The issue of online medical verifications for emotional support animals (ESA’s) is an ongoing problem for professional apartment management. As written in this space before, we want to approve all legitimate reasonable accommodation requests for our residents who need assistance animals. The key, of course, is “legitimate” – and that is the issue. I…

A couple of interesting emotional support animal medical verification questions have hit my desk over the past month. First, recall that case law on the issue of permissible credentials of a medical or health care professional is a bit unclear. Individuals who are licensed by a public regulatory authority (such as a state) to provide…

A legitimate question from leasing office professionals I get from time to time is: “We approved an emotional support animal for a resident two years ago. Does that approval continue indefinitely or can we seek a supplemental medical verification from time to time?” My answer is that there are any number of disabilities for which…

In this era of an ever-increasing number of service and/or emotional support animal requests received by professional apartment leasing offices, three of my clients have faced the same issue recently. Here is a common fact pattern: our resident submits a request for an emotional support animal. That request has a medical verification letter or certificate…

A Fair Housing Defense reader sent in a question about emotional support animal medical verifications that I want to address. Because our industry has seen such an increase in the number of service and/or emotional support animal reasonable accommodation requests, my reader wanted to know if one way to curb potential abuse of the medical…

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a press release concerning a new case HUD charged in Oklahoma. Specifically, HUD alleged that the landlords of a rental property violated the Fair Housing Act (FHA) by rejecting the emotional support animal request submitted with a veteran with disabilities. As I…

I had three clients in three states (one near the Pacific Ocean, one in the Midwest, and one in the middle Atlantic) all reach out to me with a variation of the same question concerning service and/or companion animals: what happens if the resident is not disabled but still seeks an emotional support animal? Does…