And in fact, Cavalin's main theme for the first hour of his class is about how to not get sued. "Many managers don't know anything," he says.
Cavalin posits a hypothetical: Let's say the manager is cleaning the floor next to a glass entry door to the complex, and has marked the floor to show it's wet. A tenant outside knocks on the door to get in. He lets her in and she immediately slips and, thwack! — Cavalin claps his hands loudly — hits the floor, busting her head open.
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Can she sue? Cavalin pauses, to blank stares. "Yes," she can, he says. "Why? Because the guy opened the door."
And that's just the beginning of the blizzard of laws that can put an apartment manager in a bind. Some might find state law a little intimidating: Don't ask rental applicants if they are married or have children, Cavalin says, because under California law, that could open a landlord to a discrimination complaint. Another example: If a Koreatown landlord hires a receptionist who can only answer phones in Korean, that could lead to lawsuits.
The law even protects superstitious tenants. If someone dies or is killed in the apartment, Cavalin says, for three years the manager must inform any subsequent prospective tenants. And the dead-tenant law gets far more complicated than that: Landlords must disclose the manner of death, but there's another layer on top of that — not if it's AIDS-related. Students raise their eyebrows when he explains that if the landlords keep tenants in the dark about past deaths, the renters can break the lease.
"Everything you do, you need to write a letter," Cavalin cautions. "You know why? You need the paper trail."
Maureen Lambe, of the National Apartments Association, says managing rental units is "probably the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the time, the residents are happy, they like where they live, they like how you keep their property well maintained, and they appreciate it."
Most important to the ranks of unemployed but educated young people, the jobs offer a foot in the door for recent grads, Lambe says — especially business management and real estate majors and aspiring entrepreneurs. They just have to realize, "You need to like people, you need to like solving problems," she says. "You need to like a job that's going to be different every day."
