Landlords get new way to monitor tenants

Meg McLeod

Naughty or nice? Thanks to a new program from the city of Saginaw’s technical services department, landlords can now have that information about their tenants delivered right to their inbox.

“There’s nothing worse than a bad tenant, and there’s nothing better than a good tenant,” veteran landlord Noel Peterson said Tuesday.

Peterson, a landlord for more than 40 years, said he’s seen plenty of unlawful tenants through the decades. With the free public safety incident program, landlords can now receive an email when the police are called to one of their residences.

Jeff Klopcic, director of technical services for Saginaw, explained what landlords are sent: “So they’re notified when it happened, what type of incidents, its location, and it also gives a police report number and a phone number to call the police department.”

The treasurer of the Saginaw Landlords Association said he thinks this will greatly benefit all of the city’s landlords because they’ve never had access to this information before.

“As it is right now, things go on in the houses and the neighborhoods, and we have no idea whatsoever,” Jack Haveman said. “With this notification, we would deal with them, evict the tenants, correct the tenants, whatever we have to do, see if we can solve the situation. This is our business. This is how we feed our family. It’s extremely important to us.”

Peterson echoes that sentiment. He said this is a step in the right direction to not only improving his business but also creating a safer Saginaw.

“We’re invested very heavily in this town financially, and we want to continue to see it succeed,” Peterson said.

Source: wnem