‘Welcome to the torture house’: Renter struggles with corporate landlord neglect

Beads of sweat dripped in jagged lines from Brandis Rogers’ temples and the nape of her neck. In the dark, she pulled a chair in front of a makeshift cooling station in her dining room — three mini fans powered by a generator in the backyard.

August 1 was the sixth full day she and her family had been without power. Rogers’ rental house — a big, yellow “dollhouse” —looked picturesque under the beams of sun. But the heat on that 98-degree day was turning the inside into an oven. According to the hallway thermostat, the house had reached 81 degrees and was climbing. The temperatures that week were among the hottest in the month of July.

“It’s hot,” Rogers sighed as she sat back in her chair, angling herself in front of the fans’ breeze.

On July 26, a power outage struck Rogers’ northwest Charlotte neighborhood. While neighbors got their electricity back a few hours later, Rogers and her family remained in the dark.

A Duke Energy technician came to her home that night and assured her that power had been restored to her meter. From what the technician could see, Rogers said, there was a problem with her breaker panel.

She immediately reached out to her corporate landlord, Main Street Renewal, to have an electrician come out to make the repair. But despite submitting a maintenance request, typing desperate pleas in the resident portal, frustrating calls answered by robots instead of people and long hold times, Main Street Renewal didn’t send anyone for nearly a week.

Rogers stayed in the home without power for two days until Main Street put her in a hotel at her request, she said. Her 13-year-old daughter who has asthma went to stay with a friend to escape the heat.

In an emailed statement to The Charlotte Observer, a spokesperson for the rental company said Main Street Renewal sincerely apologizes for the inconvenience Rogers and her family experienced and has provided rent concessions — totaling $505 — for the days they did not put her in a hotel.

“We’re committed to delivering a consistently high standard of service, with clear communication and timely resolutions for our residents. On the few occasions when we fall short of expectations, we do everything we can to make it right and use the experience as an opportunity to learn and strengthen our services,” the statement said.

For Rogers, an apology isn’t adequate. She wants to see the company develop systems to ensure what she endured doesn’t happen again.

“I have no faith in this company at all,” she said.

Rogers’ dissatisfaction matches complaints tenants in single family homes have made against corporate landlords in North Carolina and Charlotte. Across the state, corporate owners have gobbled up tens of thousands of homes and converted them to rentals and caused the makeup of neighborhoods to shift. Some tenants have alleged, including to the state attorney general, that absentee ownership leaves some like Rogers in dangerous situations with slow-moving solutions.

The slogan “Welcome Home” is used often in the company’s advertisements and social media. But since Rogers moved in at the end of May, her experience has been the opposite.

“No, welcome to the torture house,” she said.

What is Main Street Renewal?

Main Street Renewal is a rental company based in Austin, Texas. The company owns and rents out single-family homes across the nation. The rental company owns properties in 35 cities including Charlotte and the Triad area, according to its website.

Main Street Renewal is owned by Amherst Holdings. The company was one featured in the 2022 investigation Security for Sale by The Charlotte Observer and the (Raleigh) News & Observer, which found that Amherst Holdings is one of 20 companies that then owned tens of thousands of rental properties across North Carolina. At the time, the companies owned one-quarter of all rental homes in Mecklenburg County.

Tenants of these properties, the investigation found, often deal with maintenance problems from delays to additional fees.

According to Main Street Renewal’s website, the company has more than 200 single-family homes available for rent in the Charlotte metro area.

When Rogers saw the advertisement for her 2,000+ square foot home perched in a cul-de-sac on a hill in northwest Charlotte, she applied for it out of delusion, she said.

“I always believe that you manifest what you want. You speak it into existence,” she said. “... In my mind, I’m like, ‘I may not get it, but I’m gonna still apply for it.’”

Eight hours after submitting her application, she was approved. With this being her first move in 11 years, Rogers admits some of the process was new to her. Before she signed her two-year lease, she had no idea about the company’s local and national complaints.

In the past three years, nearly 1,900 complaints have been submitted to the Better Business Bureau against Main Street Renewal The top concerns include security deposit issues, lack of communication and maintenance negligence. A Better Business Bureau investigation released in March concluded that a pattern of customer service issues including “unreasonable delays in response to reported maintenance issues” continued after the bureau documented it in 2023.

While other corporate landlords have a high volume of complaints, Main Street Renewal has a D+ rating with the Better Business Bureau. Several other landlord giants dominating across the state have A+ ratings.

Tenants have sued the company too. In 2025, seven lawsuits were filed against the company in Mecklenburg and Wake counties. Two claim that delayed response or shoddy maintenance work left two families in dangerous conditions.

One case filed in June claims that Main Street Renewal waited nearly a month to respond to concerns of a water leak in a Union County home. While the pipe was eventually repaired, the lawsuit alleges that the rental company failed to clear any bacterial growth. The result left the family exposed to toxic mold which caused seizures and rashes, the lawsuit alleges.

Another case filed in March alleged that the company’s failure to fully remedy a “catastrophic” plumbing failure led to a mother and her child being exposed to raw sewage and flooding in their Mecklenburg County home.

A Main Street Renewal spokesperson did not directly respond to the Observer’s questions about the Better Business Bureau investigation or the lawsuits.

While Rogers has lived in her home only two months, she had problems before the power outage. When she first moved into the house, she didn’t have hot water, she told the Charlotte Observer. And her stove had to be replaced due to it heating up when not in use, she said.

Now aware of the company’s reputation, Rogers has a message for anyone considering leasing with Main Street Renewal:

“Run.”

Portal pleas

Getting to talk to a real person on the phone when facing a maintenance issue is very difficult, Rogers said.

Main Street Renewal has no emergency phone line. Instead, tenants are able to mark their requests as urgent to ensure they are prioritized, a company spokesperson said. However, a review of Rogers’ resident portal — an online dashboard where tenants pay rent, can review their lease and submit maintenance requests — by the Observer does not show an option for tenants to mark a maintenance request as “urgent”.

A spokesperson for Main Street Renewal did not directly respond to a question about this discrepancy either.

Main Street Renewal says residents can connect with staff through text messages and both live and virtual agents and submitting maintenance requests through the resident portal at any time. The company said it provides hotel accommodations and relocations for maintenance repairs that take an extended period of time.

On July 27, the first full day she was without power, Rogers got a notification that a maintenance appointment had been scheduled for July 31 – four days later. Her calls to Main Street Renewal’s Charlotte office were answered by Liv — a virtual agent — who eventually put her on hold for extended period of time.

Unable to reach a person, Rogers took to her resident portal to plea for help.

“My child has asthma. It is hot in this house and we cannot go anywhere else,” she wrote. “As a tenant who pays her rent on time with no issues we shouldn’t have to go through this.”

“Y’all need to do better at treating customers properly in (emergency) situations. This is wrong across the board! I need an electrician at this house tomorrow 7/28. We cannot wait until Thursday.”

Mia, Rogers’ daughter, laid in her bed in the dark on August 1. While the power was out she stayed with friends to avoid the heat and reduce any problems with her asthma. Being in her house was “hell,” she said.

“It feels like I’m suffocating,” she said as she sat at the edge of her bed.

That afternoon — six days after the power initially went out — a vendor hired by Main Street Renewal came to make repairs but told Rogers he needed parts to replace the breaker panel. The technician said he’d come back that night, Rogers said. But he didn’t return until 3 days later, she said.

It took nine days after the initial power outage for electricity in Rogers’ home to be fully restored. The company paid for Rogers and her family to stay in a hotel for three days. But she paid $860 out of pocket to cover hotel stays the six other days.

Apology not accepted

While Main Street Renewal covered part of her rent and extended its apologies for what she and her family endured, Rogers said she isn’t accepting the apology that easily.

“I was left in the heat for nine days and the first couple of days it was extremely hot. It was awful,” she said. “I had to ask them to put me in a hotel. They didn’t even offer.”

A company as large as Main Street Renewal should have systems in place to ensure maintenance emergencies, like she and her family faced, are handled efficiently. There should be an emergency phone line and the maintenance team should be able to respond immediately — not days after the fact, she said.

Finding a nice, affordable place to live in Charlotte is hard to come by, she said.

“It’s hard to find a place to stay. It’s stressful because people are homeless. We’ve been homeless before,” she said. “I don’t want to be homeless again. That’s why I make sure I pay my rent on time. I pay my utilities. I take good care of where I live at.”

In the remaining year and 10 months of her lease, Rogers hopes speaking out about her situation will inspire the company to get its act together.

“The system is broken and it needs to be fixed,” she said.

This story was originally published August 14, 2025 at 5:06 AM.