Articles

Three Steps to Ease Your Fears of a Housing Discrimination Complaint from Stephen Marshall on Vimeo.

There's a lot of employee turnover in the rental industry. Leasing agents, assistant managers, and even property managers move around. A lot. When it happens unexpectedly at one of your properties, it can leave you in a serious bind. In those situations, every employer is tempted to lower their standards. They need help quick. So let's skip the background check. Let's skip checking their references. Let's just get them working so that all those tasks that are backing up get done.  Here's the problem: those employees are going to be handling money. Tenant money and owner money. There's almost no...

On October 13, 2017, the Lexington Herald-Leader ran a front-page article that was nothing more than a hit piece against Lexington's private rental industry. The article's purpose, other than perpetuating a false narrative against landlords, was to promote a report released by the Lexington Fair Housing Council titled Locked Out: Foreclosure, Eviction and Housing Instability in Lexington, 2005-2016. You can read the report in its entirety here. You'll likely be appalled at the report's tone that landlords are the problem and at its suggestion that landlords profit from evictions and exploit the eviction process for personal gain. In short, the...

In my very first post on this site, found here, I wrote about Kentucky’s then-current law on liability for landlords for dog-bites on their rental property. The law at that time centered around a 2012 case, Benningfield v. Zinsmeister, in which the Kentucky Supreme Court interpreted the state’s dog-bite statutes in such a way as to hold landlords liable for injuries caused by certain dogs on their rental property if the dog causes damage on the property or within immediate physical reach of the property. I’m glad to finally get to provide an update on that law: it’s changed. Landlords are...