Things to Consider When Renting to Family with Kids

In the future, you are going to rent to families with kids if you own a rental property. Normally, this is not an issue. However, landlords are sometimes reasonably concerned about the damage that kids can cause on their properties. Kids have all forms of accidents that can lead to small property damage. This can include drawing on the walls with markers and crayons and spilling juice on carpets.

So, can you refuse a family with kids? Well, to make things simple, no. Here are a couple of things you should know if you are managing a rental property without the help of a property management Garden Grove professional.

Preventing Discrimination Against Kids

You should place your selection criteria and applicant screening on paper and follow it. This will help protect yourself. To guarantee that it is compliant with applicable laws, you can hire a lawyer to take a look at it. After that, you should keep careful records that show that you picked tenants according to these particular criteria.

Of course, your criteria should not take gender, national origin, religion, race, and age into account. You should look at references, rent/income ratios, job history, credit scores, and much more and you’ve got to follow these criteria.

You are opening the possibility to potential enforcement action if you show fear about how the pregnant tenant is going to handle the stairs, how dangerous the bus stop is for children, or you start talking about the busy streets.

Forbidden Rules Against Kids

There are also particular forms of rules targeting kids that you can’t make. Here is a couple of them:

• You cannot pass a blanket ban on tricycles.
• You cannot have special adult hours for using the pool. However, you can state that the pool is off-limits during particular hours of the day if using the pool at that moment disturbs other tenants or nearby homes.
• You cannot restrict kids from using the pool. However, you can prohibit unsupervised kids from using the pool.

Be Cautious with Your Marketing Materials and Ads

It won’t be right to create an ad on any online platform that says something that basically means “NO KIDS” since the law says you cannot discriminate against families with kids.

For those who don’t know, there are a lot of landlords out there who have gotten into legal issues for subtler means of discriminating families with kids, even though it was not obvious that there was any criminal intent to discourage. You can get into trouble for just being careless about describing your property if you aren’t careful.

For instance, here are a couple of descriptions for a rental property that can be interpreted as attempts to discriminate families with kids:

• Quiet setting for mature people.
• Ideal for college students.
• Ideal for urban professionals.
• Perfect for couples
• Singles or couples only

You can get sued for explicit discernment in every case. You might also draw the attention of fair house inspectors. They will act as an applicant and will examine you if you’re violation the Fair Housing Act.