Atlanta Metro County – Section 8 Program Fails to Serve Tenants & Landlords
Last week we received a letter from the Dekalb County DCA’s Housing Choice Program also known as Section 8. If you remember last year I posted about another issue/concern that I had with Dekalb DCA.
What the letter basically stated was due to lack of funding for the program they had to cut back their portion of the rental proceeds by 15%. So that left 2 options – one to have the tenant make up the additional 15% or to forgive the amount to the tenant.
Once again the DCA puts the landlord in a very difficult position. For the average rental, this makes about a $135 to $150 deficient per month total. If the tenant could have paid the additional money, they probably wouldn’t be on government assistance in the first place. So collecting it from them I believe will be challenging.
So what is a landlord to do? It’s not worth it in today’s market for a landlord to terminate the lease or to evict a tenant for $1,500.00 deficient. The vacancy period, turn key, and marketing expenses for a new tenant are much more than that. However, should we just accept that?
In Gwinnett county, we were told that after the first 12 month’s the lease renewal didn’t matter to DCA, that they would authorize a tenant to be relocated at anytime during the term and we could nor charge for early termination. This happened to put the owner in a huge disadvantage and cost the owner a much longer vacancy than has they not renewed.
All this to say is that the government assisted programs are quickly changing and for this reason, we are not taking on any new Section 8 properties. They don’t seem to care about the contracts that they sign or that the tenant’s sign either. This is very disturbing to me.
At a meeting of NARPM (National Association of Residential Property Managers) last week, we brought up the question about how other professional property managers were handling these issues and they also stated that they had stopped serving the DCA programs. So what is going to happen when professional property manager’s quit servicing this segment of the market? I think the DCA will find that there will be fewer homes available to serve their needs.
It was already a difficult process for a landlord to serve this segment of the market place and I believe that we will find fewer and fewer reputable managers willing to go through the hoops necessary. This will become true especially after we see more and more landlords becoming burned by the arbitrary changes in contracts.
Please feel free to leave your thoughts…
