Category: Renting Safely

Tips and alerts to help renters find and keep safe housing.

Dear RentConfident: How Difficult is it to Break a Lease in Chicago?

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Recently the New York Times ran this short article about the complexities of breaking an apartment lease in New York City. A friend of mine who is a broker at a Chicago leasing agency posted it to my Facebook with the comment, "would love to hear your take on the subject under Chicago's RLTO. We get a lot of people looking for off-season re-let help for peak-season leases. It's a rough world."

Quick answer: if you know what you're doing, it can be very easy. When I was trying to find a sub-lessee for my old apartment in 2007, it took me about a week despite it being a vintage top floor walk-up in Rogers Park during the off-season. But at that point I'd already been showing property professionally for 2 years and I knew both a) what my landlord required and b) how to pitch an apartment. If you don't know what you're doing, it can be obscenely difficult. Case in point, my friend whose departure from her Chicago apartment for the Netherlands wound up involving two attorneys, a Realtor, a middle of the night move-out and some serious fretting that her landlord would come in during the workday and poison her pets.

So how can the same starting situation wind up so vastly different? There are, as I'm sure you can guess, a number of factors involved. Continue reading Dear RentConfident: How Difficult is it to Break a Lease in Chicago?

Published by

Kay Cleaves

The Predatory and Abusive Industry of Rent-to-Own Furniture

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Bill collectors knocking on your door and barging in with cameras. Doors kicked in. People in handcuffs. Class 4 Felony convictions. It's all part of your average day for the employees of... Rent-a-Center? Today we'll be looking at the strange world of the "rent to own" furniture industry and how it affects a subset of Chicago's renters, namely the lower income sectors.

Rent to own, or "RTO" to use the industry shorthand, is a huge industry in the US bringing in $8.6 billion in revenues nationwide in 2016 according to the Association of Progressive Rental Organizations. As points of comparison, the construction industry was recently bringing in about $13 billion and the financial services industry brought in about $17 billion per year according to Inc Magazine's list of the biggest industries in the US.

Note that this article does not address the concerns of rent-to-own within a housing context. That deserves an article of its own, which will probably appear here within the coming weeks. Today we are only talking about the businesses that offer rent to own furniture, electronics and appliances.

A Big Industry with Little Oversight

Given the size of the industry, legislation governing its practices is largely absent nationwide. In Illinois there is one mention of rent to own business practices. It's in the criminal code, sections 720 ILCS 5/16-1d and 720 ILCS 5/16-3a. It states that failure to return leased personal property within 10 days of receiving notice of non-payment is considered a Class 4 Felony. (Note that the same section addresses car rentals and library books.) Continue reading The Predatory and Abusive Industry of Rent-to-Own Furniture

Published by

Kay Cleaves

New Laws for 2018 Affecting Chicago Renters

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You may not know it, but on the first Tuesday of every month we send out an email newsletter to a bunch of our friends and customers. Normally we do not duplicate content between the newsletter and the blog. However, given that the two audiences do not really overlap and that this month's newsletter dedicated a substantial amount of time to the new laws that went into effect in the state of Illinois and city of Chicago, we are reproducing that section of the newsletter for our article this week.

With the start of the new year many new laws have gone into effect at the federal, state and local level. Of particular interest to Chicago renters are the following:

Federal

New Tax Laws. Of particular concern for renters, especially low income renters, are new federal income regulations that are predicted to decrease the amount of available funds for charitable donations. While many charitable individuals make donations for personal reasons, there is no denying that their tax-deductible nature has been an incentive for many years. With more money going to taxes, fewer incentives to itemize deductions and more limits on charitable tax deductions, non-profits may struggle in the coming year. This includes service organizations that help low-income renters with many facets of daily life and in times of crisis. Continue reading New Laws for 2018 Affecting Chicago Renters

Published by

Kay Cleaves

RentConfident’s Top Content of 2017

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52 Blog Entries. 52 Header Graphics. 12 Newsletters. 3300 visits. Despite cutting our articles in half this year by eliminating Monday posts, our readership has grown by a whopping 35% in 2017. Some of you like, comment or share our posts on social media. Some are agents who send our articles to their renting or landlord clients. No matter how you found us, as we close out 2017 I would like to thank you for reading and for all that you do to help spread the word that pay-what-you-can consumer protection for renters does exist in Chicago.

Since we have so many new faces around here, I thought I would hop on the bandwagon of year end round ups with a guided tour of our most popular articles from the past year. If you're looking for a good place to start in all of our content, some of these might serve as good jumping-off points for your journey. These are provided in a roughly chronological order rather than in order of popularity. Continue reading RentConfident’s Top Content of 2017

Published by

Kay Cleaves

The Best Rental Concessions for Tenants

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Rental industry pundits are claiming that the downtown Chicago apartment inventory has been overbuilt over the past few years. They are predicting an end to the massive rent increases in the city that have led to calls for rent control and stepped-up efforts to preserve affordable housing. These sorts of predictions happen every year, and they tend to happen towards the end of the year when Chicago's market is the slowest, so we always recommend taking them with a grain of salt. However, one of the metrics they use to determine the rise and fall of the market is something called "rent concessions," an interesting and persistent part of the market.

A rent concession is anything that lowers the net (actual) amount a landlord earns from a tenant. But rent concessions don't always take the form of discounted rent. In recent years landlords have tried all sorts of campaigns to capture the interest of renters, and if downtown really does have a glut of new apartments we'll be seeing more and more of them over the next few years. Let's look at some common concessions and decide on the best options for renters.

Special note for Illinois residents: in Illinois any rent concession with monetary value must be included in writing with the lease.

Cosmetic Improvements

A fresh paint job. A refinished tub. New kitchen shelving. These are some of the cosmetic (appearance only) improvements that a landlord might offer as a concession. Unlike some of the others listed below, these are not considered to have a monetary value and are therefore exempt from the in-writing requirements in Illinois. (Get them in writing anyways!) Cosmetic concessions are self-serving on the part of the landlord, as they don't really make your apartment any safer, they just make it look better and therefore easier to rerent when you leave. Not to mention that these are things that you can probably do yourself with a minor amount of skill and some spare time. If a landlord offers cosmetic improvements as a concession, we'd take a pass unless looks are the most important thing to you. Continue reading The Best Rental Concessions for Tenants

Published by

Kay Cleaves