Metro Apartment Manager, December 2006

Q: We are thinking of making some of our apartments nonsmoking. Can we do that without tripping over fair housing law?

A: The simple answer to the question is: yes. But if you had said, “Can we do that without considering fair housing” the answer would have been no. Only those interested in how we get to the answer, or in the implications of the answer, should read on.

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Metro Apartment Manager, August 2006

Q: We nearly had to evict some tenants. But before we filed, we talked them out. They left a car—I can’t tell if it runs or not—in the parking lot, also a couch on the front porch but said we could give it to some neighbors. They said they understood they’d lose their deposit since they didn’t clean. So that means all I have to deal with is the car. How do I do that?

A: Property management is a complicated business, controlled by real estate agency regulations, state law, sometimes municipal ordinances, contracts, with a few federal laws (lead paint, fair housing) thrown in. It’s easy to get confused.

If rental turnovers are part of your every-day job, you know instinctively what to do. But if you don’t do it every day, or even if you do, it’s useful to have something like a checklist to be sure you get everything done you need to. I love checklists. They help keep me on track. So I’ve developed several that guide me in my business. One checklist I use is triggered when a tenant notifies me (or sometimes when I notify the tenant) that he is moving out. (If you’d like to see the checklist I use, it’s called “Move Out/In checklist” and is found on the Resources page.)

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Metro Apartment Manager, July 2006

Q: I gave my tenants a 30-day no-cause termination notice but they say they’re going to fight it. So it looks like I will have to evict them. Can you tell me what to expect?

A: Yikes. Isn’t this the same question we dealt with last month? Well, yes it is. And we said we’d talk a bit about negotiated settlements.

Oregon courts (and others around the country) are pushing litigants (that is people suing one another) to work things out without using the court process. After all, judges are quick to point out, a judgment by the court will be viewed as arbitrary; it’s sort of a zero-sum game where one person wins only because another person loses. Settlements that are not imposed, but agreed to — however reluctantly — by the parties are the opposite. Neither gets everything desired, but both get something, so it is a non-zero-summed game.

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Metro Apartment Manager (PDF), April 2006

Q: We’re considering prohibiting smoking in our small plex because we think it will improve the quality of tenants we get. Is that legal?

A: Fair housing laws protect people who belong to protected classes. That means you can’t say you rent to them because they are members of a protected class. Of course, all of us belong to protected classes: we all are one sex or another (or… but that’s for another column), one race or another (or more than one), one religion or another (or none).

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Metro Apartment Manager, February 2006

Q: Generally, I don’t allow pets. I did rent to someone with a seeing eye dog one time. Now I have a tenant who simply wants a cat as a “companion animal.” Do I have to do that? I’m inclined to just give her a 30-day notice and ask her to leave.

A: Coming between people — and not just tenants — and their pets is often more perilous than coming between a mother and her first born. If you allow pets, you greatly expand your universe of potential tenants. I believe, too, that good pet owners make great tenants, because it’s harder for them to move and people who take care of their pets generally take care of their home as well. I suspect, though, that roughly half of rental housing doesn’t allow pets. Some tenant advocates would like to prohibit landlords from not allowing pets. The Province of Ontario does exactly that. The City of Toronto even makes pet owners a protected class.

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Metro Apartment Manager, January 2006

Q: Gresham recently increased its business license fee so I’m now paying $25 per unit, which adds up to serious money since we have 60 units. We decided to pass that on to our tenants, so sent them a bill for the annual fee. A few objected that it didn’t seem fair. I explained that when taxes and utilities go up, we increase the rent. The only reason we billed this directly was that I don’t feel this kind of tax on landlords is fair, so wanted the tenants to know about it and to know they were paying it. One tenant is adamantly refusing to pay. I suppose I could take it out of his security deposit. Otherwise, am I correct that I need to use a 30-day for-cause notice?

A: You are right that the remedy for nonpayment of anything other than rent for the current month is a thirty-day notice. You are also right that you can take nonpayment of a fee out of the security deposit. The latter comes with caveats, however.

Security deposits can be withheld by a landlord for any physical damage to the premises and “to remedy the tenant’s defaults” under the rental agreement. That makes having a well-thought-out rental agreement important. I remember reading a rental agreement that neglected to require the tenant to return the premises clean — after the landlord had taken the tenant to court for not cleaning and therefore losing.

The law covering security deposits requires the landlord within 31 days after then end of the tenancy to account for any amount not returned to the former tenant within that time. The law doesn’t talk about claims made against the deposit during the tenancy but I know landlords routinely charge such little stuff to deposits and send tenants notice. Doing that has the benefit of not losing track of amounts owed you or arguing that the statute of limitations hasn’t run on that claim, but it has the disadvantage of reducing your security deposit which you may need some day.

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