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Tenant screening has become a $1 billion industry. Like many landlords across America, you may look to third-party screening companies to gather and analyze key information about rental prospects and issue a report assessing how likely they are to pay rent and obey the key terms of their lease. But while enabling you to steer clear of problem tenants and make sounder rental decisions, relying on outside reports to decide whether to accept or reject applicants carries potential fair housing risks.
Follow our five best practices when using AI-based digital ad platforms.
Savvy use of digital media for marketing purposes can be a game changer for landlords. But it can also get them into fair housing trouble. The same artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithmic technologies that empower you to streamline and target your marketing can also be used, whether deliberately or inadvertently, to exclude groups the fair housing laws protect.
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.
In this lesson, we’re going to review the fair housing rules as they apply to advertising your community, most of which is probably done online now. Although communities still run print ads in newspapers and apartment guides and on billboards, a large part of their marketing effort is devoted to promoting the property on: (1) websites that list rental vacancies, like Craiglist; (2) social media sites that show ads to their users and allow properties to create their own homepages, like Facebook; and (3) their own community’s website.
In this lesson, the Coach reviews fair housing rules banning discriminatory statements. The rules apply to discriminatory advertising, but there’s more to it than that, since they apply to all kinds of statements, including:
This month’s lesson tackles some fair housing questions that always crop up this time of year. Every holiday season, it seems, there’s a story about disputes over nativity scenes and other religious displays in town squares or public buildings.
This month, Fair Housing Coach reviews fair housing protections based on familial status. The phrase “familial status” isn’t that common in everyday life, so it’s easy to get confused over exactly what it means and whom it covers.
In this month’s lesson, Fair Housing Coach explains how to comply with fair housing laws banning discrimination based on source of income. The federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) doesn’t prohibit discrimination based on source of income, but an increasing number of states and municipalities have added these provisions to their fair housing or civil rights laws in recent years.
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