Finding a rental for you and your dog?

Good luck with that. I say that because there are so many apartments for rent listed online that specify that dogs are restricted. Other apartment units may not be listed as dog-free zones of rental space but nonetheless that is what you will hear when you call and speak to John or Martha or Percy, all who ask that question with a grim determination that is spooky in its finality: do you have a dog? It doesn’t make sense in a city that appears to have many dogs walking their owners based on cursory glances while out and about leaving me to wonder where these people live. Certainly as an agent, I have had clients who have a gap-period between vacating the property they have sold and moving into a property they have just bought.

Generally property management companies which have established models of property management processes will have policies and procedures that govern pets in the buildings they manage, not limited to but including conduct and size limitations of the pets. But many appear to have one process and procedure: refusal to rent to a household that owns a dog. I wonder, though, if this anti-dog landlord/property management staff isn’t based on erroneous assumptions that a dog in the unit will cause problems and more precisely if they cause more problems than a household that doesn’t own a dog, statistically speaking.

I would argue that just like a financial/tenancy review is responsible for a landlord to conduct, so too do we need some way of generating clean records of responsible dog ownership especially as it relates to tenancy so that those households that own a dog and exercise that ownership well in every regard get a glowing review as a prospective tenant.