Unauthorized Pets in Rentals: What They Cost Landlords

I want to tell you about a puppy. It was a mixed-breed puppy, which is the dog version of a mystery box (you don’t know exactly what’s inside, and I’m not convinced the dog does either). It was not house-trained. It was also staying at one of my properties, and nobody told me. Someone snuck it in, so I found out about the puppy around the same time I found out about everything it had done. Those are two things I typically prefer in reverse order. This one chewed through baseboards, ruined floors, and kept going until the bill hit about $7,000. On a rental cash-flowing $300 a month, that’s almost two years of cash flow eaten by a puppy (in the baseboards’ case, literally). (Before anybody from the rescue world emails me: I’m building a dog-first hotel, and this is a pro-dog article. It’s also an anti-surprise article). What bugs me is how avoidable most of it was. If that puppy had been disclosed and screened, we’d have known what was coming and planned for it. Every landlord eventually meets their own version of this puppy, and $7,000 turned out to be the cheap version. The expensive versions come down to what your paperwork can prove, which, for an animal nobody told you about, is...