As a Plano landlord and property owner, it is your responsibility to keep your rental property in a safe and habitable condition. For the majority of property owners, this means doing regular maintenance and repairs. Although if your rental house was built before 1978, there are various things that you may need to include in your property maintenance list. For instance, quite a lot of older homes were built using lead-based paint on interior walls and ceilings. Lead-based paint can be extremely dangerous to your tenants, which is why landlords should be concerned about limiting lead-based paint exposure as much as possible. In the sections that follow, we’ll go into a few of the hidden dangers of lead-based paint in a rental home and what property owners can do to assist their tenants in keeping away from exposure.
The Hidden Dangers of Lead Paint
Lead-based paint was a well-known material used in buildings formed earlier than 1978. Considering lead paint on the walls is not necessarily dangerous unless the paint is disturbed, chips, or crumbles into dust. As lead paint ages, it becomes toxic to people (especially children) who come into contact with it. The most typical settings for this to come about would be around windows and window sills, railings, banisters, porches, and doors and door frames. For adults, ingesting lead paint flakes or inhaling the dust can cause a host of health problems, like headaches, body aches, digestive issues, memory loss, and even kidney damage. But more critically, lead paint is most noxious to children, leading to learning disabilities, hearing problems, nerve damage, and bone marrow issues. Such health issues can have a dreadful and lifelong impact on those most unfortunate enough to find themselves exposed to lead-based paint.
Landlord Responsibilities
As a landlord, the health and safety of your tenants should be a key priority. The risks of lead paint amplify beyond that, likewise. Basically, in quite a lot of states, if you knowingly rent a property with lead-based paint without disclosing that fact to your tenants, you could be liable for any associated costs of treatment and other damages, such as pain and suffering. Precisely why, it’s relevant to be aware definitely whether your rental property has lead-based paint, inside or out, and take any appropriate courses of action from there.
If you don’t know whether your rental has lead-based paint or not, among the first things you really have to do is get it tested and inspected. On the basis of the property’s age and location, it may not be appropriate to rely on disclosures provided to you when you purchased the property. Subsequently, if lead is detected, you may be legally required to notify your tenants and provide them with information about lead-based paint and the dangers of exposure.
Avoiding Tenant Exposure
One of the best approaches to remove any chance of exposure is to have the lead paint removed entirely. This alternative action, despite being expensive, is the most permanent long-term solution to the danger. Do not attempt to take out lead-based paint yourself; this is a task ideally better left to the professionals.
If removal and replacement aren’t a possibility, you may be able to encapsulate or enclose your rental’s surfaces to prevent any contact with the lead paint. Encapsulation, normally the more practical option of the two, is a process where a special coating is applied over the lead paint, creating a watertight seal. As another option, enclosure involves covering the existing surface with a new one, such as putting up new drywall over an existing wall or covering window sills with cladding. Even supposing both options may be effective for the time being, if the coating ever wears off or the enclosed surface is removed, the risk of exposure will be very high. You may likewise still need to impart disclosures to your tenant referring to the lead paint, based upon the laws in your area.
At Real Property Management Legend, we apprehend that owning rental properties can be associated with some unanticipated challenges. When nuisances and problems do emerge, you need the experience and resources of Plano property management experts to work it out with you. Contact us online to get more info and learn more.
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