According to a multifamily survey conducted by PetScreening and J. Turner Research of nearly 23,000 apartment residents, more than half of respondents support the idea that irresponsible pet owners should be charged more in pet-related fees.
Call it the hidden variable of an apartment community’s pet population—visiting pets. While community teams have steadily gravitated toward crafting pet policies more reflective of the modern resident, these policies oftentimes omit this crucial component.
As more and more communities allow pets onsite, most operators are seeing an uptick in assistance animal accommodation requests. It’s no secret that there are bad actors trying to pass their pets off as assistance animals to circumvent pet fees and restrictions.
Apartment communities across the nation are making concerted efforts to strengthen their pet-friendliness, which is both uplifting and necessary.
Residents consider pets to be part of their families, and the pandemic-fueled adoption boom has added even more pets to the rental-housing landscape.
Assistance animals qualify as one of the more complicated topics in rental housing. Operators constantly wrestle with the distinctions between service and support animals, what qualifies as legitimate documentation and how to most efficiently manage their verification processes.
The multifamily world is using newfound data when exploring ways to modify longstanding practices for the benefits of pets, residents and the bottom line. Advances in pet technology have made this possible and things are trending in the right direction.
Seeing that nearly 70% of residents are pet owners—that’s more than two-thirds of a community’s population—it makes sense that pet data would be tracked in the same way. Those who do aim to track pet data often do so in haphazard fashion.