About the Landlord Training Program

Keeping Illegal Activity Out Of Rental Property: A Community-Oriented Property Management Approach

Program Overview

Background

Chronic drug house activity is a major cause of neighborhood decay. Most drug house activity (dealing, manufacturing, or growing) is on rental property. Owner-occupant drug houses are the exception. Law enforcement alone cannot solve the problem -- the number of search warrants issued is a fraction of the number of drug houses suspected. Prevention efforts must include the involvement of those with the greatest leverage to stop the activity at a given location -- the property management community.

The Landlord Training Program was designed to help law enforcement agencies, owners, property managers, and residents keep illegal activity out of rental property. (While designed originally to focus on the issue of drug activity specifically, the program has consistently proved effective in helping to reduce a broader range of rental-based illegal activity.) This community-oriented property management approach was developed originally by John H. Campbell of Campbell DeLong Resources, Inc. for the Portland (Oregon) Police Bureau. The program has been developed through a process of intensive research with hundreds of organizations and individuals -- including landlords, management associations, private attorneys, tenant advocates, housing authority personnel, tenant screening companies, narcotics detectives, patrol officers, and many others. Funding for the original program development was provided by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice.

Work on the project began in July of 1989, with the first training presented in November of that year. Since then, the program has trained more than 17,000 landlords and property managers, impacting over 180,000 rental units in the Portland metropolitan area and thousands more have been trained across the nation -- at last count, for example, the City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin had also trained over 10,000 landlords and property managers.

In addition to the Portland program over 550 agencies, from 47 different states as well as Canada and the United Kingdom, have received permission to adapt the program materials -- some of those agencies have been providing programs for years, others are just getting started. In the course of being tailored to other jurisdictions, the program has both evolved and adopted various names, examples: Rental Housing Program, Police/Community Housing Program, Crime Free Multi-Housing Program, Landlord/Tenant Training Program, Partnerships in Property Management, and Enhanced Safety Properties Program. Portions of the program have been adapted into a program in Texas and Georgia known as "Resident Shield" and portions of the program have been adapted by the Institute of Real Estate Management's "Smart Partners Program: Better Properties Through Stronger Communities."

The program has received national recognition as an Innovation in State and Local Government by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. National training tools have been developed by Campbell DeLong Resources through a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA Cooperative Agreement No. 94-DD-CX-K014).

Program Content

The training for landlords delivers two important messages: 1) That effective property management can have a major impact on the health of a community, 2) That there are accessible, legitimate techniques which can be used to stop the spread of drug activity on rental property. The training includes:


Included with the training is a comprehensive manual of the material, complete with applicable laws and references to support organizations.

Marketing

The impact of the training is a function of the quality of the information and of the number of landlords and property managers who actually absorb it. The critical measure of success is not the degree to which individual landlords enjoy the course, but the degree to which the whole community benefits. To bring about a fundamental shift in approach to property management, we need to have a large number of landlords take the course. We do that by providing a quality training and marketing it well.

A three-tiered marketing approach is used:

Evaluation Summary Example

The following summarizes findings on the value of the training. Unless otherwise noted, data are drawn from two sources:

    1. Questionnaires collected from trainees six months following the training. Questionnaires were mailed to each of the 2,641 "groups" of landlords who attended the trainings (a "group" is one or more people responsible for the same property -- in many cases, a husband and wife). In all, 1,512 questionnaires (56%) were returned. The theoretic reliability of a sample of 1,512 out of a population of 2,641 is ±1.7%, assuming a two-part variable with results evenly split, 95% confidence.
    2. Post training questionnaires collected over four years of training. Questionnaires were distributed to all participants at the end of each training session. Participants were asked to fill in the surveys and hand them in before leaving. In all, 3,335 surveys were filled in, or 85% of the number of groups attending (the 15% variance is due to some trainees not staying till the training ended and others choosing not to fill in a questionnaire). Using the same assumptions as those above, the statistical reliability of 3,335 out of a population of 3,928 is ±0.7%.

Trainee Characteristics

Perception of Value

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