As the Broker/Owner of a small (100 single family units) property management company, I try to stay on top of the learning curve. By attending classes on a yearly basis, I keep up to date on legal issues affecting our industry.
I had the privilege of attending a class sponsored by the local Rental Housing Association. The subject was ADA Compliance. ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) was created to insure fair and equal treatment of people with disabilities. Unfortunately, with any new law comes a host of people trying to capitalize on it.
One common area where ADA is used to extort money from unwary Landlords has to do with pets. While a Landlord has the right to enforce a pet policy, that policy cannot prohibit a tenant from having "therapy animals".
These "therapy animals" are not considered pets, but a necessary part of the disabled tenant's therapy, so the standard rules do not apply. You cannot say no, and you cannot charge a pet deposit.
Example:
We received numerous inquiries over the past year from an individual that has been shopping our rental vacancies on Craigslist. She described herself as a mother of a disabled child with 5 or 6 animals (the story changed slightly each time she inquired). When we responded to her inquiries, she never knew anything about the property(ies) she was inquiring about, so she asked the same questions repeatedly. What is the address, the rent, do you accept pets?
Every time we responded to this individual, we were careful not to say anything that could come back to haunt us later. Pets are negotiable. We began to get suspicious mainly because of several key factors:
1. The individual never knew anything (not even the basic Craigslist info) about the rentals she was emailing inquiries about, leading us to believe she was sending out mass emailings to many different rental ads.
2. She repeated the question "do you accept pets?" after repeated answers that "pets are negotiable", always in writing, often over the course of 7-10 emails.
3. Clearly disappointed that she could not trap us into saying anything that could later be construed as non-ADA compliant, she would never agree to view any of the rentals she targeted over the last year. She did, however, convey that she had recently come into a large sum of money regarding a lawsuit, and hoped that would outweigh any problems we might have in qualifying her. I still wonder what the lawsuit was regarding, but I have the distinct feeling i know already.
While one could make a legitimate legal argument that 5 or 6 animals posed an "undue financial burden" on the Landlord as they would affect his/her Landlord insurance policy, the legal fees involved with fighting the battle often outweigh the amount of money these people are trying to collect. Thus, most Landlords settle for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars per occurrance, though many attorneys advise that if you are faced with this kind of extortion attempt, it is imperative that you fight even the small fights, as a settlement only perpetuates the problem.
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