Fair Housing Laws in Michigan: Common Mistakes Landlords Make When Advertising and Screening
Most landlords do not intend to discriminate. But good intentions do not protect you from a fair housing complaint. Every year, Michigan landlords face legal action over rental ads, screening practices, and tenant selection processes that violate federal or state fair housing laws, often without the landlord realizing they did anything wrong.
Understanding what the law requires and where landlords commonly slip up can save you thousands of dollars in fines, legal fees, and settlement costs. More importantly, it keeps you on the right side of regulations that carry real consequences.
The Legal Framework You Need to Know
Fair housing laws operate at two levels for Michigan landlords. At the federal level, the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. These seven protected classes apply to virtually all rental housing in the country.
Michigan adds additional protections through the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act. State law extends coverage to include age, marital status, and, as of recent amendments, sexual orientation and gender identity. That means Michigan landlords must comply with a broader set of protections than the federal minimum requires.
Both laws apply to advertising, application procedures, screening criteria, lease terms, property maintenance, and the termination of tenancies. Fair housing laws cover the entire lifecycle of the landlord-tenant relationship, not just the moment you hand over the keys.
Advertising Mistakes That Create Legal Exposure
The most common fair housing violations happen before a tenant even submits an application. They happen in the ad itself.
Describing your ideal tenant is where many landlords get into trouble. Phrases like “perfect for young professionals,” “great for a single person,” or “ideal for a mature couple” all reference protected classes. You may think you are describing the apartment, but regulators and courts will read those phrases as expressing a preference for a particular type of tenant.
References to nearby churches, synagogues, or mosques can be interpreted as signaling a preference for tenants of a specific religion. Describing a property as being in a “family-friendly” neighborhood could be read as discouraging applicants without children, while advertising a “quiet adult community” (outside of legitimate senior housing exemptions) suggests discrimination based on familial status.
Even seemingly practical descriptions can trigger issues. Saying a unit “is not suitable for children” or “has no yard for pets or kids” crosses into familial status territory under fair housing laws. So does specifying “no Section 8,” which, while not directly a fair housing issue in all states, has been challenged in jurisdictions that prohibit source-of-income discrimination.
The safest approach is simple: describe the property, not the tenant. List the number of bedrooms, the rent, the location, the amenities, and the lease terms. Let qualified applicants self-select based on the facts.
Screening Mistakes That Put You at Risk
If advertising is where the most visible fair housing mistakes happen, screening is where the most costly ones occur. Inconsistent screening practices are the single biggest source of discrimination claims against small landlords.
The problem usually is not that a landlord applied overtly discriminatory criteria. It is that they applied different criteria to different applicants. If you run a credit check on one applicant but skip it for another, or if you verify employment for some applicants and not others, you have created a pattern that a complainant can use to argue discriminatory treatment.
Fair housing laws require that you apply the same standards, in the same order, to every applicant. That means having written screening criteria before you start accepting applications. Your criteria should specify minimum credit score thresholds, income-to-rent ratios, rental history requirements, and how you evaluate criminal background information.
Speaking of criminal background checks, this is an area where the law has shifted significantly. Blanket policies that reject any applicant with a criminal record have been challenged under fair housing laws because they can disproportionately affect protected classes. HUD guidance recommends individualized assessments that consider the nature of the offense, how long ago it occurred, and its relevance to tenancy.
Certain questions during the application process are off-limits entirely. You cannot ask about disability status, whether an applicant plans to have children, their country of origin, or their religion. You cannot ask a prospective tenant’s age (beyond confirming they are legally old enough to sign a lease). In Michigan, where marital status is a protected class under the Elliott-Larsen Act, you should avoid questions about whether applicants are married, divorced, or single.
The Consequences Are Real
Fair housing violations carry significant financial penalties. Federal fines for a first offense can reach $21,039 per violation, and that number increases for repeat offenders. Michigan’s state penalties add another layer of potential liability.
But fines are only part of the picture. A fair housing complaint triggers an investigation by HUD, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, or both. Even if the complaint is ultimately dismissed, the process consumes time, requires legal representation, and creates stress. If the case proceeds to a hearing or court, damages can include compensatory awards to the complainant, punitive damages, and the landlord’s obligation to pay the complainant’s attorney fees.
Many landlords assume their small portfolio size protects them. It does not. Fair housing laws apply to nearly all residential rental properties, with very narrow exemptions. Owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units are exempt from the federal Fair Housing Act under certain conditions, but the Elliott-Larsen Act does not provide that same exemption. In Michigan, even a landlord renting out half of a duplex must comply with state fair housing laws.
How Professional Management Protects You
The simplest way to stay compliant with fair housing laws is to remove subjective decision-making from your advertising and screening process entirely. That is exactly what professional property management provides.
At Rondo Investment, every rental listing follows a standardized template that describes the property without referencing any protected class. The language is reviewed for compliance before it goes live on any platform. There is no guesswork about whether an ad might contain problematic phrasing because the process eliminates that risk upfront.
Tenant screening follows documented, consistent procedures applied identically to every applicant. Credit checks, income verification, rental history review, and background screenings all run through the same process regardless of who applies. The criteria are established in advance, applied uniformly, and documented at every step. If a rejected applicant ever files a complaint, there is a clear paper trail showing that the same standards were applied to everyone.
This level of documentation and consistency is difficult for individual landlords to maintain on their own, especially those managing properties as a side responsibility. The landlords most vulnerable to fair housing complaints are often the ones who handle screening informally, relying on gut feelings and inconsistent processes that look very different from one applicant to the next.
Protecting Your Investment Means Protecting Your Process
Fair housing compliance is not optional, and it is not something you can figure out after a complaint is filed. The time to get your advertising and screening right is before your next vacancy, not after a letter arrives from the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.
Rondo Investment manages rental properties across Metro Detroit with fair housing compliance built into every step of the leasing process. If you are a landlord who wants to fill vacancies efficiently while staying fully compliant with federal and Michigan fair housing laws, working with an experienced property management team removes the legal risk from your plate. Contact us to discuss how professional management can protect your properties and your bottom line.