Dispute Resolution and Non-Disparaging Agreement

Description

Tenants stayed in our homes for years and became our friends UNTIL THEY MOVED OUT AND WERE CHARGED FOR DAMAGES. Then they turned to their keyboard and smashed us on Google, Yelp, the BBB and every other complaint-friendly site that gave them a voice and BASHING THEIR MANAGER became their passion. Twice we were invited by the BBB to withdraw our membership because they were going to terminate our BBB certification due to bad reviews.

After several years of this we got fed up and our attorney Monica Gilroy helped us craft a Non-Disparaging Agreement for tenants to sign before move in. (We tried embedding language in the lease but it didn’t work.) Tenants fussed at the notion that we were taking away their right to smear us if they felt we deserved it and half of them refused to sign it. We were moving in 50+ tenants in a month and were constantly fighting with tenants about signing this document. We went back to the drawing board and recreated it into a more friendly agreement defining how we would both respond if/when a dispute arose. It worked like magic. Every tenant signed it without reservation. A year later we had a B+ with the BBB and a four-star Google rating. A year after that we had an A+ with the BBB and a 4.7 with Google. So, STOP BAD REVIEWS FOREVER with this (non-state specific) ONE-DOCUMENT-FIXES-ALL strategy.

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Since the invention of the internet (and Yelp-type sites) property managers have had to fight negative reviews that generally pop up when tenants feel the manager has violated their expectations or after move out when the tenant realizes the manager charged them for damages and withheld some of their deposit. We’ve had tenants stay 10, 15 and 20 years in the same property and had a great relationship with them until they saw what we charged against their security deposit and then it turned ugly. No matter what we did, they felt the needed to tarnish our reputation on the web and alert future customers of what terrible people we were.

Because of this trend, managers need a way to ELIMINATE BAD REVIEWS FOREVER and not simply try to offset them with good reviews. In an effort to help managers with this challenge several vendors offer a reputation management service to help managers clean up their online reputation. You can pay vendors $1,000 a month for them to attack your online reputation or simply adopt this document and solve the problem once and for all.

Twice we were invited by the BBB to withdraw our membership because they were going to decertify us due to the number of filings about us on their site. We tried embedding language in the lease but it didn’t work. Tenants didn’t read the lease or felt we didn’t have any power to enforce the non-disparaging language in the lease.

When we tried the non-disparaging approach we got serious pushback from tenants. They didn’t want to sign the document as it took away their right to disparage us if they felt we deserved it. They would sign the lease and ancillary documents but a third of them refused to sign the non-disparaging agreement. Many felt it was unamerican to prevent them from announcing their unhappy experience with their landlord on the web so we had to step back and rethink how we did this. Once we got the document right we had no problem getting tenants to sign it and stick to their promises. This final document ended all bad reviews.