Why Have Rules?
Rules make living in an apartment complex more comfortable, pleasant and convenient for tenants. It devolves on you as a landlord to ensure your tenants’ “quiet enjoyment” of their homes.
Often you include rules in the rental agreement, and that may be sufficient for single-family rentals. But, as you will see separate rules are essential for multi-family dwellings as small as a duplex if you expect to keep peace in the building, avoid constant complaints from tenants and keep good tenants.
Furthermore, to avoid claims of illegal discrimination, carefully craft rules for the entire building, making them equally applicable to everyone. These rules may duplicate those in the rental agreement, or they may duplicate them in part with others added to deal with specific situations that arise.
Obvious rules you want to include are:
• Safety reminders, such as, don’t open the door for strangers, and “doors of residents’ dwellings should be kept locked.”
• A reminder that the tenant should buy renter’s insurance and liability insurance.
Both of the above are for your protection as a landlord. Reminding tenants of safety and the fact that your insurance doesn’t cover their fire or burglary losses provides you some protection from lawsuits.
Some Standard House Rules
Below are occupancy rules that many landlords use in their properties. They may or may not be appropriate for yours, but all of them are reasonable and legal.
• Pets allowed only with a special pet agreement.
• Waterbeds permitted only with a special waterbed agreement.
• No loud noise that disturbs other tenants.
• No other disturbance of other tenants.
Well-crafted house rules are as important as rental policies and standards.
• No playing in the halls, garden or landscape areas
• No leaving toys in the halls
• Units shall be kept clean and free of debris, filth and rubbish.
• No storing of flammable materials
• Tenants must pay for unclogging drains and for overflows from bathtubs, showers and toilets
• No more than specified number of people in the dwelling unit
• No repairing of vehicles or storing inoperable vehicles on the premises
• Landlord not responsible for tenant losses because of lack of heat, refrigeration, or other services due to accident, act of God, or something beyond landlord’s control.
• Parking in assigned spaces only. Guests must use guest parking only or park on the street.
Other rules may come up as circumstances arise. You can change them at any time upon notice to all tenants as provided in your state’s Landlord/Tenant Law.
What you have to be careful of is writing rules that are discriminatory to a protected class. Many times that happens with rules that involve children. There is a right way and a wrong way to write the same rules:
Right
Residents and their guests are not permitted to play in the hall.
No more than four people may occupy the premises.
Any new residents must fill out a rental application and be approved by the landlord.
No lifeguard is on duty at the pool.
Tenants and their guests swim at their own risk.
Or, children 10 and under must be accompanied by an adult. No toys, bicycles, or other vehicles are to be left in the halls or walkways
Wrong
Children may not play in the hall.
No more than 2 children and two adults permitted to occupy the premises.
Children may not swim in the pool alone.
Children may not leave toys in the halls or walkways.
Why Enforce Rules?
The main reason for religiously enforcing rules is that eventually you will have to. The longer you wait to begin enforcing your house rules, the harder and more disruptive it will be. Once a tenant has gotten used to the idea that he or she can violate rules with impunity, you will have no way of stopping the rule violations short of threatening eviction.
A study by the US Census Bureau, called the Property Owners and Managers Survey, discovered that 40 percent of single-family rentals and 73 percent of multifamily properties had had problems with disruptive and/or undesirable behavior in the past two years. Even more telling is how the percentages increased with the size of the building. Eighty-five percent of rental properties with 50 or more units had had problems with disruptive and/or undesirable behavior, and 82 percent of properties with 20 to 49 units had had problems. At the same time only 45 percent of duplexes experienced similar difficulties.
Even for properties as small as three- and four-plexes some 65 percent experienced disruptive and/or undesirable behavior.
What all these numbers mean is that by virtue of the fact that you have lots of people living close together, you can almost count on having problems.
If you start from day one refusing to tolerate rule violations, you should have few problems in the future.
The second reason is that routine enforcement keeps good tenants. Good tenants want to live in properties where they don’t have to think about bad neighbors. If you allow tenants to get away with too much noise, wild parties, illegal parking, leaving possessions in common areas and similar things that irritate people, pretty soon good tenants move. Of course the bad tenants stay and have their parties. Pretty soon they are joined by more bad tenants just like them.
Eventually, the place looks just the way you would expect a complex with an infestation of bad tenants to look, junk spread everywhere, broken cars in the parking lot, beer bottles on the lawn. Then, when you have a vacancy, the good tenants take one look at the outside and don’t even bother to look at the inside. You’ll never have a chance of renting to them.
Ultimately the only solution will be a complete house cleaning, where you evict the whole lot of them, clean the place up and start all over again. It’s a lot easier, cheaper and more businesslike to enforce rules from the get go.
The third reason is for you, the landlord. House rules are like rental standards: if you don’t know what they are, how can you rent to someone who meets them? By creating reasonable occupancy rules you know what you expect of your tenants.
Good tenants want to live in properties where they don’t have to think about bad neighbors.
How to enforce the rules
The Property Owners and Managers Survey was instructive as to how landlords and managers in different sized properties handle disruptive and undesirable behavior. In the large complexes—over 20 units—the vast majority of managers deal with problems by first, talking to the offending tenant (83 percent) and by issuing a written warning (82 percent). An amazing 61 percent began eviction proceedings.
The numbers are greatly different with single-family properties. Landlords of those properties deal with bad behavior first by talking to the tenant just 30 percent of the time. In two-to-four-unit properties 54 percent of landlords talk to their tenants about poor behavior. In single-family properties just 14 percent issue a written warning, while 28 percent do in two-to-fourplexes. Only 12 percent begin eviction proceeding in single-family properties, while 24 percent do in small-plexes. An incredible 27 percent of singlefamily landlords don’t do anything at all!
What do these figures tell us? First, that managers and owners of large apartment complexes know how important it is to enforce the rules. They know that good tenants move if the complex begins to deteriorate. And since they are running a business that depends on good customers, they want to keep as many of those good customers as they can.
The figures also tell us that owners of smaller properties let a lot of things go that they probably shouldn’t. Why? It’s a lot of trouble to deal with tenant problems, and you don’t want hassles. You think that maybe they’ll just go away if you hide your eyes.
The eye-hiding behavior brings us back to the first reason you have to enforce the rules: you’re going to have to eventually. And the longer you let it go, the harder it’s going to be to fix the problems the tenant is causing.
We can all take a lesson from the large apartment complexes. When you have a problem with a tenant, deal with it now!
1. Talk to him or her, even if just by phone. Outline the difficulty you are having and ask for an explanation. Maybe there’s a good one, maybe not.
2. Follow up the call with a written warning. It doesn’t have to be a notice to clean up your act in 15 days or move in 30 (or whatever you have where you live), just a written confirmation of what you told them on the phone. You can get these forms from your local apartment or landlord association.
3. If the problem is serious enough, start eviction proceedings. That is where you might send the notice that they have 15 days to clean it up or move out.
The safest solution is for you to have a checklist of how you proceed in dealing with tenants with whom you are having difficulties. Make sure you deal with each the same way to avoid fair housing complaints.
As landlords our duty is to our good customers—good tenants—the ones who pay our mortgages, our property taxes, our insurance, take care of the properties, and hopefully put some money in our pockets. We don’t do our good customers a service when we tolerate behavior by our bad customers that is likely to encourage them to move.