First Come, First Serve Rental Application

First Come, First Serve Rental Application by NY-LL on June 11, 2012 @22:40

SELECTING AMONG SEVERAL APPLICANTS
How does a landlord choose between several applications received within a short time frame, all of which satisfy his minimum requirements for qualification for the rental unit, and what does the landlord tell the applicants when he has made his choice? Four or five written applications with checks for holding deposits and credit check fees may have been received during a Sunday afternoon of showing, for example, and now the landlord must choose among them on Monday morning. The choice must be made in such a way as to avoid both the actuality and appearance of fair housing law violations. We can only speak in general terms here, you will need to check with your local enforcement agency to ensure you are in compliance with regulations they have in force, but the following should be of value as a general approach.

Keep in mind what fair housing laws are designed to do. They are designed to prevent you from discriminating against applicants on prohibited grounds.

These are usually race, sex, handicap, etc. You, as a landlord are not in the business of providing preferences for such protected classes, nor should you try to do so even if you want to. Your task is not to allow their status to enter into your decision making process.

There are two distinct schools of thought on how to do this. One says that you should take the applications on a first come, first served basis, so that the first in time gets the unit if his application checks out in the screening process, even if there is a better qualified applicant who came in later. The second says that you should sort the applicants by the strength of the information on the application that is important to you, and select the first one whose information is verified.

Realty professionals tend to favor the first method, for the same reason that human resource managers in big companies like racial quotas and oppose legislation to eliminate them. By using an arbitrary number or event to make the selection for them, they think they can avoid being sued for discrimination. In your case, if a housing investigator comes to see you, you just say, "I didn't decide anything, I just took the first one that came in and qualified." Then you show him the applications and the date and time written on them. In reality, a resourceful housing advocate will find a way to sue you if he wants to anyway, so this is not a route to lawsuit proofing.

There are strong advocates for the second method. They point out, quite rightly, that there is nothing in the fair housing law that precludes you from judging applications on the basis of their quality, as opposed to their rank in time. As John observes, "I think one angle to consider is that many of us are "moms and pops" who live in (or very near) the property and have a more one on one, face to face relationship with our tenants (and neighbors) and can be hurt more easily if we don't look for the best possible tenants."

This is a telling point from the financial point of view alone. A landlord with 3 or 4 units is much more severely injured by a deadbeat than a landlord with 100 or 200.

You could also use either method depending on the situation that confronts you. If all the applications are pretty much the same, so that no one or two stand out, then use the first come, first served method.

The second part of the question is, what to tell the ones who do not get the apartment. This applies to whatever method you choose to select among them.

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Re: First Come, First Serve Rental Application by NY-LL on June 11, 2012 @22:50	[ Reply ]

The practice seem to differentiate between the “first come, first serve” meeting the minimal qualifications (even if a better qualified applicant comes later) and the other is the “best qualified” with the stronger qualifications (amongst all the qualified applicants within the rental pool).