Recently, Colorado law regarding the right of a tenant to a safe and functional rental dwelling was expanded to include new criteria for when a landlord must act on a quick timeline to solve certain maintenance issues and stricter remedies, such as when the landlord is required to pay for a hotel room for a renter experiencing an habitability maintenance issue.
The new law, SB24-094, tightens the timeline in which a landlord must commence repair and the rate of progress during the repair period. It also outline when a landlord must, if requested by the renter, pay for a hotel room proximate and comparable to the rental dwelling. This law addresses a problem that exists in the rental business: landlords or landlord agents who are irresponsible about attending to renters’ valid maintenance requests. That said, the tight timeline poses a challenge for good, caring landlords in many situations.
The law requires landlords to communicate with the renter within 24 hours after a tenant informs the landlord that they believe an habitability issue exists. For drastic maintenance issues, the law gives a landlord 72 hours to complete remedial action.
The law defines remedial action as timely and good faith efforts to repair an uninhabitable condition at the residential premises. Uninhabitable conditions are situations such as: roof or wall leaks; broken window or door locks; gas or plumbing not working; presence of toxins like mold, lead or asbestos; no running water; no heat in freezing weather; and other things that would be unsafe for tenants to tolerate for long periods. For the first time, air cooling is part of the warranty, but only if cooling devices already exist at the rental at the time the lease commences.
For many issues, if the landlord hasn’t solved the problem in 72 hours a tenant might be able to assert that the landlord pay for a hotel room until the problem is resolved. Where this law is not clear, however, in the case of a landlord complying with the 24-hour requirement to acknowledge and commence repairs, is how long the landlord has to fully complete repairs and what constitutes completion.
My most recent brush with a renter asserting the habitability law was case in point about how the law is not clear in certain aspects. Here’s what went down with this renter.
The renter called me at about 4:30 p.m. on January 4, the Sunday after New Year’s to say that there was a leak into their bedroom from the bathroom above it. I returned the call to the renter within an hour. When we spoke he told me that the pipes above were leaking but only if the renters upstairs used the shower, and that for the moment there was not an active leak.
Within two hours of my being notified, my plumber was on the phone with the renter. Meanwhile I contacted the upper unit people and told them of the situation and asked them not to shower until we solved it, which they agreed to do. On Monday afternoon my plumber went to the property to assess what was causing the leak. He opened up the ceiling in the lower room and found that an old lead drain pipe had a hole in it. Tuesday he completed the repair on the pipe.
We needed to leave the ceiling open for some days so the space could dry out before reinstalling drywall or an access panel. The tenant, however, began to assert that the hole in the ceiling itself was a violation of the habitability law. That’s not true in a scenario such as this, but that didn’t stop the renter from harassing me. At one point he called me 13 times in a 15-minute span. When I texted him that I was at a doctor’s office, he demanded that I attend to him immediately no matter what because he was claiming an habitability issue in his mind meant that he had priority with my time over everything else. He threatened and harassed me from Monday through Thursday that week even though I was giving him updates and informing him of the process more than once a day.
The moral to this story is that tenants can be highly irrational when they are experiencing the discomfort of a maintenance problem in their rentals. This renter has been a renter with my company for several years. He was one of my favorite renters until this incident. I was blindsided by the vitriol he thrust upon me, vilifying me and not seeing reality clearly. The reality was I responded promptly and the leaking was not active.
If I would have had to do this over again I would have worked harder to give them a bigger dose of reassurance and empathy for their distress. In my mind I went above and beyond in acknowledging it. But after a point I felt I needed to respond with the facts of the matter, because the renter was threatening a law suit based on his misunderstanding about what constitutes a violation of the habitability law.
This experience made me have a new perspective on the impersonal way corporate management companies address issues like this. Perhaps for potentially highly emotional situations, like a leak in a ceiling combined with an irate and irrational renter, the corporate method would be less stressful. Hmmm.
The best thing to come out of this experience is that I familiarized myself intimately with this law so that the next time a tenant comes at me with threats of lawyers right off the bat like this one did I can be confident in my knowledge that I am abiding by the law.
