A rental lease template could help prevent some of Philly’s landlord-tenant disputes before they begin | Opinion

As we enter a new year, Landlord Tenant Court is once again packed, rental assistance funding has dried up, and the city’s COVID-19 renter protections are disappearing. That means it’s time for us as a city to again think creatively and collaboratively to improve the way we rent.

Moving our city’s rental environment forward starts with getting smart and serious about the foundation of each and every landlord-tenant relationship: the lease.

One of us worked on a recent study of over 170,000 residential leases submitted in over 200,000 eviction proceedings between 2005 and 2019 and found that Philadelphia’s residential rental leases are riddled with terms that our courts shouldn’t enforce. Over 60% of these contracts included so-called “exculpatory clauses,” which aim to let landlords off the hook for their negligence. Half included “as-is” clauses, which wrongly waive the landlord’s obligation to ensure that a rental property is habitable. Because few of us read, and virtually none of us negotiate, the law in our leases, bad and unenforceable terms have become significantly more common over the last 20 years.

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This is almost never the fault — or intention — of landlords. Nearly two-thirds of Philadelphia landlords own only one or two units, meaning that they may not have access to legal services. As a result, they often resort to the internet and download lease templates from the websites of large, national landlord associations, or even less savory for-profit form providers. They’ll also often pull a lease from the first hit on a Google search. Philadelphia’s landlords who have few resources are thus left without access to a contract that ensures they are doing all the right things when formalizing a contractual relationship with a tenant they often do not know.

This means that tens of thousands of landlord-tenant relationships in Philadelphia begin each year with a written contract authored by some far-away attorney, stuffed with provisions few landlords or tenants really want, and potentially in violation of Pennsylvania law. It’s not surprising that such sloppy beginnings can leave landlord-tenant relationships on uneasy footing.

It’s safe to say that leases that relied on straightforward, accessible wording, and that plainly stated landlord and renter responsibilities, would bring needed stability and clarity to our city’s rental market. And leases that complied with our laws would bring legitimacy to well-meaning landlords and consistency to the court system.

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As a result, there’s a pressing need for a Philadelphia-specific lease template that landlords can use to ensure that they are operating within city and state law, while clearly communicating rights their tenants have and obligations they must meet. And because that lease is a document that affects the public — the eviction process, in particular, makes our most vulnerable communities less safe, less healthy, and less economically stable — it makes sense that a model lease is a social document.

That’s why key stakeholders should and must come together to develop and endorse a model rental lease template. Such a process ought to be embraced by Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration, whose 2018 Task Force on Eviction Prevention and Response recommended the widespread adoption of — you guessed it — a model rental lease. The process has to focus on small landlords who so often rely on leases ripped from the internet, as well as our city’s leading landlord associations — such as the Homeowners Association of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Apartment Association — who have energetically participated in tough yet productive conversations aimed at reducing Philadelphia’s eviction rate.

The city should also develop ways to incentivize landlords to use this model lease — from lowering license fees for those who adopt it, to including it in packets of free information that the city otherwise provides. Other U.S. cities have adopted model lease templates, but if Philadelphia does now, it will be the first large city in the country to offer such a commonsense and supportive resource.

There are roughly 288,000 rental units in Philadelphia. That means that we have 288,000 opportunities for fair rental contracts — ones that are clear, balanced, and can be fully enforced in our courts of law.

David A. Hoffman is the William A. Schnader Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Jordan Konell and Luke McCartney are law students at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.