Building a Fair Housing Experience: Empowering Your Maintenance Team

The maintenance team typically has more interactions with residents - and prospects - daily than any other on-site staff – yet they typically receive the least fair housing training! When our maintenance professionals aren’t trained to effectively and appropriately answer the most common questions asked by those residents and prospects, they can easily get us into fair housing trouble simply by being helpful.

Whether it is a prospect asking about availability or a resident wondering why their new neighbor has a reserved parking space at the community when reserved parking spaces are not offered, knowing what can and cannot be said in response is critical to maintaining compliance while also interacting in a non-confrontational manner.

To ensure fair housing compliance, and a customer-friendly experience, it is essential that everyone on the maintenance team can respond to the most asked questions with a fair housing compliant answer, even if that answer is simply to direct the question to someone in the management office.!

In this session, our expert speaker will review the basics of fair housing compliance, the basics of effective communication and then  examine the most common situations the service team encounters and offer appropriate responses.

Webinar Objectives

The “post-COVID” era seems to be one of increased impatience, heightened intolerance and reliance of litigation to solve what previously were thought to me issues that didn’t require a law degree to sort out! In this environment, even well-intentioned comments can be misconstrued and in the extreme, taken to be discriminatory.

It is therefore essential that all team members who interact with the public be trained in the basics of communication and how fair housing compliance must inform their listening and speaking. Whether speaking to a resident in their apartment home or running into them in the grocery store after hours, we must remember that in the resident’s mind, we are always on the clock and must conduct ourselves in a professional, polite, and respectful manner.

Webinar Agenda

• Ensure awareness of current Fair Housing requirements and suggested strategies for effective compliance.
• Learn how to effectively answer the most asked questions heard by maintenance professionals.
• Understand special considerations required for the effective practice of fair housing by maintenance staff.

Webinar Highlights

• Review of basic fair housing compliance elements.
• How being too helpful can backfire.
• Effective communication protocols.
• How to answer the questions like “Why can’t I do favors?”; “Why can’t I help residents with personal tasks?”; “Why can’t I do “side jobs” for residents?” and “Why does my neighbor have an animal on this no-pet community?”
• Recognizing the distinction of accommodations and modifications vs special treatment.
• A summary of best practices to support compliance.

Who Should Attend

On-site and multi-site managers, training professionals, service/maintenance managers, service/maintenance techs