DCRA Unveils New Web Resource For Basement Landlords
Do you rent one of the hundreds of basement apartments in the District of Columbia? If so, there was certainly nothing reassuring about some of the comments left on this Prince of Petworth post about reporting rental income, which turned into a happy hour of sorts for less-than-ethical property owners. For example, here's one commenter's advice to the property owner in search of ways to reduce the amount of rental income they need to report to the IRS:
You can make the tenenat [sic] pay all utilities and reduce the bills paid from the monthly rent - This will make your rental income lower.Get the tenant to buy you a VISA gift card or something instead of paying you rent every month. Even if you do it for two months out of twelve, it will offset the $12,000 cap.
There are many ways to work around this, you just have to be creative, and legally you are not wrong at this. It is no crime to receive a gift card.
Strange -- that reads eerily like the prose of that dude who rented me a place that didn't have adequate heating a few years ago. Maybe I should have sent him more gift cards.
Anyway, the District's Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs was reading along and was similarly intrigued by some of the responses. DCRA -- which already operates a relatively well-known information source dedicated to providing college students with resources to help them find fair and safe off-campus housing in D.C. -- decided that the misinformation out there about the struggles of obtaining a certificate of occupancy, license and inspection had to be addressed. So they unveiled Rent Your DC Basement Apartment Legally yesterday, a resource center for landlords who want to follow the law, but have no idea how -- or worry about the potential consequences of going through the process if they are already renting illegally.
"There's a lot of misconceptions about [the process]; the whole string was pretty interesting to us, that people weren't coming in because they thought we were going to fine them," said DCRA's Public Information Officer, Mike Rupert.
Rupert was a visible presence in the comments on the Prince of Petworth post. "[P]eople with safe units are getting their licenses in 30-45 days," Rupert wrote, a sentiment that is reiterated on the site's first blog entry. "For people with unsafe units, why would you want to put people in there anyway? While I'm sure you need extra cash, at least be safe and protect your tenants and yourself."
"The thing with government, especially for us, we do so many things, and people just say, make a flier for it," said Rupert, when we talked to him today. "There's so many random variations depending on where you live, how old your house is...I thought it would be a good place to consolidate information."
The site is still being pieced together, but there's already some helpful info to access: a fact sheet for what property owners need to do to get licensed to rent, as well as a checklist for inspection and a forum for people to leave comments where they have experienced problems with the system. The agency is also enhancing its reputation as one of the most accessible in D.C. government, soliciting recommendations for what should be offered at the site to via Twitter and conceding that, often times, their main website is not designed to serve this kind of specific issue.
"[The blog] just makes it so much easier for people to find. They put in 'rent D.C. basement', and within a week, it's going to come up as number one or number two in a search -- as opposed to our website," admitted Rupert. "Who knows what they'll find on DC.gov? Between the PDFs, [the motivation] kind of gets lost."