Remaining Fair Housing Compliant in Your Screening
Dec 19, 2023
Running a property and creating a welcoming community is a rewarding experience, but it also comes with a big responsibility: ensuring fair housing for all your residents. This important law protects people from discrimination in housing based on a variety of factors, including race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. As a property manager, it's your job to understand and comply with the Fair Housing Act.
Consistency is key
When it comes to Fair Housing, consistency is critical. This applies not only to your maintenance practices, but, just as importantly, to your resident screening.
Practicing Fair Housing in your day-to-day operations
Fair Housing can sound intimidating, but, by establishing the right culture, your team will be set up for success:
Treat everyone equally. This means providing the same quality of service and opportunities to all residents, regardless of their background. E.g., if you make an exception to any policy or procedure, make sure you provide the same information and options to all prospects and residents who are in the same situation.
Be mindful of your language. Avoid using discriminatory language.
Create clear and consistent policies. Make sure your policies are applied fairly to everyone, and that everyone understands them.
Be open to feedback. If you receive a complaint about a potential fair housing violation, take it seriously and investigate it thoroughly.
Resident screening is a key area of vulnerability
Setting different terms, conditions, or privileges for renting housing is a fair housing violation. For example, requiring higher security deposits from families with children or demanding higher application fees from only a certain race or religion of people are examples of discrimination in terms, conditions, or privileges.
As a result, it is critical that you delineate a repeatable, unbiased, and standardized process in your resident screening. Here are the four main tips for establishing and maintaining those protocols:
Create clear Approval vs. Denial criteria. Standardize all credit score, income, criminal, eviction, and rent performance requirements and apply those same criteria across ALL applicants at the property.
Team training and education. Compliance starts with education and awareness. Training your team and arming them with the knowledge to abide by all fair housing practices is key.
Reduce or eliminate human error or bias. Where possible, introduce technology, software, or other practices that replace subjectivity with more objectivity.
Create a checklist. Have your team execute the same punch list for every applicant. Reiterate the importance of this checklist to your team, and, if necessary, tie performance evaluations and/or compensation to the completion of these requirements.
Conclusion
In conclusion, implementing standardization and consistency across every aspect of your resident screening practice can be a complex and frustrating task for property managers. With so much human involvement and seemingly infinite paperwork, effective screening requires uniform and repeatable processes that eliminate as much human error and biases as possible. Reference checks are key area of vulnerability.
By providing an objective and standardized technology for conducting your landlord references, Trigo simplifies the reference check process by eliminating certain areas of subjectivity, inconsistency, and human error from your resident screening practices.
