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By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2025 Cain Publications, Inc.

Remember when you acquired your first piece of rental property. Maybe you had visions of providing a great place for people to live.  Maybe you looked forward to the thousands of dollars that were going to roll in because of your becoming a real estate tycoon.  Or maybe you thought of how this property was your first step toward a hefty retirement income.  People get into the rental property business for different reasons, all of them valid

But then, after it was yours and after you had put all that sweat and time into making it a great place to live, you rented it out.  If only it could have just sat there and generated income sitting vacant? No problem at all.  It would be like farmers getting paid not to grow crops.  But you do have to rent the property, or sell it, to generate any income and become a tycoon.

Reality set in when you began to look for tenants.  Oh, they seemed like wonderful people who would be ideal tenants but to whom life has just dealt a bad hand.  “But we have it under control now,” they assured you, “our life is turning around.”  Taking them at their word and wanting to give them another chance, plus not wanting to appear to be the notorious hard-hearted landlord of myth and legend, you rented to them.  You were sure they would be wonderful tenants when they moved in and rented from a landlord who had the tenants’ best interests at heart.  But life just kept on dealing them rotten hands, and started dealing you the same hand, too. What with the late or nonexistent rent, the complaints from the neighbors, the trashed property and the calls from the police about these folks. It was as if your tenant’s bad luck was rubbing off on you,

Renting out property requires a shift in thinking from buying property and getting it ready to rent.  No longer are you dealing with things, but with people.  And that’s the most difficult assignment many landlords have.

Things don’t try to fool you, people do.  Things don’t lie to you, people do.  Things don’t try to make you feel sorry for them, people do. Things don’t try to make you be in a hurry so you make a bad decision, people do.

That’s why tenant selection is and landlord’s most important job.  Many landlords never get that figured out.  They go from one bad tenant to the next, eventually reaching the point where they say “bad tenants are inevitable; it doesn’t matter what you do, you’ll always get them.”

Then one day comes the last straw.  It could be anything including that minuscule, nearly invisible straw all the way up to a a two-by-four whacking you upside the head..  It might just be a particularly bad day and a tenant hasn’t done anything worse than he usually does.  But it hits you wrong.  Maybe a midnight move-out with three months of rent still owing.  Maybe the tenant calls and says he can’t pay the rent this month, “you understand don’t you, times have been tough for us lately.”  Or maybe you discover the worst: that a tenant has been cooking methamphetamines and dealing them in your property.  You can’t take any more.

“Get me out of this business!” you scream, as you pound a “For Sale” sign in the front yard.

What drives landlords out of the business?  Mostly it’s poor, or nonexistent tenant selection.  For example, I received a call a few years ago from Greg, a landlord, complaining about the tenants on both sides of his duplex.  He could hardly wait to sell the place.  The rent was always late from both units, one more so than the other.  I asked him, “what about your other properties?”

“Oh, those are great.  I have wonderful tenants who always pay the rent on time and take care of their homes.”

“So would we be having this discussion if you had good tenants in this duplex?” I asked.

“Well, no.”

“Then why don’t you just boot both tenants out?  Give them a 30-day, no cause notice and make them move, then start over with good tenants?”

He did just that.  The woman on one side didn’t think it was real, and the landlord had to do an eviction.  I watched as the sheriff removed her.

A few months later I ran into Greg at a meeting and asked how things were going with the duplex.

“Great,” he said.  “I’ve got great tenants in both units.”  He knew how to select good tenants, he just hadn’t done it.  Selling the property was now the farthest thing from his mind.

I drove by the duplex later and noticed how nice the grounds and exterior looked.  I imagine the interiors look just as good.

Bad tenants were about to drive this landlord out of the business.  These were bad tenants that would have been avoided with some basic tenant selection.

The Good Tenant Selection Process

Good tenant selection is not difficult.  It does require planning, attention to detail and a step-by-step process.  If you expect to have good results every time, select tenants the right way every time.

Create realistic but effective rental criteria.  You do it for three reasons: one you know who is acceptable and who is not, two, it self-screens, meaning that tenants who can’t qualify usually won’t even apply, and three, it creates an aura of professionalism around your business that good tenants welcome.

Most important, though, you know who is acceptable and who is not.  You take subjectivity out of the equation.  Either an applicant is qualified or not.

Regardless of what else you put in your rental criteria, include these four: 

1. Applicant must fill out application completely and truthfully.  That means to your satisfaction not his or hers and there are no blank spaces. Do not accept it until you are satisfied.  Remember, you are in charge here, not them. 

2. Verify the source of income.  Whether it is a job or some kind of government assistance, you must be able to verify it independently.

3. Meet all adults who are moving into the unit.  That includes the adult children of the tenants.  None of this “let me take it home for my husband to sign and I‘ll bring it back.”  You have to meet the husband, girlfriend, or significant other.

4. Appropriate identification.  In most cases that is a driver’s license.  The picture must be theirs and the address or addresses on the license match those on the rental application.

The hard part, sticking to your criteria.  If you are lucky and your property is in a good rental market, you could have plenty of qualified applicants.  However, some of us are not that lucky, and we end up feeling lucky to get even applicants whom we would never rent to.

With bad tenants, as time goes by, as desperation creeps into your consciousness, you start considering the applicants with the lack of qualifications that you turned down earlier.  The mortgage and taxes drive you to accept one of them. Even if you do have written criteria, you might accept one, thinking that you have been too stringent or have expected too much.  Besides, the tenant you’re thinking about renting to is “turning his life around now.” Uh, huh.

Resist the temptation.  Better no tenant than a bad tenant.  If you don’t stick to the criteria you set, you will pay the consequences with a bad tenant, or at least a tenant who tries your resolve about continuing in the landlording business.

Tenant selection is the most important part of our business.  If you want to stay in it, or at least want to get out on your terms instead of the bad tenants’, do tenant selection right.

Sponsored by Zip Reports where they do employment and rental screening. Contact Robert L. Cain at bob@cainpublications.com

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2025 Cain Publications, Inc.

In 2023, rental owners wrote off $4.2 million in bad debt. Almost one quarter of that, 24.5 percent or $1.029 million, arose from landlords renting to applicants who completed fraudulent applications reports the National Multihousing Conference (NMHC). Application fraud has become so prevalent that in that year, 93.3 percent of rental owners experienced fraud, reports the NMHC Pulse Survey from Jan. 24, 2024.

Some 80 percent of rental owners and managers have seen applicants misrepresent information on applications and 84.3 percent reporting income/employment documentation falsification, reports the NMHC. Is that representative of all rental owners or just NMHC members? They don’t say, but if the members of that professional organization have seen fraud become rampant in their businesses, imagine how well owners with less rental property management experience and knowledge do in comparison.

Without question, application fraud gobbles rental owners’ and managers’ bottom lines, making running their businesses less profitable. Nearly one-fourth, 23.8 percent, of evictions can be traced back to fraudulent applications reports NMHC. How do the fraudsters do it?

That 84.3 percent who falsify income and employment documentation is most common, and we’ll look at how they do that in a minute. But they do more than just misrepresent income and employment; they go so far as to dummy up fake Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, and create phony bank statements and credit reports. None of those are easy or inexpensive and done so it will actually fool a suspicious eye. Figure fooling a careful rental owner or manager will cost in the neighborhood of $500. Fortunately, many bad tenants choose to do the job themselves and not very well, leaving bright, unmistakable red flag that says “fraudulent application.”

Let’s look at the different documentation that bad tenants use to worm their ways into rental properties. Many start, if they are to create an identity different from their own less-than-desirable one with a driver’s license. Those can be had from several online Chinese companies for $80 to $100. The more expensive ones include appropriate watermarks, barcodes, holograms, and scannable data. The best customers for these driver’s licenses are underage kids who want to be able to drink, but fraudsters may use them to help create a false identity. If a fraudster wants to go whole hog, he or she can even get a passport from these companies that will fool scanners at the airports and immigration. Those, of course, come at a price much higher than $100.

A fake Social Security card is easier to get and create, but comes with verification problems when someone tries to match it with an existing account. It could be one that doesn’t exist or that of someone else. If it matches another person’s numbers, the fraudster has stolen an identity, a felony that could land them in prison.

You can easily buy fake W2s. bank statement, and credit reports from numerous companies on the internet. The costs of those can vary depending on how real someone wants the document to be. Those can cost in the neighborhood of $200 to $300 for good counterfeits.

Two of the oldest tricks are the phony employer and previous landlord. They still use friends to pretend to be employers and previous landlords, but some companies will offer imposters to answer the phone acting as the employer and previous landlord. That costs money, of course, but those companies promise to pass as credible.

Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, when bad tenants try to do the job themselves, maybe to save money, they’re sloppy. Doing a phony document properly requires care and precision, qualities these folks probably don’t have. After all, they’ve mismanaged their entire lives, so when they find themselves in the position of having to fraudulently obtain a rental home, why would we expect them to use the care and precision required to fool the suspicious eye of a rental owner or manager? So you’ll see W2s without a company name and address on them, much less a logo, and bank statements that don’t match a standard bank statement in either font or organization. And credit reports? Just try to create a credit report that matches the way a real credit report looks. The spacing may be off, the typeface may be just a little different here and there with different font sizes and appearance such as blurry characters and misspelled words. Most rental owners and managers pull credit reports themselves, anyway, easily catching the fraudsters who give the owner their phony one.

Staying one step ahead of the fraudsters isn’t possible. New scams crop up daily. But the old, tried and true screening methods work just as reliably as they ever have to catch applicant lies. Verify everything. Doubt every document that an applicant gives you until you prove it’s accurate. If your applicant looks too good to be true; if everything about them is perfect; if their credit score is 800; if they’ve supposedly worked at their high-paying job for three years, earning far more than enough to pay the rent comfortably; if their previous landlord has nothing but glowing remarks about them, be suspicious, very suspicious.

Our response is simple. Does the credit report match the one your applicant provided? If not, reject. If the employer they listed has never heard of them (and you called the number you found on the employer’s website), reject them. If their previous landlord’s phone number isn’t the one for the one listed in county tax records, send them on their way. Established screening methods work. It just takes time to confirm everything. But you owe it to your investment and to your other tenants, the good ones, to see that the people who move into your rental properties are quality tenants.

In most rental markets today, with vacancy rates low, with waiting lists long, we can afford to make sure that the applicants we get are indeed the applicants they say they are.

Sponsored by Zip Reports where they do employment and rental screening. Contact Robert L. Cain at bob@cainpublications.com

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2025, Cain Publications, Inc.

What a great time to own rental property. Rents have risen to the point where they slowly make up for the lost income during the pandemic. And the shortage of rental properties promises to keep rents where they continue to make a profit for rental owners. The high interest rates and limited supply of houses and have kept prices high and renters out of the home-buying market, making it cheaper to rent than buy. As the pendulum swings in rental owners’ favor, take full advantage. Some ideas about how in a minute.

Renting today makes far more financial sense than buying. The median sale price of a single-family home is $407,200 according to the National Association of Realtors. Housing prices will remain high because there simply aren’t enough properties to satisfy the needs of people who want to buy. Meanwhile high interest rates keep current owners from selling their homes because they wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else to live they could afford. They may have an interest rate of four percent where their rates are now. They would have to pay seven percent for any house they’d buy now, if they could even find an available suitable one to make their next home.

“I want to be a homeowner so bad,” CNN reports TikTok creator Jordan Swanson having said. “In this economy it’s literally impossible.”

The difference in the cost of rent and the cost of a mortgage is significant. That $407,200 median single-family home with loan cost of $325,760 with the 20 percent down, is $2167 a month. It would require an income of $8668 a month or more than $104,000 a year to afford that mortgage, far out of the reach of most renters. And that’s not even factoring in taxes and insurance that would also be included in the income-requirement calculation by a mortgage broker.

CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) in a March 21, 2024 report predicts that new mortgage payments can be expected to outpace rents for the next five years, making renting the only option for many. Single-family and small multifamily properties will continue to be in short supply, keeping the inventory of homes low and prices higher . Right now, they estimate, we have a 3.8 million housing unit shortage, and will remain so a few bumps in sales notwithstanding.

With average rents from November 2024 at $1595, it is $572 a month, 36 percent, more affordable to rent than a mortgage.

Rental owners are starting to make up for their losses during the pandemic. That average current rent of $1595 is 39 percent higher than the average rent of $1149 in 2019 when the pandemic and its rental killing consequences began. Rents do appear to be dropping with average rents down 17 percent from October. Look for rents to moderate more, how much more we can’t predict, as a million multifamily units come online in 2025. It still won’t fix the nationwide housing shortage which CBRE says will continue for several years to come. More multifamily properties will become available while the fewer available single-family and small multifamily properties will maintain the current 3.8 million unit shortage.

Yes, it’s a great time to own rental property. It can be an even better time if we take advantage of it. The extra, added benefit begins with tenant retention. Jeff Tucker, Senior Economist with Zillow said, “As renters are pressured financially by everything from rent to price

increases of essentials like food, healthcare, and transportation, they may

be seeking more value from that rent. The right location and amenities, especially if they can save renters money, can add greatly to quality of life.” And make them reluctant to move.

Zillow also reported on what encouraged renters to stay where they were. First, 72 percent said rental costs if they were “a good deal.” Quiet neighbors retained 69 percent of them followed by 68 percent who said they could not “afford to move somewhere else.” Other reasons were the quality of property maintenance, liking their landlord or property manager, allowing pets, and a private outdoor space.

It costs a lot of money to move and it costs rental owners a lot of money to find new tenants. Marketing gurus point out that it costs seven times more to find a new customer than to keep the existing one. Thus, if you already have a tenant, at least one that you want to keep, it pays to give that person not only no reason to move but the desire to stay right where they are because they know it’s better than any other place they might go.

I consider patronizing companies that make it hard to do business a waste of my time and money. Rental ownership is a business and our customer (tenants) appreciate our making renting from us easy. As the Zillow report confirms, liking their landlord or property manager was a major factor in whether they stay in their current residence.

Rental owners have a system.

Good tenants appreciate this part. In conversations with a prospective tenant or the actual renter, the rental owner writes down the gist of a conversation and then tells the tenant what to expect and when. Then does it—as promised, no excuses.

A tenant who always seems to have rented from slipshod or incompetent landlords or managers finds it a breath of fresh air. In fact every time the tenant has any dealings with the landlord, he feels as if the landlord is complete control of the situation.

They give great customer service.

In his book, Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith writes, “Create the possible service; don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.” We can make our customer service so good that our tenants might not even think about buying a house because they are so happy where they are.

Yes, it is a great time to own rental property. Rents have risen to the point where they are making up for the lost income of the pandemic. And the shortage of rental properties promises to keep rents high enough to where they actually make a profit for rental owners. Now keep the tenants we want to keep despite a waiting list for applicants.

Sponsored by Zip Reports where they do employment and rental screening. Contact Robert L. Cain at bob@cainpublications.com

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2024 Cain Publications, Inc.

In 1992, after watching crime, especially drug dealing, increasing in rental housing, Timothy Zehring, a Mesa, Arizona, police officer, started the Crime Free Multihousing Program (CFMH). It has spread to more than 2,000 cities in 48 states, five Canadian provinces, England, Nigeria, and Puerto Rico, plus more, as an answer to or tool for eliminating crime in rental properties.

It worked and continues to work.

As publisher of the Rental Property Reporter, along with the late John Campbell, I was part of implementing the program in Portland, Oregon. I wrote the training manuals for the program. The eight-hour program gave landlords the skills to screen applicants, manage properties to discourage criminal activity, and generally make rental housing nicer places to live for residents by using CFMH.

After completing the three phases of the CFMH program under the supervision of local police, landlords and property managers become individually certified and their properties become certified. They get a certificate and window stickers announcing that the property participates in the Crime-Free program.

Their website lists the following benefits:

• A stable, more satisfied tenant base. Increased demand for rental units with a reputation for active management
• Lower maintenance and repair costs. Increased property values
• Improved personal safety for tenants, landlords, and managers

From the start, I have believed the program would benefit not only landlords, but their tenants and the communities where their properties are.

Landlords who take the training come away with confidence in managing their properties, something I know has been a problem. As I spoke around the country, landlords told me they didn’t know how to manage their properties so bad tenants couldn’t infect them. CFMH helps with that. Portland landlords who did the training gained skills that enabled them to ensure the tenants they rented to were quality and to know how to deal with problem tenants and their guests. They also learned how to screen applicants and under what circumstances they can reject an applicant without running afoul of the Fair Housing Act. Plus, they learned simple methods of hardening their properties against crime by using Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED).

Questions have arisen, though, that cast doubt not only the effectiveness but the “fairness” of the program. Has it resulted in crime decreasing? Does it illegally discriminate against protected classes?

As long as landlords do the policing, the managing themselves, it works as intended. Problems have arisen when local governments decided they should make Crime-Free Rental Housing the law. Now some communities have had problems with what critics call unfair evictions and illegal discrimination. 

For example, a Reuters article reported on Dec. 19, 2022, Herperia, California, enacted an ordinance in 2015 that required landlords to evict a tenant “if the sheriff’s department notified them that a tenant had engaged in criminal activity.” A 2016 investigation, though, reported that the actual purpose of the law was “what one city council member called a ‘demographic problem.’” That “problem” was Hespria’s increasing Black and Latinx population, said the Department of Justice. The “deeply flawed” ordinance ended up tearing families apart because tenants had the audacity to call the police for help too often. I guess calling for help qualifies as criminal activity. Similar ordinances around the country have resulted in scrutiny because of perceived or actual unfair treatment of minorities.

As the Reuters article said, “Sheriff’s deputies often demanded tenants’ evictions based on the conduct of a guest and when women called to report domestic violence. Black renters were nearly four times as likely to be evicted under the ordinance than white renters, and Latino people were about 30% more likely to face eviction, the DOJ said.”

In one case in Hesperia, a woman and her three children were evicted on the demands of the local police because she had called 911 to report that her husband was beating her with a television cable. Some city ordinances include the provision that excessive calls to 911 can result in eviction under the ordinance, even though that may not be part of the landlord’s lease language, only local law.

Government isn’t much good a managing rental property, as has been proven over and over by how well HUD has done managing its rentals. Plus, when government gets involved in rental management an entire additional set of issues factors in. Individual landlords and property managers for the most part have only to deal with the Fair Housing Act. When government gets involved, the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) comes into play, too, adding structural and demographic requirements absent from the Fair Housing Act. When landlords rent to Section 8 tenants, for example, that also falls under the ADA. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act covers all recipients and subrecipients of HUD financial assistance which includes government programs administered by the Federal Government.

Local police, if their city has enacted a Crime-Free Housing law, can be overzealous taking basic management away from the property owners and managers. An issue a landlord may already have dealt with, such as a guest committing a crime in the home of one of a landlord’s tenants, could require an eviction even though the landlord has already resolved the problem.

Therein lie the concern and complication, government getting involved. The Reuters article cited Timothy Zehring saying that “he advises cities against adopting ordinances because enforcement then falls ‘under color of law,’ which could expose municipalities to lawsuits.”

Statistics go to support the claim of illegal discrimination and thus liability because at least 80 percent of people evicted in California’s largest cities, including Sacramento and Los Angeles, were non-white. Data from other cities around the country report similar evidence of discrimination.

Deborah Archer, president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York University School of Law, and cited in the Reuters article, said all this attention is “a helpful step” and should prompt more cities to repeal their programs. Will that repeal result? No way of telling if or when.

In the meantime, it continues to be up to landlords to get the training, get certified, and take complete control of their rentals, not allowing the cities to interfere in their management. No one can substitute our taking charge of our own properties because we know each of our properties, our tenants, and the situation around our properties.

Sponsored by Zip Reports where they do employment and rental screening. Contact Robert L. Cain at bob@cainpublications.com

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2024, Cain Publications, Inc.

Years ago as I rode the Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic I wore a t-shirt I’d had made with “The Northwest Landlord: The newsletter for landlords” printed front and back. A group of three or four young women came up behind me and one of them said something to the effect that I shouldn’t be proud to be a landlord, because, she implied, landlords are all slimy and crooks. You know how you usually can’t come up with the perfect comeback until hours later? This time the perfect comeback popped into my head.

“Oh,” I said, “You shouldn’t be proud of taking responsibility for your life and providing an essential service? You shouldn’t be proud to have made a good financial decision?” I’ve relished that comeback ever since. Not another word from that young woman.

Some people’s hate of landlords has come about because of either a bad experience or two with a landlord or because of a belief that people don’t have the right to own property they rent to others. We can’t do anything about either one. But we can do our best to run an ethical business.

The overwhelming majority of landlord run their businesses honorably and ethically. But a few landlords run businesses that give landlords a bad name, operating in a way not even approaching ethical. Those are the ones people remember. One such business has come to the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which is in the process of ordering the company to refund $48 million to customers defrauded and otherwise cheated by the company, an agreement awaiting okay by a judge. The company’s name isn’t important because it engages in activities a few other rental owners are guilty of  and serves as a lesson about unethical and illegal business practices.

That company, said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan, “preyed on tenants through a variety of unfair and deceptive tactics, from saddling people with hidden fees and unjustly withholding security deposits to misleading people about eviction policies during and pandemic and even pursuing eviction proceedings after people had moved out.”

Just the tip of the unethical practices iceberg, others involved junk and hidden fees that were only disclosed after the lease had been signed and tenants moved in. The full disaster became public with the 57-page lawsuit the FTC filed against the company.

When I see landlords doing things such as those, my blood boils. As rental owners, out ethical obligation is to treat our tenants with respect and fair dealing.

One ethical principle is Integrity. Investopedia offers that Integrity “Incorporates other principles—honesty, trustworthiness, and reliability. Someone with integrity consistently does the right thing and strives to hold themselves to a higher standard.”

That company’s 60-page-long lease agreement has buried in it sections with print much smaller than the rest, the “fine print of myth and legend,” and sections with a colored background with smaller print and a font color similar to the background, blending into the background color. And just in case the applicant actually reads all 60 pages of the lease agreement and refuses to sign, the company has already collected a non-refundable $500 Reservation Fee in addition to the non-refundable $55 Application Fee. Other times the tenant never learns about some of the fees until after the lease is signed and the tenant gets the first rent bill that included fees never disclosed before lease signing. So much for integrity.

Another ethical principle, Honesty, requires truth in all matters, thus “fostering an ethical climate. Partial truths, omissions, and under or overstating don’t help a business improve its performance,” says Investopedia.

The owner of the company in question made unethical behavior its policy when he encouraged the dishonest behavior by “calling on the senior vice president responsible for overseeing the company’s fee program to ‘juice this hog.’” So much for honesty.

Thinking of our tenants as customers who pay our mortgages, utilities, insurance, and maintenance, and make us a profit, changes the viewpoint about hog juicing and recognizes valued customers worthy of fair treatment.

Rental property ownership is a business. Would you do business with a company that concealed the prices and terms of its products? Probably not more than once. Consumer protection and the state Attorney General’s office would have something to say about those practices. Yet, some rental owners believe they can flimflam their tenants and think they are just “juicing the hog,” cheating profits off the back of their customers and ignoring ethical behavior.

Every transaction in the rental business to be ethical must be open and above board from the ads that get the phone to ring to the move out process that ensures security deposits are handled legally and ethically.

Success in our business isn’t just about making money. Pride and ethics in our business are every bit as important, and maybe more so. If you feel guilty about how you make your money, no rationalization with remarks such as “it’s just business” will allay the conscience of any honest business person.

Some people will always believe that owning rental property is something akin to Satanism. We can’t do anything about them. but we can deal openly and fairly with our employees, our contractors, and our tenants. If we do, the money will take care of itself, and we won’t have to rationalize unethical activities making remarks such as “it’s just business.”

The Landlord

Through hard work and persistence, the landlord provides housing for those who do not choose to own their own property.

The landlord epitomizes what has made this nation great: individual achievement. The landlord is the embodiment of the idea that each person has the ability to be successful if he or she is willing to do what is required for success.

Because of the landlord some forty percent of this nation’s people have a place to live.

Because of the landlord builders, remodelers, craftsmen, banks, mortgage bankers, insurance companies, utilities and many other businesses make a profit.

Because of the landlord local governments receive billions of dollars in property tax revenue to provide streets, roads and highways; to provide street lighting, bridges, police protection, fire protection, schools, colleges, parks, community centers, water, garbage service, senior services, and many more services which make our cities better places to live.

Because of the landlord’s diligence and hard work, the politicians and bureaucrats who would limit the rights of the landlord receive regular paychecks.

Be proud to be a landlord.

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2024, Cain Publications, Inc.

Rental owners and managers, the top ones, know their properties and the areas those properties sit in. They are in the best position to know what their units should rent for. They know that in part by surveying the rents of comparable properties. It can take time and figuring to do a proper job, but they know what the best comparable properties are and how they relate to their own properties.

Along comes RealPage, the property management and software company, offering algorithms that figure “optimum” rents for clients’ properties. Their company’s “products manage everything from marketing to pricing and other property operations,” and do what can best be described as a rent survey on steroids. They come up with rents for rental properties based on the data they accumulate about properties comparable to the one the subscribing rental owner owns.

But the company uses an “unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing,” says the Department of Justice (DOJ) in its complaint. Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote, “We allege that RealPage’s pricing algorithm enables landlords to share confidential, competitively sensitive information and align their rents.”

RealPage suggests to subscribing landlords that they need to either raise rents, keep them the same, or lower them to be competitive. How RealPage’s conduct “undermines fair pricing” they don’t say. If rents are too high, renters will go on to the next property where rents are more reasonable. Too low, and landlords lose money.

Does anyone care about how RealPage does its business except RealPage itself?

Rent surveys done by rental owners accomplish the same thing except they don’t have as much hard data as does RealPage’s algorithm. RealPage uses “proprietary data,” something owners don’t have access to, and may reflect appropriate rents or not. “Landlords agree to share their competitively sensitive data with RealPage in return for pricing recommendations and decisions that are the result of combining and analyzing competitors’ sensitive data.” The DOJ says that is anti-competitive.

DOJ uses the Sherman Antitrust Act as the basis of their claim. That says in part in Section 1 “Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.” And in Section 2 “Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony.”

Does RealPage create a monopoly? Their market penetration according to their publication, “The Real Story” amounts to only 7 percent of rental owners and managers, a long way from even a 50 percent market penetration much less a monopoly. But exaggeration by the federal government might be expected.

Taken to its logical conclusion, a rent survey is okay as long as you keep it to yourself. Suspect and maybe falling under the suspicious eyes of the DOJ might be if a rental owner shared his rental data with fellow owners at, say, a rental housing association meeting. That’s certainly non-public data. Would that be illegal or is that simply free speech? DOJ could have a better case against a rental owner there than in a filing against a company with only a seven percent market penetration.

Again, does anyone care? It appears that the DOJ assumed that no one could find any reason to care about what RealPage did so they threw in the idea that RealPage’s service raised rents to make them unaffordable. But the suit never explains how RealPage would be artificially raising rents and making housing less affordable, and by extension how rental owners’ rent surveys would.

Would the RealPage system work any better than a rental owner’s own knowledge and research? Landlords know their properties and their tenants better than any machine or most skillfully written artificial intelligence (AI) code could.  Rental owners aim to optimize rents and that has to be done on a unit-by-unit basis, not a one-size-fits-all system.

Optimizing rents could well result in one unit in a complex renting for more or less than another because of location, features, quality, and any number of other factors. Something no AI-generated data could accomplish.

For example, landlords may not be looking for 100 percent because that’s a money loser. If you owned 50 units and were charging an average of $500 a month rent for each unit (just an example, I know rents are higher than that just about everywhere. Plug in your own numbers.) and at that rent maintained 100 percent occupancy, that would give an EGI (Effective Gross Income) (Gross rents less $0 vacancy allowance) of $25,000 a month or $300,000 a year.

To optimize rents, the idea is to increase EGI over $300,000. Suppose the rent survey discovered that the average rent for your units should be $575? Raising rents to the average would increase the Scheduled Gross Income (SGI) to $345,000, but would result in some vacancies. Some rents may be just fine, others may be too low or too high. Discover the market rents for each property and each unit. Once you have that, you can calculate the likelihood and cost of vacancies.

That’s the way successful rental owners think and calculate. They might take RealPage’s data and see how it fits their properties, but they know what their properties will bear and at what rate their rents will do best.

The whole idea behind rent surveys is planning for profits. At the same time, by using a rent survey, you can determine average rents and from those optimum rents for a property. Always ask “what will the market bear and still make me money?”

The point is, numbers mean nothing in and of themselves. They only mean something when related to what the numbers have calculated. While RealPage’s numbers might give an idea what rents should be, it is up to rental owners to determine if they accurately reflect the rents for all the units in a property.

Sponsored by Zip Reports where they do employment and rental screening. Contact Robert L. Cain at bob@cainpublications.com

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2024, Cain Publications, Inc.

Billy Bad Tenant wanted to move so he wouldn’t have to sleep on his friend’s couch anymore. Besides, his friend had gotten tired enough of Billy that he kept suggesting that Billy find a new place to crash. His reputation preceded him with two evictions and more bad debts than he could count or care about, so with that history, he was out of luck with almost all rentals. He needed help if he was going to worm his way into another rental. Feeling flush, Billy had won some money gambling (usually he lost, hence his inability to pay the rent) so he had more than enough cash to rent a new place. But he knew his chances were slim to none of finding anything with his rental history.

At wits’ end, he was looking through TikTok one day and saw a video advertising “Need a New Identity? Want to Start Over? Results Guaranteed.” He clicked on it. The ad came from a fraud company calling itself XYZ Co. LLC. They were happy to “help,” they said, and could fix him right up. They created a complete new identity for him that they claimed would fool even the most suspicious rental owner. Billy sent XYZ the amount of money he wanted to “earn” adding the company’s fees.

Yes, they really do exist, these companies in the business of creating new identities, and they don’t care for what purpose as long as they get paid. They have become one of the latest thorns in the side of rental owners and managers screening their applicants.

Billy Bad Tenant became William Ideal Tenant, a whole new person, it seemed. On his rental application, William wrote he had a job at XYZ Company LLC that paid him in excess of $100,000 a year. The genuine-appearing paystubs confirmed it as did the employment letter.

Since the XYZ already was a real LLC, it could create a “real” pay stub for William along with a matching bank statement. Now he had “proof” that he earned $100,000.

When the rental owner called XYZ Company from the number on its website, they confirmed that William did in fact work there and had for several years.

XYZ also created a rental history that the rental owner could kinda, sorta confirm, if he wasn’t too suspicious. At least the previous landlords seemed to exist, even if they weren’t the actual owners of the rental properties where William claimed to have lived. They gave William glowing references.

To create the new identity, the XYZ Company created a synthetic identity for William, how that works in a minute. That included a credit report using William’s name but another person’s Social Security Number. They had hacked the number from 90-year-old Willie Winston who hadn’t used it for several years.

Fraud has increased to the point where, according to Transunion, 95 percent of property owners and management companies experience difficulty preventing fraud. Bad tenants get more and more clever using phony documents and references to get past even the most careful screening processes. A National Multihousing Council (NMHC) survey reports that more than 70 percent of apartment owners and managers “have experienced fraudulent identification documents or misuse of another individual’s personal information, and this number continues to rise as creating these fake identities gets easier.”

Bad Tenants ask themselves daily what they can do to get rental owners to think they are qualified to rent. Where can they mislead screening so it misses their real rental history?

William Ideal Tenant (aka Billy Bad Tenant) might have done it himself but didn’t have the computer skills required, so he paid the XYZ Company to do it for him. He wasn’t good at details, anyway. So even if he did have the computer skills, he likely wouldn’t have done a job that could fool even the most lax property manager. One thing people look for in suspicious documents is what just don’t look right, such as different fonts or even different-sized fonts on W2s.

Fraudsters use three different methods in creating rental fraud, reports Transunion.

First-party fraud amounts to “using another person’s identity with their knowledge and/or permission. . . they’ll use a friend’s identity who has high wages and a stellar rental history.”

Third-party fraud involves “stealing an identity from an unsuspecting victim without their permission. Third-party fraudsters present legitimate bank statements and wage documents using identities stolen from victims,” partly what the XYZ Company did for Billy Bad Tenant using the 90-year-old’s Social Security Number.

Third is synthetic identity: “stealing more than one [identity to] create a new one, . .  fabricate an identity using a mix of stolen identities using data from multiple individuals,” also what XYZ Company did.

William/Billy didn’t get away with it. Here’s why. The rental owner spotted red flags and couldn’t confirm much of anything on the application. The most obvious red flag was the driver’s license. Yes, those can be created with a synthetic identity, as can passports and other government documents, a federal crime. But that would have been more expensive than Billy could have afforded. Is the name of the driver’s license the same as the “applicant’s”? What about the address? Does it match any of the addresses on the application? If not, why not?

What about the addresses on the credit report? Do any of them match the application addresses? If not, the explanation had better be good.

What about the Social Search? Does the demographic information match the applicant’s? In this case, the Social Security Number of the phony name came back with a 90-year-old’s information. Just looking at 20-something-year-old Billy cast reasonable doubt about the truth of everything Billy had written on the application.

So many rental applications are done online now, and screeners, the lazy ones anyway, might rely without question on the fake documents the applicant provides. Every applicant must be verified in person with proper ID.

Nothing replaces verifying everything, meeting the applicant in person, and looking for anomalies in the information on the application. If we rely solely on technology, we are asking to become the victim of rental fraud.

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2024, Cain Publications, Inc.

A July 16, 2024, a White House “Fact Sheet” reported that the president “is taking action to make renting more affordable for millions of Americans.” Biden wants to require rental owners to “cap rent increases on existing units at 5% or risk losing current valuable federal tax breaks.” Also proposed are building more affordable housing units in Nevada and fixing distressed housing including “building more affordable housing and revitalizing neighborhoods,” to alleviate the shortage of “affordable” housing.

The plan affects only those properties with 50 or more units. Of the 49,547,000 rental units in this country,18,738,000, 38 percent, consist of more than 50 units,. Assuming Congress passes it (a huge assumption), rental owners of more than 50 units who increase rents more than 5 percent, will lose those “valuable federal tax breaks” including depreciation tax breaks on their properties.

Rent control has been a staple in several cities and states for supposedly making housing more affordable and plentiful.

How has that worked?

Has rent control made more affordable housing available? It hasn’t. In fact, looking at the history of rent control in such cities as New York, Newark, and Chicago, it does just the opposite. A study by the National Multihousing Council in 2018 citing a 2000 article by Dirk Early in the Journal of Urban Economics reported that 30 percent of the tenants in rent controlled housing are in the top half of income.

Early also reported that landlords prefer to rent to smaller household, such as one or two people, and seniors, leaving people with two, three, or more children, possibly low-income, with a more difficult time finding “affordable” housing.

It was also supposed to result in more integrated neighborhood. It didn’t. In New Jersey, for example, they found rent control increased segregation.

An advantage to landlords is that rent-controlled tenants stay longer, even though that may not offset the disadvantages. Tenants, a study found, may tolerate homes that are too small or too large because it not only costs so much to move but the rent would be higher elsewhere. Edward Glaeser and Erzo Luttmer pointed out in a 2003 article in American Economic Review that 15 to 21 percent of New York City tenants lived in units that were too small or too large, with presumably a comparable situation in every city that has rent control.

In total and in addition, the National Multihousing Council explained in its report, “Rent control and rent stabilization laws generally led to a reduction in the available supply of rental housing.”

Rent control laws generally lead to a lower supply of rental housing as rental owners do several things to ensure their properties actually make a profit. That includes condo conversions and taking properties out of the rental market. In Boston, for example, David P. Sims wrote in a 2007 article in the Journal of Urban Economics, that thousands of rental properties went off the market because of condo conversions.

Rent control often benefits people who could just as easily pay market rent. Richard Green, a USC professor and director and chair of the Lusk Center for Real Estate there wrote, “One of the reasons I don’t like [rent control] is because it’s not targeted. You could have rich people living in a luxury building in Manhattan who now get the benefit of rent control, and that’s just silly to me.. . . It helps people who just don’t need help.”

In the category of “you can’t do just one thing,” rent control can mean a loss of tax revenue for cities. For example, in the late 1980s New York City lost about $4 billion in property tax revenue because the assessed values of properties, which are based on the net income of owners, dropped because of lower rents, meaning lower property tax revenue. A similar situation faced Cambridge, Massachusetts which lost between five and ten million dollars per year in property tax revenue in city of about 100,000 at the time. As an aside, when Cambridge eliminated rent control in 1994, real estate values grew by $1.8 billion reported the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Rent regulations change the jobs and administrative processes of city governments because they have to hire inspectors and bureaucrats to administer the rent control. In Cambridge, they estimated that rent control cost about $40 per unit. In the vicious circle, less tax revenue means there’s less money to hire inspectors, so housing quality slides slowly into disrepair creating blight and more slums.

The chances of this rent control plan passing are slim to none. The rental housing industry, which contributes millions of dollars to Congressional campaigns and the Realtors, the second largest lobby, will come out in force against any such legislation. But rent growth has slowed in the last year, anyway. Realtor.com reported that asking rents fell 0.4 percent in June, year over year, so the surge in rent hikes may have abated for now.

Just think about the bureaucracy and cost a nationwide rent control would require. To keep up with all the rental properties ensuring their rent increases remained below the mandated five percent, the government would have to hire hundreds or thousands of inspectors and bureaucrats. Lacking those, the ability to enforce the law would be curtailed. At some point, it could require more money to operate the program than it could ever possibly earn without fees charged rental owners that would put some owners out of business. Think about the problem Cambridge, Massachusetts had where it cost $40 a unit to administer that city’s rent control. That was in the 1980s. Assuming that those costs appreciated at the rate of inflation, it would cost more than $106 a year to keep up with each rental property. For the 18-million-plus rental properties with more than 50 units, the administrative costs would approach $2 billion.

Rent control, state, local, or in this case national, is just a bad idea, one that would inflict further difficulties and costs on rental owners and renters that comes with the side effects ending in a bloated bureaucracy unable to handle the work of dealing with the nearly 19 million rental units it would have to administer with no increase in available affordable housing. The move for rent control is afoot but fortunately unlikely to become law in the near future.

Sponsored by Zip Reports where they do employment and rental screening. Contact Robert L. Cain at bob@cainpublications.com

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2024, Cain Publications, Inc.

Mike Charton has lived in his apartment for many years. When I asked my fellow author what kept him there, he listed five things. Those five things reflect reasons renters stay in their rental homes for a long time. He first listed the neighbors he has. Second, he can write, rather than working on a house. Third, when the rent paying job sent him to work from home, he had to sign a contract saying the work equipment would be there. “I would need to inform the company about moving.” (That one’s is unique to Mike’s situation, I think.) Fourth, moving is a lot of work. And fifth, not sure moving to another place would balance out in the long run. Translated, it costs a lot to move, not to mention the hassle.

Long-term renters used to be an anomaly, but times have changed. Data from Redfin in June of this year reports that one in six renters, 16.6 percent, stayed in their homes at least 10 years up from 14 percent 10 years ago.

Even though Baby Boomers represent the smallest number of renters, one-third of them stay for at least 10 years. Another third have a one-to-four year tenure. Five-to-nine year renters account for 21.5 percent staying put. Boomers are a special case that we’ll look at in a minute.

The age group that moves most often is the Gen Z’s, Zoomers, born 1995 to 2012, of whom only 4 percent stayed in one place for over five years. That age group has had less opportunity to be long-term tenants since even the oldest of the group wasn’t 18 years old until 2013 and wasn’t 21 until 2016 when they moved out of mom and dad’s house. And some of them have moved back skewing the residency longevity data more. Those born from say 2007 to 2012, the youngest of them still ensconce themselves in their bedrooms in their parents’ homes. Even actual renters have been renting for barely five years.

Eighty percent or so of Boomers own their homes, but most Boomer renters fall one of two categories, renters by choice, that is, lifestyle renters who “don’t want to work on a home,” or low-income, those earning $20,000 a year or less. They also are often single people, reports the Census Bureau.

Redfin posits four reasons people might stay in a rental longer. First, homeownership is out of reach for many people. Second, the number of homes for sale has decreased. Third, move-in rents increased dramatically during the pandemic, and continue to, and renewal rents not so much. Fourth, renting has risen as a lifestyle, becoming more appealing than buying a home.

Also, as Mike pointed out, it costs a lot of money to move, not to mention the huge hassle, thus not something to be undertaken lightly. But people do move occasionally, some for reasons beyond a landlord’s control. One would be if they cannot afford the rent. That could be the result of a job loss or increased expenses such as a medical bill. They might also have landed a job that will require their moving. Higher or lower rent could result, but the option of staying put doesn’t factor in.

Optional reasons include an apartment that’s too small or too large. Others have to do with issues with their current home such as maintenance, where the landlord doesn’t keep up the property, or bad neighbors, where the landlord doesn’t insist on civil behavior from tenants. A bad neighborhood will also send people to a new home, as will separation, divorce, or marriage. Some of those reasons can be affected by the rental owner who can do his or her best to make the situation tolerable or even pleasant for a good tenant.

For rental owners, as you know, it also costs a lot of money to find a new tenant. The profit-making question for the rental owner asks how to encourage their renters to stay where they are. It begins when a new tenant moves in and the landlord shows he or she values that tenant. Maybe just a welcome note with coupons from local businesses, or a follow-up a day or so after they’ve moved in are all it takes. That says to a new tenant that their landlord does care and isn’t just a money-grubbing rent collector.

It continues during the tenancy with regular inspections and fixing what’s broken promptly, maybe within 24 hours. And never promising anything they can’t do or which will take longer than they might think,

Some rental owners ask for feedback from their renters, maybe with a survey form on the company website where the renters pay the rent. The important thing is that then they report the results and tell them what they plan to do to correct any deficiencies, always under promising and over delivering.

Come lease renewal time or even before that, they do something to reward their good tenants by writing and mailing or delivering, not emailing, a thank-you note or give a small gift. The important point is to always appreciate them. They will remember.

Also they know their tenants’ names, their children’s names, their pets’ names, where they work, when their birthdays are. They create a database with all that information.

Finally, don’t trade bad service or conditions for lower rent. Orvel Ray Wilson, author of Guerilla Selling in an article entitled “A Crash Course in Customer Recourse” wrote “Guerillas track both satisfiers and dissatisfiers. Satisfiers and dissatisfiers are independent. That is, failing to provide a satisfier will not provoke a negative response, and providing more satisfiers does not necessarily compensate for a dissatisfier. For example, lower prices (satisfier) will not compensate for poor housekeeping (dissatisfier).”

Substitute “landlord” for “guerilla.” The rent is low but the place is in shambles, paint peeling, much needing repair, just little things, but the place looks shabby. Tenants (especially good ones) don’t think about the rent being low, only that the place doesn’t look very good. They might even think the rent is too high for a “dump like this.”

You can charge market rents or higher if you provide good service, but lower rents won’t get good tenants to trade off for unsatisfactory conditions, only not-so-good tenants, the ones who expect to live in dumps.

Keeping good tenants means keeping your eye on the customer service ball. Never miss an opportunity to do the little things and the big things to provide top-notch service to your tenants. And don’t neglect the opportunity to remind them of what you’ve done. Do these things and you can look forward to having your good tenants stay with you a long time and thank you for being their landlord.

Yes, people are going to move sometimes, but good business demands that we make it something they don’t want to do because you provide a great place to live.

Sponsored by Zip Reports where they do employment and rental screening. Contact Robert L. Cain at bob@cainpublications.com

By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2024, Cain Publications, Inc.

One bad tenant can destroy a rental business. That’s why we screen applicants carefully by examining credit reports, rental histories, employment information, and verifying that the information is accurate and belongs to the person applying to rent. Failure to do that is a disservice to other tenants and to our investment. But you know that already.

To ensure that we get accurate data from an applicant, many rental owners rely on third-party screening companies. They use them because they can check things that rental owners don’t have access to. And they do a thorough job of it. Nothing wrong with thorough screening. It’s just good business. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on April 29, 2024 issued a Guidance regarding how we must screen applicants to avoid running afoul of the Fair Housing Act by screening “too thoroughly.”

In that Guidance, they admit, “Housing providers have a legitimate interest in selecting tenants who will pay their rent and otherwise comply with lawful requirements of their lease. However, some tenant screening practices do not in fact serve these goals.”  Who’s their “bad guy” here? Tenant screening companies, says HUD.

“These issues have been magnified in recent years by the increasing reliance by housing providers on tenant screening companies to drive tenant selection decisions. An increasing number of tenant screening companies claim that they use advanced technologies, such as machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence (‘AI’). These technologies can increase these companies’ capacity to access and analyze information about applicants that has not been widely used for rental decisions until recently but may have little bearing on whether someone will comply with their lease.” Or so asserts the Guidance from HUD.

Just how are they running afoul of the Fair Housing Act? The tools they use gather data from numerous sources, put it all together, and come up with a “screening” score that might violate the Fair Housing Act if the application is rejected.

You see, as the Guidance reports, “Even when there is no intent to discriminate, a policy or practice violates the Fair Housing Act if it has a discriminatory effect and (i) the policy or practice is not necessary to achieve a substantial, legitimate, non-discriminatory interest or (ii) the interest can be served by a less discriminatory alternative.” They cite regulation 24 CFR 100.500 which reads in part, “(a)Discriminatory effect. A practice has a discriminatory effect where it actually or predictably results in a disparate impact on a group of persons . . .because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” There’s the magic phrase, “Disparate Impact,” a catchall for otherwise neutral requirements that might possibly negatively affect a member of a protected class.

Lest you think that only screening companies are on the hook for a violation of the Fair Housing Act or the Guidance from HUD, the rental owners who hired them are, too. It’s basic contract law. The person hiring a contractor is just as responsible for any illegal or unsafe practices as the contractor is.

HUD issued six “Guiding Principles for Non-Discriminatory Screenings,” many of which are things that rental owners do already. But a couple of them leave questions that most rental owners could be unsure of without legal advice.

1. Choose relevant screening criteria. HUD’s Guidance says they “should be waived if not relevant to the applicant’s individual circumstances.” How can you necessarily judge relevancy for that applicant? And suppose you “waive” a requirement for one applicant but consider it relevant for another and reject that person? That leaves the door open for a HUD complaint from another member of a protected class. The example HUD uses is for evictions where the tenant prevailed. That is supposedly not relevant. But if you look at the case, the tenant might have prevailed because the rental owner made an error in the filing. It wasn’t that the tenant didn’t deserve eviction; it was just that the landlord didn’t do it right.
2. Use only accurate records. That calls upon landlords to become expert at interpreting data for accuracy plus being required to prove the data are correct.
3. Follow the applicable screening policy. That’s just good business sense. If you’ve already delineated what you will legally check to decide if an applicant meets your standards.
4. Be transparent with applicants. Most rental owners who know their stuff already write out rental policies and requirements and hand them to applicants. That’s all HUD asks for in this case.
5. Allow applicants to challenge negative information. Don’t you do that already?
6. Design and test complex models for Fair Housing Complaints. Here’s a rabbit hole that’s a cinch to get lost in. HUD’s explanation doesn’t create a map of the hole. “Screeners that use complex models should choose types that are more interpretable, especially when doing so does not meaningfully reduce accuracy or fairness.” Their clarification may be even more obtuse: “If a highly complex model has a discriminatory effect, the model’s lack of transparency could make it hard to prove that a legally sufficient justification exists for the criteria used for a denial decision.” How are we supposed to follow a Guidance whose meaning we can’t decipher?

HUD then “clarifies” three screenings that rental owners most often do to test applications.   The first is credit history. “Black and Brown persons are more likely to have inaccurate credit reports or have had experiences that resulted in low or no credit scores.” What does HUD suggest? “Because of these disparities, overbroad screenings for credit history may have an unjustified discriminatory effect based on race or other protected characteristics. How much, then, can you accommodate poor or nonexistent credit and still operate in a businesslike manner. HUD suggests looking at their rental history and if they had been paying rent regularly. But you’d take that into consideration, anyway. We don’t care if Visa doesn’t get paid as often as they would prefer as long as the rent gets paid as agreed. But long-overdue bills can result in wage garnishments and car repossessions.

Second is eviction history. HUD states that Blacks are evicted more or most often. So they say we shouldn’t use, but don’t define, old, incomplete, irrelevant data especially when a better measure is available. The worry comes when an eviction is ignored for one applicant but not for another and the rejected applicant files a Fair Housing complaint.

Third are criminal records. “Persons who have been involved with the criminal justice system are disproportionately individuals with disabilities and Black and Brown persons, and therefore overbroad criminal records screening policies are likely to have an unjustified discriminatory effect.” We are supposed to look at the nature, severity, or how long ago they occurred and ignore arrest records if they didn’t result in a conviction, just like we ignore failed evictions. A special case is if records are old or for offenses not directly “relevant” to tenancy. And what does relevant mean in this case? Some will obviously be irrelevant, but how relevant are convictions for drug sales, drug manufacturing such as meth labs, or sex offenses? A case could be made by a crook’s attorney that those offenses happened long ago so shouldn’t count against the applicant. Here’s where there’s so much up in the air that it may be impossible to get a firm grasp on any of it.

The question remains, what’s a rental owner to do to ensure that he or she doesn’t end up in HUD’s crosshairs?  When you use a screening company, be as specific as possible about the property’s rental requirements. Your screening company probably already provides a form where you can input your specific requirements. Follow your rental requirements but examine them for “disparate impact.”

Sponsored by Zip Reports where they do employment and rental screening. Contact Robert L. Cain at bob@cainpublications.com