$11,438 a month.
That’s what a Tampa woman’s building quoted her to keep living in the same two-bedroom she’d been renting for about $3,800. Not to buy it. Not for some new penthouse. To stay exactly where she already was.
She read the number out loud on TikTok three times, like saying it enough would make it make sense. It didn’t.
The clip is making the rounds again this week after a popular X account resurfaced it, putting that $11,438 figure back in front of people who, much like the woman reading it, were convinced there had to be some mistake. The paperwork said exactly what she thought it said.
She lives in Channelside, Tampa’s shiny waterfront neighborhood, and had been in the same unit for two years. The previous year’s renewal nudged her rent up by about $100. This time was different.
The renewal had two very different prices
Her 12-month renewal came in at $4,900 a month — about $1,100 more than she’d been paying. That alone would have been enough to ruin someone’s morning. But alongside it was another option: if she didn’t want to commit to another year and instead went month-to-month, the quoted rate was $11,438.
“The numbers that were presented to me made my jaw fall to the ground,” she says in the video. Then she put it more bluntly: “I don’t even know how that number is calculated. It’s almost like they pulled it right out of their ass.”
That’s roughly $137,000 a year to rent the same two-bedroom apartment.
@emlegssssss PLEASE NOTE: The rent increase to re-sign for 12 months is $1000. If I want to sign for month to month that is when it is $11k a month. My rent is not $10,000, I would literally never pay that for rent 🤣🤣 I also can’t afford that. Thank you. ##rent##tampa##channelside ♬ Explosion – Official Sound Studio
People kept looking for the typo
“Did they accidentally put an extra 1 at the beginning?” one person asked. Thousands liked it. Another tried to reason the number down into something recognizable: “I think it was per annum. So like $938 per month?”
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People weren’t debating whether $11,438 was fair. They were looking for the mistake that would make it believable.
Then another renter showed up in the comments with her own receipt. “Girl I just got mine and it’s $5,542 for month to month, I was like are y’all out of your damn minds,” she wrote, posting a leasing email showing that rate. Different renter, different number, same kind of sticker shock.
The $11,438 wasn’t for an upgrade. It was the price quoted for staying in the same apartment without committing to another 12 months. Month-to-month leases commonly cost more because the tenant isn’t committing for a full year. That’s the ordinary part. Here, that flexibility more than doubled the 12-month quote.
Call it a month-to-month premium if you want. At $11,438, “premium” starts doing an extraordinary amount of work.
“How is that legal?”
One commenter watching from British Columbia had a question that cut through everything else: “How is that legal? Im in Canada (BC) and the tenant act says they can only up rent a percentage 2.3% to be exact.”
Florida is a very different place to be a renter. The state does not impose a statewide percentage cap on residential rent increases, and under Florida’s current law, cities and counties cannot simply impose their own rent controls.
So the remarkable thing about an $11,438 month-to-month quote isn’t that some rent cap failed to stop it. There generally isn’t one there to stop a number like that in the first place.
Which brings the story back to the two figures sitting in her renewal notice.
$4,900 if she committed to another year. $11,438 if she wanted to stay month-to-month.
She signed the year.
