What should property management companies be considering when it comes to compliance monitoring? Join us as we share tips and a checklist to help everyone attain greater fair housing compliance.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Table of contents
In fair housing, compliance monitoring is critical. For some companies, this is done by the compliance department, but for smaller companies, this means taking steps during supervision to review whether thorough documentation exists whenever files are reviewed.
Suppose a property has a deficiency in complying with appropriate policies or taking each step in the reasonable accommodations process. In that case, it will save your company so much money and hassle for this problem to be identified in-house and corrected long before it is discovered during a fair housing investigation.
Consider this scenario
A resident calls to complain that they received a rent increase when their neighbor did not. You look in the file, and there is no documentation as to why this has happened. Now what? Chances are this is nothing more than an oversight, but how will it appear to a fair housing investigator? Could this appear as preferential treatment or, worse yet, discrimination?
In this scenario, we have not one but two failures. First off, there was the failure to document the reason for the difference in rent. The second failure was that the mistake wasn’t caught and corrected, resulting in a compliance failure.
This is a matter for training, training, training!
Do not assume that everyone knows what information needs to be added to the documentation or that the compliance supervisor knows what they should be looking for. Proper training can avoid both of these situations.
If a compliance issue has been identified, this can be used as a training moment to make sure everyone on the team knows where things went sideways and the proper way to correct them.
Final takeaway
The final takeaway is that proper compliance monitoring is essential for fair housing compliance and will save your company time and money by avoiding costly lawsuits.
Get Your Fair Housing Compliance Checklist Here
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