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Section 8 landlords owe $400K in back-taxes

An I-Team investigation for 13 ABC-WTVG has revealed that local landlords who continue to receive government money to provide low-income housing owe a combined $400,000 in real estate back-taxes to Lucas County.

During last night's 11:00 news broadcast, I-Team reporter Ronnie Dahl interviewed Lucas County Treasurer Wade Kapszukiewicz who said that according to a department audit, nearly one in five local Section 8 landlords were behind on their property tax bills. Following 15 months of collection efforts, a combined $400,000 tax bill is still past due.

A representative of the Lucas Metropolitan Housing Authority, which administers Section 8 contracts with local landlords, told WTVG that the LMHA resists terminating contracts with landlords who owe back-taxes because administrators do not want to see Section 8 residents displaced from their homes.

Kapszukiewicz said that 52 county entities -- including the Toledo Zoo, Toledo Area Metroparks, TARTA and local public schools -- rely on property tax monies to fund their operations.

"If you're going to have your hand out to receive federal government money, HUD money, to be a Section 8 landlord," warned Kapszukiewicz, "you better made sure you're using your other hand to pay your real estate taxes."

WTVG currently does not have a text version of their report on their website; however as of this morning you can access the video report from the station's home page.

BG landlord's lawsuit against city will proceed

A Wood County judge has refused to dismiss a Bowling Green landlord's lawsuit against city officials.

The suit, filed by the owner of Brentwood Estates LLC, claims that city officials conducted stealth searches of tenants' mailboxes in order to obtain information about occupancy in the rental units as part of the city's crackdown on Bowling Green's maximum occupancy law.

You can read about the ruling that the lawsuit will be allowed to proceed here in the Toledo Blade, which reports that Bowling Green's maximum occupancy law has been on the books since 1975, but has been more strictly enforced only in the past few years. The law states that a maximum of three unrelated persons may live together in one residential unit in neighborhoods that are zoned single-family residential.

And you thought YOUR roommate was bad ... .

Sure, your roommate may have stiffed you on the phone bill last month, and maybe he or she mooches your food, but a 19-year-old freshman at the University of Akron has a roommate story that might beat out all other bad-roommate stories.

The University assigned him to a dorm room with a 45-year-old ex-con who served prison time in the 1990s for robbing an elderly woman with a pellet gun.

As reported in central Pennsylvania's Beacon Journal, the University is now reviewing its don't-ask, don't-tell policy regarding admission of felons to the school and its residence halls.

Must you accept pets to avoid being sued?

Does a tenant's bipolar disease mandate that you allow him to own a cat?

How about a tenant's depression? If his doctor suggests to the tenant that he get a dog to alleviate his depression, are you required by law to allow the dog to live on your property, even if all your units are advertised as "No pets" units?

If you refuse to rent to a person claiming to need a pet for bipolar disease or depression, are you violating Ohio Civil Rights laws?

According to a recent discussion on WTAM 11 (Cleveland) radio host Bob Frantz's blog, "Frantz Rantz," the answer to all those questions might be yes.

What's more, Ohio rental property owners may be shocked to know that the Ohio Civil Rights Commission (OCRC) allegedly is running sting operations to catch landlords discriminating against people who own therapy animals, in much the same way they investigate claims of discrimination against particular ethnicities or families with children.

The blog entry includes a letter from one of Mr. Frantz's listeners, a Lake County landlord. In it, he details being "stung" by an OCRC investigation which included being duped by Commission plants pretending to suffer, in one case, depression, and in another, bipolar disease. The plants claimed that having pets eased their conditions and inquired if the landlord would bend his "No Pets" policy to accommodate them. After considering their requests, which in one case involved a German Shepherd, the landlord chose not to rent to the depression-afflicted gentleman due to there being small children living on the property. He then turned away the bipolar tenant with cats, stating that since he had just refused to bend his policy for one potential tenant, he could not turn around and bend it for another one.

A full year after turning away these potential tenants, the landlord received notice that he was being sued for discrimination by the OCRC.

We at www.easyrentcheck.com advise all Northwest Ohio rental property owners to talk with their attorneys about their compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Housing Act, and with the OCRC. If you are approached by a prospective tenant claiming to need a service or therapy animal, it may not be a bad idea to directly contact the OCRC and inquire about your obligations. Last, it is well within your rights to require a medical prescription or letter from a prospective tenant's medical doctor, to prove that indeed the service animal is necessary.

Surely in the case of a visually impaired person, or one who is wheelchair-bound, the necessity of a service animal is obvious and in most cases, the animals used to assist persons with these disabilities are rigorously trained, tested, vaccinated, spayed/neutered, and certified as therapy dogs. But what about less evident disabilities, such as mental disorders, and what about classifying any ol' untrained, uncertified, unneutered, hair-shedding, fear-aggressive, barky, bitey Spot or Fido with an unknown veterinary history as a "therapy animal"?

Unfortunately, in the case of mental disorder-prescribed therapy animals, there is no certification or training program required to classify dogs or cats; and there is no legislated list that states for a fact which diseases, disorders and conditions medically require the assistance of animals and which ones do not.

This is where it gets confusing for rental property owners, who may find themselves -- like Mr. Frantz's listener -- unknowingly and unintentionally breaking the law.

easyrentcheck.com site news

We at www.easyrentcheck.com are pleased to announce that we've contracted D.A. Wyatt, the creator of http://www.buckeye-classifieds.com, to make some changes and fix some of the quirks at our site.

We had been having a slight problem with our Search by ID feature in that our drop-down menu refused to put listing IDs in the correct numerical order, but thanks to Ms. Wyatt, it's working fine now.

Also, we now have separate Private Policy, Terms of Service and Equal Housing Opportunity pages on our website. Our web designer had previously put these items all on one page, but now they are more easily accessible to our site visitors.

But the most exciting changes are yet to come!

We've long been dissatisfied with the www.easyrentcheck.com sign-up process, which requires property owners with vacant rentals to pay for their listing space first and then create their User ID account second. This has always seemed a bit backwards to us, and we've asked Ms. Wyatt if she can re-write the process so that users will create their User ID account before being asked for any money. The new sign-up process idea seems much more ethical and it should be more comfortable for new users at our site. It will also allow property owners to create an account even if they do not currently have a rental vacancy to advertise; later, when a vacancy needs to be listed, they will easily be able to log in under their username and purchase a listing credit.

Additionally, we at www.easyrentcheck.com have been dissatisfied with our site's inability to allow users to renew their listings. Currently, if you as a property owner list your vacant rental unit for 30 days but then decide, as your 30 days are about to expire, that you'd like to extend your listing to 60 days, the database requires you to purchase an additional 30-day listing and re-enter all your property's information. We realize this is terribly inconvenient, and we've asked Ms. Wyatt to explore options for allowing users to self-renew or extend a listing beyond its initial listing period. We will keep you posted if it looks like this will be possible. In the meantime, if you'd like to extend your property's listing, please use the Contact Us link on our site and let us know. We will manually extend your listing at no cost to you! Make sure to let us know, though, before the listing expires. Once Day 31 hits on your 30-day listing, the information will have already been deleted from our system.

Last, we want to apologize to each of our users who have created a Notify Me alert at our site. It seems we have a bit of quirk with it; users are receiving multiple Notify Me e-mails when in fact they should only receive one each time a new rental listing matches their search preferences. It is never our intention at www.easyrentcheck.com to spam a user's e-mail account! We cannot apologize enough for this inconvenience, and rest assured that we are working on the problem.

Sincere thanks to our users for their patience as we upgrade www.easyrentcheck.com, Northwest Ohio's locally owned rental search site.

Landlords must now register with county auditor

Here's something The Editor hadn't heard about until she read Friday's Toledo Blade.

The Blade reports that a new law requires the owners of rental properties to register their contact information with their respective county auditors.

According to the article, the law went into effect a month ago, although neither Lucas nor Fulton county auditors are yet prepared with the proper forms for registration.

From the article:

It isn't always easy for police, fire, and housing code enforcement officials to quickly find the owner of a rental unit in a crisis.

That is because property records sometimes list only the name of an obscure corporate owner without solid contact information.

But a new Ohio law aims to correct the problem.

It requires owners of rental housing - even one living unit - to register with the auditor of the county in which the dwelling is located. They must furnish the name of a company official along with an address and telephone number for the owner.

They are required to list and provide information about each property owned in the county. And out-of-state owners must identify a contact person who lives in Ohio.

The complete article, written by Gary T. Pakulski, is linked above.