As a Logan landlord and property owner, it is your job to keep your rental property in a safe and habitable condition. For many property owners, this means executing regular maintenance and repairs. But be informed that if your rental house was built before 1978, there are some other things that you may have to add on your property maintenance list. For example, various 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 next paragraphs, we’ll speak about most of the hidden dangers of lead-based paint in a rental home and what property owners can do to get their tenants to successfully evade exposure.
The Hidden Dangers of Lead Paint
Lead-based paint was a regular material used in buildings erected previous to 1978. Applying 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 usual areas for this to transpire 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 bring on a host of health problems, particularly headaches, body aches, digestive issues, memory loss, and even kidney damage. But more importantly, lead paint is definitely risky to children, inducing learning disabilities, hearing problems, nerve damage, and bone marrow issues. Such health issues can have a damaging and lifelong impact on those ill-fated enough to find themselves exposed to lead-based paint.
Landlord Responsibilities
As a landlord, the health and safety of your tenants should be a major priority. The risks of lead paint do definitely extend beyond that as well. Actually, in some 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. That’s exactly why it’s imperative to determine absolutely whether your rental property has lead-based paint, inside or out, and take any appropriate actions from there.
If you don’t know whether your rental has lead-based paint or not, among the first things you have to do is have it tested and inspected. Depending on the property’s age and location, it may not be quite enough to rely on disclosures provided to you when you purchased the property. Afterwards, if lead is detected, you may be legally required to notify your tenants and give them some information about lead-based paint and the dangers of exposure.
Avoiding Tenant Exposure
Included in the best ways to ward off any chance of exposure is to have the lead paint removed entirely. This course of action, even though expensive, is the most permanent long-term solution to the hazardous situation. Do not attempt to take out lead-based paint yourself; this is a job better left to the professionals.
If removal and replacement aren’t exactly possible, you may really just encapsulate or enclose your rental’s surfaces to prevent any contact with the lead paint. Encapsulation, typically the more reasonable option of the two, is a method where a special coating is applied over the lead paint, creating a watertight seal. However, 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. Despite that both options may turn out well for a period of time, if the coating ever wears off or the enclosed surface is removed, the risk of exposure will be very high. You may further still need to give disclosures to your tenant in regard to the lead paint, depending on the laws in your area.
At Real Property Management Cache Valley, we know that owning rental properties can actually come with some sudden challenges. When concerns do occur, you need the experience and resources of Logan property management experts to guide you through. Contact us online to learn more useful information.
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