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We present scenarios based on actual cases. Your job: Spot the fair housing mistake.

Cases from the past year offer six important lessons.

While it may seem like routine business, responding to transfer requests may have significant fair housing implications.

Let’s play a quick game of fair housing word association in the multifamily leasing context:

Housing discrimination.

For many, this phrase summons up images of landowners seeking to avoid leasing their property to persons of particular races, nationalities, or other protected characteristics. And that, in a sense, is rental housing discrimination in its traditional form.

While many fees are perfectly legitimate, some fees add up to illegal discrimination.

We’ll tell you what happened in each case—and how it may impact your property.

Most of you are pretty familiar with what the fair housing laws require. But it’s in the court rooms and administrative tribunals where the broad rules and principles of fair housing law are actually applied to real world situations. So, every once in a while we need to take a step back and look at what has been taking place in fair housing litigation across the country. And that’s precisely what this month’s lesson will do.

We’ll give you six strategies you can implement to put the guidance principles into action.

On average, 25,000 to 30,000 fair housing complaints are filed against landlords in the U.S. each year. Fueling this massive wave of litigation isn’t just the national determination to crack down on discrimination but the glut of potential plaintiffs, including not just the individual victims but also their allies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), state and local fair housing agencies, and nongovernment fair housing organizations (FHOs). You may think that as long as you obey all the laws, you have nothing to worry about.

One reason that complying with fair housing laws is so challenging is that you can’t delegate your nondiscrimination duties the way you can with other legal obligations. Managing your own personal conduct isn’t enough; you’re also responsible for the third parties you hire to market, manage, police, landscape, repair, maintain, and perform other services for your housing community. This includes not only the employees you directly hire, train, and oversee but also the outside businesses you engage as contractors.

A look at recent cases yields some important lessons.

It’s against the law to commit housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status and handicap (disability).

In today’s highly competitive rental market, effective advertising is crucial to attracting the right renters. But for these very same reasons, your advertising and marketing practices can get you into fair housing hot water. The advertising media you select and the message you craft may be illegally exclusive.