Tuesday, October 19, 2010

potential tenants about to arrive

A couple sitting out in their car smoking.

Is it okay to reject people on the basis that they smoke? Would hate the blinds to get all smelly.

This is getting real now.

17 comments:

  1. We don't allow smokers in our rental property. Or dogs.

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  2. Yes, as per the others. It is worth having it on the market an extra week or two to get the right people. And it is your call about smokers, pets etc.

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  3. When we rented out our house, we said no to smokers and pets were negotiable (consider size, indoor/outdoor pets etc). We had cats when we were looking for a rental and needed our landlord to be okay with us having pets so we figured we couldn't really be too tough on our own tenants with the same issue.
    Good luck with your decision!

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  4. I think you have to be reasonable. If they only smoke in their car, that has no real bearing on you leasing to them, right? ;-)

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  5. Smokers lease our place. Allegedly They don't smoke indoors but the place smelt last time I checked.

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  6. Should say. Good tenants otherwise

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  7. Well, the thing that occurred to me was, if God had not shown us mercy because we might cost him something, where would we be?

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  8. Yes, I had thought of that too, but the fact is that we can't afford to have the place trashed. We are already stretched considerably...

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  9. And the smell of smoke is very hard to get rid of once it is there, which may put off tenants in future as well...

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  10. I'm not sure renting a house to someone can really be compared to shoeing them mercy. On that logic, shouldn't we be offering our houses free of charge because God doesn't make us pay for salvation?

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  11. We had a tenant who smoked. She smoked so much that our white walls turned a pale cream colour - We could see the original wall colour underneath where her pictures had hung. On the plus side, she sat around watching a lot of TV so the house suffered no damage while she lived there. She also left the house spotlessly clean when she moved out - the kitchen was unbelievably clean - and based on the water usage, I would say she spent a lot of time cleaning while she lived there. She always paid the rent on time, and she told us straight away in anything needed repairing. We considered her to be a good tenant.

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  12. I used to work for the Dept of Housing. One day, one of the staff took me out to show me a particular vacant property, which had had a smoker as the previous occupant.

    They didn't believe in opening windows, so the place had tended to be a bit humid. At least, that was the explanation given for why the nicotine residue had formed little orange stalactites on the ceilings.

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  13. Joanna -
    I don't think that renting a house to someone always involves showing mercy, but I do think that in some cases it will be a way of showing love and kindness, and in some cases choosing not to rent to someone will show a lack of love and kindness.

    I think what I was trying to say in my original comment was that considering we are the recipients of such kindness from God, how can we base our decisions only on what we think will be best for ourselves?

    Simone -
    I don't think that there is a simple answer to this one. And anyway, if you have a number of people applying to rent the house, how can you be kind to them all? Although smoking is probably in a different category from someone with a history of not looking after a place. (Even more so pets, as we are talking about risk, not likely damage).

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  14. Yes, that's certainly true, Caroline! I think it's a really important question to ask how our understanding of grace influences our 'business' transactions. I just wasn't convinced that the issue of mercy was necessarily relevant to the question of renting to smokers, though it would certainly be central to the question of renting to the disadvantaged.

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