Allow Pets or Risk Vacancy?

[Jeremy Bartlett]

Looking for some general advice:

We have some tenants who are really great - military couple, clean, quiet, pay rent on time, etc. They are wanting to break their lease 5 months early because they have a dog who is currently bouncing around New Jersey from home to home and they want to bring him up here (Alaska). I have already explained that breaking their lease would result in the forfeit of their security deposit. They offered to bring us tenants to replace them, I explained that they would have to pay an application fee and pass our background check before we agreed to let them take over.

My question is, if we allow them to have their dog they have expressed interest in staying put until Sept of 2020. Is it worth going through the advertising/tenant swap out just to avoid our otherwise ideal tenants having a dog? We were planning on raising rents from $1200 to $1350 when their lease expired June 1. If we charged $50/mo pet rent on top of the base rent increase, is that worth having the security of two years of reliable rents at slightly above market rates? Should I get them to sign a 2 year lease when we finalize this conversation to ensure that will be the case?