Guest Editorial: Open Letter to Montana Legislators...

Dear Editor,

This is an open letter to Montana Legislators Fern, Hamilton, Gillette, Galloway, Yakanich, Buckly, Stafman, Dooling, Kortum, Malone, Essman, O'Brien, Fitzpatric, Hertz, Springer, Nikilakokos, Pope, Boldman, Caferro, L. Smith, McKay, Zephyr, Nicol, and Hayman.

I am writing to thank you for your bills addressing housing and/or homelessness in the latest legislative session, even though few passed. From emergency shelters for the homeless and seasonal housing for guest workers to short- or long-term housing for all, reading your bills and discussion assures me there is a bipartisan commitment to finding solutions. We must act. Each details ways and means to release or create private and public property in order to restore the balance of supply/demand of inventory and hasten an end to the crisis.

Some proposals favor Landlord, others favor the Tenant. In theory and historically, a free market adjusts to "affordability" without resorting to rent control or private property, which is currently outlawed. SB105 sought to add "commercial property" to the language but was deemed superfluous, and so it died. Failure of HB233 "To Refund Rental Application Fees" might have to do with an underestimated, underexamined effect on Property Management Companies.

My personal rental search experience in Butte concords with most who spoke at the hearing in Missoula. A Property Management Company (PMC) in Butte controlling a considerable share of inventory charges a non-refundable $50 application fee for three months of access to listings. While the President of Montana's Landlord Association (MLA) made a defense of fees at the hearing, PMCs are the ones owing a clear, public, on-the-record explanation of exactly what service an applicant has purchased for the fee. It should not come as a surprise to PMCs that, until or unless they convince spectators otherwise, non-refundable fees charged to applicants are seen as tantamount to extortion.

If fees are for performing background checks, why? Those are as little as $15-$20 at DOJ or online, while a more thorough type requiring fingerprints is $35. If the latter type were required, then applicants may as well just pay directly there at the fingerprinting facility. By way of analogy, applicants for teacher licenses in Montana bear the $35 cost AND responsibility to send to OPI (=PMC). Once licensed, whether or not having contracted a job (=leased an apartment) with a school (=landlord/owner), applicants do not have to undergo another at their expense until the license expires or the search ends, let alone every three months.

The objection, then, is not to background checks or income verification but to an exorbitant fee for performing related entry-level clerical tasks of data entry, receiving and filing background check reports, and reference checking.

MLA's defense of fees - that non-landlords underestimate the time, effort, and professionalism involved - is wholly unconvincing to this former small business owner who processed employment applications with no training with ease and speed by following provided instructions. Which assessment of the work is accurate? That is discoverable by a Committee wishing to research it.

If we continue to do nothing, we expect increased homelessness and attendant misery, as well as the continued exodus of our adult children and workforce. Maxy Frisch's truism holds that when any tourism and resort industry asks for workers, it gets people instead! Montana's Constitution does not guarantee any of "life's basic necessities" to her People, but we are "free to pursue" them, which makes house-hunting sound like it should be a pleasure. Not so for minimum wage earners whose pursuit is in vain while the market is stuck out of whack. Could it be because an ideal two-party transaction has become a three-party transaction?

My analysis is that the persistence of the rental housing problem is in part attributable to the outsourcing of vetting of applicants to PMCs, whose traditional concern is maintenance. Quality, timely maintenance is the only service of PMCs that benefits both landlord and the tenant. But the vetting service hugely favors PMC over the landlord and not at all the applicant who pays for it. Fees are significant to low-wage earners who need those funds for move-in, deposits, and rent expenses, if or when they finally find a suitable rental with the PMC or not.

I hope rental property owners will see they don't need the application/vetting service of PMCs, yet PMCs can still make that profit with a true finder's fee service to applicants. Current law can't make PMCs refund any part, so consumer demand for a tangible service for the fee is the only hope. I'd like to see it as a guarantee their place in line is honored, that they will be notified and shown listings as soon as something of the type they seek becomes available, and that they get 24 hours to think about it before it is rented the next guy.

WENDY SCHULTZ

Whitehall, Montana