Above: Steffen Amun Ra addressed reporters during a briefing on the rent control ballot question held on May 14 at the State House. Looking on are Doug Quattrochi, Amir Shahsvari and Jasmine Naylor.
Yawu Miller photo
For Amir Shahsavari, renting out apartments has been a family business starting with his mother, who began purchasing properties after immigrating to the United States. As Shahsavari describes it, his mother treated tenants with care and never raised rents.
“I’ve carried that over,” he said, speaking last Thursday to a gathering of rent control opponents at the State House. “I care about my renters deeply. And we know that prices are going up, rents are going up, operating costs are going up for landlords, but you can’t put a price on those relationships.”
Shahsavari, who owns five units and is president of the Small Property Owners Association (SPOA), is a member of a team spearheading opposition to a ballot referendum that would impose statewide rent control on Massachusetts. He and other small property owners went to Beacon Hill to outline the case for opposition to the ballot question, which has consistently polled with more than 60 percent of likely voters in favor.
The lineup of speakers at the Housing for Massachusetts press event demonstrated the campaign’s likely messaging strategy: Deploy smaller multi-building owners to drive home the message that they care about their tenants and would not raise rents unless necessary.
“The tenants that I have right now, they’ve been in my property in Mattapan since 2017,” said landlord Steffen Amun Ra, a military veteran and board member at MassLandlords. “I just raised them 4 percent a year, but I also don’t think it’s fair that I go to foreign lands to go and fight for the ability to have something and then somebody come and tell me what I can and can’t charge and you don’t do that with anything else.”
The ballot question would not affect all landlords. Owner-occupant landlords — those living in properties with 4 or fewer rental units — would be exempted from rent control. Nearly half of the rental units in the state are in 2-4 unit buildings, according to the state’s Mass.gov website.
Groups like SPOA and Mass Landlords Inc. represent many owners of multiple rental properties, many of whom derive much of their income from rental payments. The 2,600 members of MassLandlords Inc. together own more than 72,000 rental units, according to the group’s founder and president, Douch Quattrochi.
While small property owners spoke during the briefing last week, the funders of Housing for Massachusetts political action committee that put together the event did not. Top donors to the PAC are umbrella organizations for large landlords and real estate investors: Massachusetts Association of Realtors, the National Association of Realtors, Equity Residential, Avalon Bay Group and UDR.
For its December 2025 filing — the last required filing for PACs until August — Housing for Massachusetts had received $458,234, with the largest donation coming from NAIOP Commercial Real Estate Development Association, which had kicked in $200,000. Because the NAIOP donation no longer places the organization among the top 5 donors currently listed on the PAC’s ads, it’s a safe bet that Housing for Massachusetts has raised more than a million dollars since December.
Money aside, the landlords who spoke on last Thursday’s panel discussion spoke about the effects of rent control on smaller investors. The ballot question would cap rent increases at 5 percent, or the consumer price index, whichever is lower. The restrictions on rent increases would prevent property owners from making extensive repairs and then tapping tenants to cover the costs or from bringing a unit up to market rate when a longtime tenant vacates, said Doug Quattrochi of MassLandlords.
“There’s no ability to renovate because there’s no ability to recoup that with higher rents,” he said. “That’s really unfair, and it punishes all of our members for having done the right thing, keeping rents below market.”
The stories recounted by the small landlords contrast sharply with the practices of many of the larger corporate landlords who are bankrolling the campaign against the ballot question. Rent control supporters say many of these firms are laser-focused on squeezing the highest possible rents from tenants. Greystar, cited as America’s biggest landlord, has been sued for using a rent-setting algorithm in Massachusetts that enabled it to charge tenants maximum rents.
For their part, the smaller investors who spoke last Thursday said they would not be able to stay in the game if rents are capped.
Like many property owners, Jasmine Naylor, executive director of the Western Mass Real Estate Investors Group, said she is seeing increases in property taxes as high as 25 percent in one year.
“I did not pass that on immediately to my tenants,” she said. “I waited for tenants to vacate, fixed up the units additionally, and then re-rented at what I believe the market rate was fair for that unit.”
Naylor noted that a rent control law would make it impossible for her to adjust rents to keep up with rising costs on the 24 units she owns.
“I understand that if this were to pass, I maybe have five more years of being a landlord in the state of Massachusetts,” she said. “And that’s a reality, because I can only afford to take so many hits with the rising costs.”
Small property owners make up 60 percent of rental housing availability in Massachusetts, said Conor Yunits, chair of the opposition campaign Housing for Massachusetts. He noted that the policy would be the most restrictive in the country and implement a “one-size-fits-all” requirement statewide.
Asked if the landlords are advocating for a negotiation with lawmakers, Quattrocchi said, “At this point, it’s kind of too late. It’s going to the ballot.” MassLandlords has advocated for a compensation form of rent control as an alternative.
Yunits countered: “We’re going to defeat this in November. And we’re going to do it through the small property owners like these folks here.”
A State House News Service report contributed to this story.
