Households that temporarily need to live elsewhere may decide to sublet their units while they’re gone. Or as Internet-based apartment-sharing services such as Airbnb have become more popular, households may seek to rent out their unit to strangers for short stays to supplement their income. Although many owners and managers of conventional sites allow this practice, letting low-income households sublet units at a tax credit site could lead to noncompliance.
Reports of water leaking from a bathroom ceiling or other types of water intrusion in a unit are serious complaints that deserve your immediate attention. Sometimes a pipe may break, in which case a household is not at fault. Other times, a resident’s child may have thrown toys down the toilet, causing plumbing problems, or a resident may have forgotten to shut off the tub faucet.
For many owners already operating on thin margins, aggressive tax assessors may be their biggest concern since property taxes are likely to be their sites’ single largest expense. If you believe that your property taxes are too high because the local tax assessor has overvalued your tax credit site, you may want to challenge your site’s tax assessment.
It’s hard to enforce all the lease provisions residents must comply with, such as bans on pets and home businesses. At some point, you may overlook a resident’s violation of a lease provision for several months. But if you ignore the violation for too long, you may lose your right to insist that the resident comply with the provision. In legal terms, ignoring the violation for too long may constitute a “waiver.”
One of the toughest situations you can face is when a household withholds rent over a claimed problem in a unit. Sometimes the problem is something major, such as no heat or hot water for an extended time. Other times the problem is something minor, such as a broken dishwasher. And still other times, there’s no problem, but the household claims that there is one as an excuse not to pay rent.
If applicants fail to meet your tax credit site’s eligibility requirements or if they can’t pass your site’s screening criteria, you don’t want them arguing with you over the rejection, or worse, filing a fair housing complaint. But that can happen if you leave it to your staff to write up the reasons for a rejection each time they send out a rejection letter.
It’s common to hire new employees who may have some experience in conventional site management, but no experience in tax credit site management. Because the tax credit program is complicated, you can’t expect these new employees to learn all the rules overnight. But until they get tax credit experience, they may pose a threat to the owner’s tax credits. That’s why it’s a good idea to give new employees a short, written summary of the tax credit program as early as you can.
When your state housing agency tells you the date it plans to inspect low-income units at your tax credit site, it’s a good idea to tell your residents. You can send a letter to residents telling them the date of the inspection and why the agency may be visiting their units. We’ve put together a Model Letter: Tell Residents When State Housing Agency Will Inspect Units, that you can adapt and use for this purpose.
Suppose an applicant or a household member at your tax credit site tells you she has been in an automobile accident and will be on disability for a while. She has no idea when it will be possible for her to work again. In the case of the household member, if your site isn’t a 100 percent low-income housing tax credit site, you’ll need to verify her benefits to ensure that her household’s income hasn’t increased above 140 percent of the income limitation.
