Landlords Guide to Pet Screening and Pet Addendums

In our last blog we covered the pros and cons of accepting a pet in your rental property. Let’s take that topic one step further and discuss investment property owner’s requirements regarding emotional support and service animals, pet applications, and pet addendums.

Emotional Support/Service Animals

Under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act; Landlords, property managers and homeowners are required to make reasonable accommodations for a person with disabilities. This includes making an adjustment to your pet policy for emotional support or service animals. The term disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act is broadly defined to include any physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity.

A landlord cannot deny an emotional support or service animal due to the breed, size, or weight. Additionally, they cannot require an additional security deposit, pet fee or increased rent.

With these laws in place, this is why we suggest investment property owners have a good pet screening and pet addendum policy in place.

What is a pet application?

Many property management companies and landlords require prospective tenants to fill out a separate pet application when applying for a rental property. This application serves as a way for the management company to screen the pet, verify an emotional support/assistance animal and determine if the animal fits within their pet policy guidelines.

At California Oaks, we have come across a large amount of emotional support/assistance animal requests and had difficulty verifying the authenticity of documentation provided by applicants. For this reason, we utilize a service from PetScreening.com, which is completely free to our property owners!

Pet Screening is a third-party service to screen household pets, validate reasonable accommodation requests for assistance animals (Service/ESA/Companion) and confirm every resident understands their pet policies. The pet application is a secure place to store all information about the pet, including breed and weight, animal age, veterinarian and vaccine/neutering information, and pet/renters insurance.

The legal team at Pet Screening will review all emotional support/service animal requests per FHA guidelines. The review time for assistance animal accommodation requests is 2-5 business days. According to Pet Screening, 18% of reasonable request accommodations had insufficient documentation or were discovered fraudulent.

Pet Addendum

Never underestimate the importance of a good Rental Agreement. Once you have approved a pet or emotional support/service animal at your rental property, have a pet addendum added to your Rental Agreement to outline your pet policies.

Pet Addendums will cover the number, size, and breed of permitted pets at the rental. Along with deposit requirements, and regulations covering noise, pet waste and property damage. Even tenants with permitted emotional support/service animals must abide by your pet policies.

This sounds like a lot of things to consider when screening a pet for your rental property, right? The good news, California Oaks Property Management stays up to date with Fair Housing guidelines and continuously updates our pet screening policies and pet addendums to ensure your investment property is covered.