U.S. Department of the Treasury

Landlords are critical beneficiaries and stakeholders of the ERA program. Many grantees have reached out to landlord associations to build relationships and identify barriers to landlords’ participation in the ERA program. Regular conversations with small, medium-sized and large landlord organizations, as well as public housing entities, has been critical in garnering increased landlord participation in many ERA programs. In some cases, grantees have asked their culturally and linguistically competent partners to incorporate landlord outreach into their targeted outreach efforts since tenants and landlords often live within the same communities and have similar application support needs.

These proactive landlord communications have also been critical to landlord participation when grantees require landlords to make concessions or commitments to providing the tenant with some assurance of housing stability. Further, many grantees have found that creating separate applications for landlords and tenants have met landlord’s needs for a streamlined process and created operational efficiencies for grantees.

Examples

State of Kentucky

The State of Kentucky and other Kentucky grantees engaged in proactive outreach to area landlords. These conversations inspired collaboration among the region’s grantees and led to coordinated ERA application requirements and forms. This created a more predictable program process for landlords (especially those whose properties cross jurisdictions) and improved landlord participation rates.

State of Massachusetts

The State of Massachusetts’s ERA program has started to collaborate with local state housing partnerships to reduce some paperwork requirements for income eligibility when the tenant lives in subsidized housing. This effort has resulted in payment processes that allow batched payments to larger landlords. Approximately two-thirds of Massachusetts’s ERA applications live in subsidized housing units, and grantees report that these batched payments allow many tenants and landlords to receive ERA assistance more efficiently.