Rejected rental application in Minnesota?
I asked this question in the renting & real estate section and didn’t get any really helpful answers so I’ll try here.
Basically my husband and I applied at an apartment in mid June for August 1st. The 1st week of July we finally got a letter saying we were rejected due to unsatisfactory credit history, unsatisfactory debt to income ratio and unsatisfactory or insufficient rental history. We were shocked because based on their rental criteria we should qualify with the possible exception of our credit (mostly due to student loans.) We were told if our credit wasn’t perfect we would still qualify, but with a larger deposit.
The basic rental criteria was must make 2.5-3 times rent (which we do), must not have any unlawful detainers, evictions or owe money to landlords (which we don’t have any of), and must have a history of satisfactory credit (which is very vague.)
After we got the letter I called the management company and asked for the specific reasons we were rejected.
The woman refused to give me any information. She said that I could write to them requesting the information and then they would mail it to us. She was very rude and wouldn’t even tell me their rental criteria until I argued that there was no reasonable reason she could have for not disclosing it.
My husband and I were of course forced to look for another apartment- and with so little time left a lot of the places we were interested in are now taken. All the places we’ve looked at since we got the rejection letter seem shocked by how the aforementioned property dealt with the situation. The place we applied to now doesn’t understand why we would have been rejected either.
Its our right in Minnesota to dispute the information that the property management based their decision on and they must investigate and reconsider us. How can we do that if they won’t tell us why they rejected us?
My question is- is there anything I can do?
In addition to the $80 application fee, we had to spent time and money looking for a different place to rent from. We wasted over 2 weeks waiting for them to run our application, when we called the property during those 2 weeks we were simply told that they hadn’t gotten around to running our information.
October 26th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
I sympathize with your situation, and you do have options to address the issue, but your best bet is probably just to chalk it up to experience.
First of all, you can write a letter to them requesting the information. They are required to answer your request, but I don’t know if there is a mandatory response time in MN. I’m sure they will drag there feet until the very end of the time limit.
Note: the reason the last criteria is so vague is so that they can reject you if they want to. You will have a hard time disputing this unless your record is spotless, which you have said it isn’t.
The second way you could handle this is to sue them in small claims court for the processing fee and damages. Again, with the vague criteria you may not win, but it may make you feel better.
You could also file a complaint with the better business bureau, which might at least cause them some trouble.
Like I said though, your best answer may just be to chalk it up to a bad experience. I would do whatever makes you feel better, which could be just writing them a nasty letter or the better business bureau option.
Good Luck! Charlie B