Small landlords face big risks

By Abigail Goldman

Saturday, Aug. 30, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Pity the poor landlords. No, not those who manage massive apartment complexes, but the little guys, the residential landlords, the grandmas and single moms and second-home owners who rent out a room or an investment property on the side. The small operators are the biggest suckers when it comes to criminal renters.

This is bad news that, like all things these days, leads back to a bad economy. It’s a compounded problem, too. Part 1: People who can’t sell their houses are renting them instead. Part 2: People who have been booted from foreclosed properties are looking to rent. Part 3: Managers of the valley’s apartment complexes, in an effort to make them safer and less susceptible to criminal renters, have started doing criminal background checks on applicants, turning away convicted felons, who then show up at small landlords’ doors.

The result is more landlords renting individual properties, only to find them used for drug sales, prostitution and other crimes, Metro Police say. Homeowners don’t put potential renters through anywhere near the same screening that large apartment complex owners do, and as a result, end up with bad-news tenants.

In an effort to help these little landlords, Metro held a seminar Wednesday night, advising 40 or so people on how to protect themselves from undesirable renters. The basic message: Set really high standards that every applicant must meet.

It sounds simple, but it’s kind of sticky — landlords can attempt to weed out undesirables, but they can’t discriminate. And so a lot of the class was devoted to recognizing the kind of behaviors that set landlords up for lawsuits. Luckily, depending on whom you ask, criminals are not a protected class, so felons can be refused at the door.

This is what managers of some of Las Vegas’ most crime-ridden properties have been doing for the past year, as part of a renewed police effort to boost the Crime Free Multi-Housing Program, which mandates that member landlords run criminal background checks on prospective tenants.

At the Rancho Alvarado Apartments on Maryland Parkway near Tropicana Avenue, identified last year by Metro as one of the most troubled properties in the southeast Las Vegas Valley, management started screening applicants for criminal history in October.

Since then, calls for police have dramatically decreased at the complex. The complex also has fewer vacancies.

And it’s not even the screening that deflects bad applicants, Rancho Alvarado manager Elsie Lopez says. It’s the threat of being screened. Because prospective renters are told upfront the complex will pay a service to comb their records, most troublemakers just don’t come back. They know well enough what the search will turn up, and so they look elsewhere.

Now the backfire: That elsewhere is often an amateur landlord’s property. At the Wednesday seminar, Metro crime prevention specialist Ed Daley asked the audience how many people currently run prospective renters’ records, and only a few hands went up.

It’s a personal issue for Daley — a town house across the street from his own was rented to drug dealers who were doing open-air sales in the streets of his neighborhood. It became obvious things were no good in the neighborhood when the SWAT team showed up, Daley said, and started shooting flash grenades onto the renter’s patio.

But it’s not just serious felons and drug dealers who are victimizing naive landlords. Mundane misfortunes are far more common — tenants who trash houses, who don’t pay rent, who have loud parties, who get the cops called. Seminar audience member Julie would not give her last name, out of embarrassment. She rented a second house in southeast Las Vegas to a friend of a friend she thought seemed OK. Because they had a mutual acquaintance, Julie didn’t require a deposit, and didn’t look into the tenant’s employment history, credit history, criminal history or any of the other histories Daley recommends poking around in.

So Julie’s tenant paid rent one month out of three and then vanished. Julie found out when a neighbor called to announce a moving truck was parked outside her house. By the time Julie got there, the place was cleared out — and covered in cat urine.

She sat quietly through Daley’s two-hour seminar, listened closely, accepted multiple handouts, and shuffled through the door when the seminar was done.

She might be done, too. Asked whether she’d rent her home to someone again, Julie said, “I think I’m through.”