Why Every Rental Should Be Pet-Friendly: The Data-Proven Case for Allowing Pets (Professional to Professional)

Am I saying this because I love animals? No. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I do love animals. Particularly dogs. I’ve had Great Danes all of my life, which would send most landlords running so I decided to buy and eliminate that problem. I also have a mare and her filly, a miniature donkey and a cat. I’m involved in pet rescue, so I’m all about animals. But I never let my personal feelings interfere with business interests, so that’s not my reason for this argument. As with most things you see me write about here, this is all about the cold hard truth of the numbers.

L – R Below: Me and my late dog, Mister a champion and wonderful companion and another pic of he and my late Brooke, another champion and my new 4.5 Month Puppy Breaker:

Tenants Love Pets

The most recent surveys show that around 65% of all tenants have pets. That’s right, two-thirds. That’s an enormous number, and it’s up by about 15% since pre-Covid. For those of us in SFR property management, the numbers are even more jarring, as SFR tenants have higher pet ownership rates than MF tenants, meaning we’re probably looking at a number closer to 70%.

But it doesn’t stop there. Of the 35% of tenants who don’t have pets, when surveyed, about 35% of them say that they would have a pet if their landlord didn’t prohibit it. You know me by now, I love the math, so if we crunch those numbers that means that a grand total of 77% of all tenants either have a pet or want one.

If I told you that 77% of tenants want a house with the walls painted in Agreeable Gray, every single one of you would go to your vendors and tell them that every turn is going to be done in Agreeable Gray from now on. You would be an abject moron not to do so. Our entire job here is to get properties rented to good tenants and keeping them, so doing anything that 77% of tenants don’t like is a suicide mission. And yet, a whole lot of you out there are ignoring the reality that 77% of tenants want pets, and you’re missing out on these tenants when you prohibit them.

The Impact on Operational Metrics

The demographers coined a term for it: “The Pandemic Pet Boom.” Pet adoptions spiked by 40%, with 11 million households getting a new pet between March of 2020 and May of 2021. We also saw that Millennials and Gen Z renters have an even higher rate of pet ownership as they’ve become the lion’s share of tenants. There has been absolutely no sign that this has abated in the years since.

Operationally, this has an enormous impact on your numbers. Recent studies have shown that pet-friendly homes rent ten days faster than homes that prohibit pets. Vacancy rates are 4% higher for rentals that don’t allow pets. Tenants in pet-friendly rentals stay longer, with different studies showing a longer tenancy by between 6-12 months. These numbers are so significant than no one in this industry should be ignoring them. When I work with one-on-one consulting clients, this is one of the first things I focus on. Not only can pet fee revenue bring in THOUSANDS of dollars a month for the average sized PM company, but your operational metrics are suffering by not allowing them.

Some of you will say “we allow pets if the owner allows them.” Okay, great. But what are you doing to CONVINCE owners to allow them? And more importantly, why are you begging for permission? With numbers of this nature, allowing pets should be the default position.

Why Don’t Owners Want Pets?

There are really only two reasons that your owner clients don’t want to allow pets:

1. They are convinced that pets cause a ton of damage that will be very costly for them to repair between tenants; or
2. They are allergic to cats or dogs and they may want to move back into the house someday.

Let’s look at these individually, starting with concerns for pet damage. The reality is that these fears are unfounded. Studies have shown that pet-owning tenants only cause on average between $40-$150 more in damage than tenants with no pets at all. This is a minuscule number that can easily be solved for. But this really becomes unimportant when you realize that one study found that children cause 400% more damage than pets on average. Are you prohibiting children? Of course not, because that’s illegal! And I’ve got news for you: some states are already looking at making it illegal to deny tenants with pets, just like tenants with children. California’s legislature is still actively debating this idea. You had better get out in front of this and learn how to manage pets instead of prohibiting them, because soon you may have no choice.

What about allergies? This is certainly a legitimate concern, as allergies to pet dander are very real, unlike the plethora of fake food allergies that hipsters on TikTok have convinced themselves that they have without any legitimate medical diagnosis. Despite me having three dogs, I’m actually allergic to dogs myself. I manage my allergy with medication and years of allergy shots because I love dogs so much, but the allergy is still there, and I have to favor hypo-allergenic breeds as a result. But what about people who have severe allergies to pet dander? This is a very real problem, but it’s not an insurmountable one. It just means that if your owner is concerned about this, you need to do a deep cleaning when the pet moves out. This includes deep cleaning of carpets and draperies, replacing HVAC filters with HEPA filters and running them for several days while vacant, and thoroughly washing all hard surfaces. This sort of deep cleaning may cost $500 more than a standard cleaning, but remember all of those operational metrics above: $500 is a very cheap price to pay for keeping a tenant a year longer and having the property on the market for 10 days shorter. And that’s before we factor in any pet fee revenue.

Your job as the professional is to not just sit back and do whatever the owner says on pets. Your job is to counsel the owner on what is in their best interests. Because they simply don’t know. Hell, most of you reading this are in the industry and you probably didn’t know these numbers before reading this article. You certainly can’t expect your lay clients to know these things and make the right decisions themselves without proper guidance. You simply aren’t doing your job if you just ask a simple question during onboarding about whether to allow pets or not and then just going with whatever the owner says. TEACH them. You aren’t just a yes-man, or at least you shouldn’t be. You are the expert. Just like your attorney or your accountant gives you advice, you should be giving your owner clients advice. When one of them says they don’t want pets, take some time to explain to them why that’s the dumbest idea you’ve heard in a long time (but not in those words).

Solve Your Owner’s Concerns

In over 15 years, I’ve only had one pet related item of damage – a $60 interior door that was easily covered by the tenant’s deposit. There are insurances available to owners with concerns like this and eviction that are very reasonably priced which may be an option to have an owner reverse their no pets stance.

If you still have an owner who stubbornly refuses to allow pets, you have a choice: do you want to be a 100% pet friendly company and lose out on that owner, or do you want to accommodate that owner’s concerns? I’ve taken the former path, because being pet-friendly is a major part of my personal and corporate identity. We won’t manage a property if the owner won’t allow pets. It’s right in our PMA. But if you don’t want to be as hard-core about it as I am, I still recommend that you take certain additional steps with that owner:

1. If the owner selects no pets on their onboarding paperwork, make them sign a disclaimer with the aforementioned statistics on it about longer days on market, higher vacancy rate, and a smaller potential tenant pool. That will make some of them change their mind and allow pets, but even for those who don’t, they won’t be able to complain to you later about how it took so long to rent their house because of their restrictions.
2. If you offer some sort of leasing guarantee (my company has a 21 day leasing guarantee, for example), then the owner should have to lose out on that guarantee if they won’t allow pets. If you’re eliminating 70% of my available tenant pool, you no longer get my leasing guarantee, because you’re the reason it’s not renting in time.
3. Make it incredibly clear to the owner that an assistance animal is not a pet, and you can’t prohibit them. Also make it clear to the owner that if they prohibit pets, it just makes it a whole lot more likely that a tenant with a pet is going to go out to a health care worker and get a letter claiming that they have an ESA (Emotional Support Animal). At that point, it’s no longer a pet, so you can’t collect pet fees, and you can’t provide a pet damage guarantee. The owner is now worse off than they would have been just allowing pets. They need to sign a disclaimer acknowledging this reality and this risk.