Q.    What is the proper way to deal with a resident who has a service or comfort animal?

A.     This is an excellent question and one that can create many headaches for someone in the rental industry.  As a rental professional, I hope you already know how to process requests by disabled tenants who want to keep a service or comfort animal.  But what do you do once these service or comfort animals are living in your community?  Many issues can arise, from whether you can increase their security deposit to what to do about a service animal that becomes a nuisance to your property.  If these issues are mishandled, they could result in a fair housing complaint.  Here are twelve rules to assist you with handling residents with service or comfort animals: 

1. Don’t apply pet rules to service or animals. 
2. Set reasonable rules regarding service animals.
3. Make accommodations for the resident, not the service animal.
4. Enforce state, local health and safety laws.
5. Treat all service animals the same, unless doing so is unreasonable.
6. Don’t charge additional security deposits to residents with service animals.
7. Charge residents for damage their service animal causes.
8. Ban service animals that create undue financial and administrative burden.
9. Ban service animals that hurt someone.
10.  Don’t require service animals to be identified as service animals. 
11.  Don’t divulge information about resident’s disability to other residents.
12.  Don’t provide care for service animals. 

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Last modified: 27 Aug 2010