July 2003 Owners Update

Tuscarawas MHA Building Expansion Complete

The addition to the Tuscarawas MHA building has now been completed and the TMHA staff are in the process of making ready for occupying the new space. The addition project added three new offices, a conference room, two new restrooms, a utility room and a basement to provide additional storage to our existing office. Raber’s Construction of Sugarcreek served as the General Contractor for the project. Plans are being formulated for an open house which will occur later this summer and will be announced in an upcoming issue of Owner Update.

Owner Update “Question Of The Month”

What steps does TMHA take to help the Voucher holder find housing?

Helping Voucher holders find housing can be a difficult job since there always seem to be more families seeking housing than there are units available. We try to match up willing owners and searching families.

In actuality, our efforts to help the tenant family can be very helpful to you the owner as well. At any given time, we have applicant families to send your way. To accomplish the task of matching up tenants and owners, TMHA maintains two lists.

List 1: We call this our “landlord list,” and is a group of names of owners and managers who are willing to work with the rental assistance program, and who typically have a number of rental units. We give this list to each family at the tenant briefing which is a group meeting where we explain the program and issue Vouchers.

Our Voucher holders will typically start their search by calling the owners / managers on that list for available housing. However, when we hand out that list, we don’t know if the owners have any available units at that time. That is a matter of the rental market. However, it does give our Voucher holders some place to start.

List 2: We call this our “available unit list.” This is a list of units that owners / managers call us about and tell us are available. When the owner calls, we get the unit location, number of bedrooms, date available, and owner contact. We give this list only to our families with active Vouchers to help in their search.

If you’re not making use of these lists already, maybe you should be. The landlord list (1) will work well if you have many units, some of which come available on a regular basis. Being on that list will assure that you always have some searching families calling you. Remember that the Voucher is viable for 120 days, so if a good applicant family applies in a month you don’t have an available unit, they may still be searching for housing the next month when you do.

The available unit list (2) is a great option for filling open units, and saves you the cost of advertising the unit. If you have few units and don’t want to be contacted regularly by putting your name on the landlord list, we recommend using the available list.

Remember that TMHA can give you some family information, if you ask for it. We will tell you the family’s address, phone, and last landlord (if we know it). We can also tell you about rental-type problems the family may have had with a prior owner if we have that information. You should also know that before we issue a Voucher, we complete a records check for
drug-related and violent criminal activity (felony convictions). We will deny issuing the Voucher if the family does not pass this records check.

All you need to do to access either of our owner lists is to give us a call at 330-308-8099.