How to not discriminate against married/non-married couples?

[Taylor McClung]

Hi there!

I have two multi-family rental properties and have come across this situation a couple times and have never found a solid answer to. Can anyone provide their insight?

Situation: I own rental property in California, which says you can not discriminate when renting a property to people who are married and those who are not. Where the problem lies is in qualifying their income. Our personal standards are that all occupants must individually have at least 3x rent in gross monthly income. If my wife and I were renters, this would disqualify us! (I'm the sole income provider). What we have unintentionally done is disqualified potentially great married couples, like us, from renting. 

On the positive side, it has limited us from accepting the "non-serious relationship" type renters because most of those people we run into, one of them usually doesn't make near enough to qualify with our standards. 

Your help with any examples would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Taylor

[Michele Fischer]

I think it is crazy to require all applicants to have 3x rent, it should be household income for the people that will be living in the unit.

You can make the strongest wage earner the primary tenant, the person to stay if relationships fail.

If I were you I would change my personal income standard and look at maybe adding other standards that reduce your risk of tenants not following through, such as looking at how long they have had their jobs and how long they have co-habitated.  Neither of those are discriminatory since they don't address marital status or another protected class.