908, it was aging but enormous with six bedrooms and three bathrooms across two stories and 2,312 square feet.
When Perez moved in with Recker in 2020, the house was still habitable, but flooding was becoming an issue. Every time it rained, the walls, floors and carpet would get drenched, creating a moldy stink, according to the lawsuit. Recker used a Shop-Vac to remove an average of 35 gallons of water from the basement with each storm.
“We’d complain and put in work orders, but they’d get deleted in the tenant portal or pushed back,” he said, echoing claims in the lawsuit.
Over the next few years, Recker and Perez noticed signs that the house was shifting, according to the lawsuit: the kitchen floor was sinking, the counter tops were separating from the backsplash, and the garage foundation was cracking.
The swamp-like conditions brought swamp-like problems. Fleas infested the home, biting them in their sleep, and rain leaked through the shingles into the attic, sprouting a cluster of mushrooms, the lawsuit said.
After years of deterioration, Invitation Homes sent an engineer to examine the property in October 2023. Two months later, they got a call from the company.
“This house is unsafe, so we need you guys to move out ASAP. The sooner the better,” an agent for the company said, according to the lawsuit.
When they asked if they could move back in after repairs were made, the agent said no, since the process could take six months or a year.
Recker and Perez weren’t sure what to do. They were happy with their $3,362 rent, and the house was big enough to hold all the equipment required for their careers in the film industry. But by then, the place was practically falling apart.
For the next three months, the company called them every few days urging them to leave, the lawsuit said.
“Every other day I’d get a text or a call saying, ‘We need you guys out now,’ ” Recker said.
In that time, Invitation Homes’ story allegedly changed. During a walkthrough of the home, an agent from the company said, “Honestly, I have a feeling they’re going to sell it. There’s no way they are going to repair this,” according to the lawsuit.
Tobener said Invitation Homes could have legally evicted the couple by filing to permanently remove the rental from the market, but it would have hurt the resale value, since those restrictions would have passed on to the new owner. So instead, the company kept urging them to leave under the premise of renovations, according to the suit.
On March 12, 2024, after months, the couple finally left. By March 31, it hit the market for $850,000 and sold two months later for $792,000.
“That was the cherry on top,” Perez said. “I will never rent from them again.”
Tobener said the property is subject to the California Tenant Protection Act and L.A.’s Just Cause ordinance, which limits the reasons that landlords can evict tenants. At the time, substantial remodels were a just cause for eviction, but the house was never remodeled.
“Instead of repairing anything, they listed it right away,” Tobener said. “That’s where they made their biggest mistake.”
The L.A. City Council has since brought a stop to “renovictions,” voting in March to temporarily ban renovation-based evictions while the city explores permanent legislation to help renters keep their tenancies during remodels.
Recker and Perez have since moved to a two-bedroom home in Pasadena. It’s cramped compared to their place in Boyle Heights, but they’re happy with their new landlord, an elderly man who lives in the front house and always asks if there’s anything that needs to be fixed.
