March 2025 Coach's Quiz
QUESTIONS
1.Keeping records that document your nondiscriminatory leasing and maintenance practices:
- Is an express requirement under the FHA
- Is a best practice that’s essential to demonstrate compliance with fair housing laws
- Is required if you keep paper records but not if you keep electronic records
- All of the above
Click to show the answer
Correct answer: b
Even though it’s not an express requirement of federal fair housing laws, documentation is the footprint of compliance and something that must be created at the time of action rather than recreated and assembled in retrospect after memories fade. So, b. is the right answer.
Wrong answers explained:
a. The reason a. is wrong is that unlike some federal housing laws, such as the Housing Choice Voucher program, which requires providers to keep records of signed forms HUD-9887 and HUD-9887-A (related to the tenant’s consent to the release of information), documentation isn’t an express requirement of the FHA but instead a best practice that’s nevertheless essential for compliance.
c. This is the wrong choice because documentation is vital regardless of whether landlords keep paper or electronic records. While the medium of records is relevant to recordkeeping techniques, it has no impact on the recordkeeping imperative.
2. Documentation and recordkeeping further fair housing compliance by enabling you to:
- Ensure effective implementation of your nondiscrimination policy
- Justify particular policies, practices, and actions in case you’re charged with discrimination
- Audit your records to identify potential problems and initiate corrective action
- All of the above
Click to show the answer
Correct answer: d
Reason: All three of the listed answers are actual compliance benefits you gain by effective recordkeeping and documentation. So, d. is the right answer.
Right answers explained:
a. The essence of fair housing compliance is to not only have nondiscrimination policies but also translate them into action on the ground. Documentation ensures you leave the fingerprints necessary to verify success in achieving that objective.
b. This answer is also right because one of the key purposes of recordkeeping is to create a paper/digital trail that enables you to tell the story of each action you take and how and why you took it.
c. This choice is also part of the correct answer because documentation does, in fact, set you up to audit your actions over a period of time to spot and take action to correct potential problem areas before they lead to complaints or enforcement action.
3. You reject an applicant who happens to be Muslim because of his poor credit history. The applicant sues you for religious discrimination. Which of the following records will NOT help you document that you had a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for rejecting his application?
- A rental policy setting clearly setting out the minimum credit score for applicants to be accepted into your community
- Records demonstrating that you explained your credit and other criteria to the applicant and all applicants
- Copies of the report indicating that the applicant’s credit score was below your minimum
- Records showing that you consistently reject applicants whose credit scores are below your required minimum
- Notes from the leasing agent indicating that the applicant was rude and had body odor
Click to show the answer
Correct answer: e
Reason: Fair housing means affording consistent and equal treatment to all while basing your rental decisions on objective criteria that are in no way based on a person’s race, religion, sex, etc. Accordingly, records suggesting that subjective and personal factors might have played a part in a decision to reject an applicant are evidence of not compliance but rather discrimination and increase your liability risks. And that’s precisely what the leasing agent’s notes about the applicant’s rudeness and body odor do in this scenario. So, choice e. is the correct answer.
Wrong answers explained:
a. A written nondiscrimination policy that clearly outlines your screening and selection criteria is a vital piece of the record documenting a landlord’s compliance with fair housing laws.
b. This is on the “good” list because records showing that you communicate your nondiscriminatory rental criteria to prospects furthers your attempts to prove that you comply.
c. The report of the actual credit score is a vital document because it shows whether an applicant does, or in this case, doesn’t meet your objective credit criteria.
d. Records showing that you consistently apply your credit criteria to other applicants documents that the required credit score minimum is a legitimate requirement rather than just a pretext to exclude Muslims and others the fair housing laws protect.
Answer: C. Deliberately. In the concluding chapter of Walden (a book about his experiences living for two years, two months, and two days by Walden Pond), Thoreau wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Answer: C. Deliberately. In the concluding chapter of Walden (a book about his experiences living for two years, two months, and two days by Walden Pond), Thoreau wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
