Leader Photo by Tim Ryan Landlord Scott Jung, left, poses a question to Shawano police officers Dan Conradt and Noah Bunt during a seminar at City Hall on Wednesday on what property owners can do to keep their rental properties crime-free.
More than two dozen Shawano landlords met with city police Wednesday for tips on dealing with troublesome tenants and keeping their rental properties crime-free.
Property owners who attended generally agreed it was a valuable and informative seminar, and one unexpected result could be the formation of a landlords association.
“The smartest thing we could do as landlords is we could maybe get together and we could have a Shawano landlords association,” Jim Warren said. “We have the nucleus right here of an association.
“We could keep in contact with each other, and the best thing that happens is we’re talking to each other. We could work out a lot of stuff on our own.”
Shawano police officers Dan Conradt and Noah Bunt spent roughly half the meeting sharing information about landlord legal rights, the warning signs of drug and gang activity, red flags that could indicate clandestine drug labs, the role of police in abatement or tenant eviction procedures, and what constitutes a nuisance under city ordinances.
Property owners posed a plethora of questions about what they could or couldn’t do to deal with problem tenants or suspected criminal activity. The answer to most of those questions was to contact police.
Conradt and Bunt stressed an open line of communication between landlords and police as key to addressing many of their tenant problems.
They also recommended an addendum to tenant leases that would require properties to be kept crime-free.
One landlord asked what would happen if the tenant refused to sign it. Bunt said that would be a red-flag not to rent to them.
The meeting eventually became an opportunity for crosstalk and sharing of information between landlords, as property owners talked about experiences they’ve had and how they’ve handled them.
Bunt said after the meeting he had no problem that the seminar was essentially co-oped by inter-landlord discussion.
“That’s what we want, for them to communicate with each other and to communicate with us,” he said, “so we can all have the same goal of taking care of problem properties and tenants in the city.”
Bunt said the turnout was even better than expected.
“There was a lot of information, and the landlords seemed to be sharing a lot of information with each other,” he said.
Shawano police are hoping the landlord meetings will become a recurring practice, and most landlords said they were looking forward to those future meetings.
“I hope they continue to have more,” Scott Jung said. “You can tell by the turnout there’s a lot of concerned property managers and owners that do want to help, and we need to know what we can do to make it better.”
Al Destache said he was a new landlord and welcomed the information police provided.
“A lot of this stuff I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’m learning.”
As for a landlords association, property owner Rhonda Richards said Shawano could use one.
“It would benefit greatly landlords,” she said. “We could get together and know more about what was going on with each other.”