No Judgment Calls
On any one day you might make dozens of decisions related to applications, evictions or other requests. Good, and especially experienced property management employees naturally use their valuable experience in making decisions. That great experience understandably and often results in using their “judgment” to make some decisions.
But if your judgment, even if clearly good judgment, causes you to technically stray from your company’s existing current objective criteria, the inconsistency increases your exposure to a Fair Housing claim. The objective existing criteria could be written criteria or the property’s historic pattern and practices.
If your good judgment (but inconsistent with technical existing criteria) results in a negative consequence to someone, that someone will argue they were treated unlike the objective criteria because of their protected Fair Housing class. Your good judgment might help the current person but then a later person where you use the objective criteria might argue your earlier exception was because of the future person’s protected Fair Housing class. So, using good judgment instead of existing objective criteria increases the risks of a Fair Housing claim both from a person you are dealing with at the time, and others in the future. Of course, the reason for your good judgment was not in fact related at all to any protected class. But your judgment straying from the “rules” feeds a claim against you and the property.
Decisions need to be based upon objective written criteria and not judgment calls. But there is a solution for when your good judgment causes you to not want to apply current criteria. If your experience and good judgment cause you to want to divert from an established criteria first speak out loud why you want to make a judgment call. Sometimes speaking the reason out loud might actually cause you or others to say that doesn’t sound right then don’t make the exception. But if it makes perfect sense, still don’t make an exception. Instead, change the objective criteria at that moment (in writing) and going forward. That way, you haven’t made an exception. Instead, the situation before you simply caused you to universally adjust the objective criteria. So do not make judgment calls – just adjust your criteria instead.
