American Homes 4 Rent’s tenants are making reports that give rise to concern that this Wall Street corporate landlord used the Coronavirus pandemic as a way to identify tenants who might have difficulty paying their rent on time and encourage them to move out early so that AH4R could free up inventory to accommodate unprecedented demand. Did American Homes 4 Rent stoop so low as to become a profiteer in the pandemic?

We hear a lot of horror stories from tenants about how American Homes 4 Rent turned the American Dream into a living nightmare. This is why we are usually not surprised by their poor business practices, lack of ethics, and slumlord-like tactics. So you know it has got to be really bad when they do something that shocks even us. And if what we have recently heard is true, we are beyond shocked. Much like a number of other tenants who have recently contacted us, we were pleasantly surprised when American Homes 4 Rent solicited information from its tenants about whether they were facing difficulties as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Sadly, we are now hearing from a number of tenants that when AH4R sent out information about hardship help, it was nothing more than a tactic to identify which tenants might be a greater risk to be delinquent paying their rent.  American Homes 4 Rent presented this as a program by which they might be willing to defer rent payments and/or offer payment plans that would allow people to remain in the homes they were renting. We have been hearing that this was not at all AH4R’s true intention. Rather, they wanted to identify potential problems that would negatively impact their bottom-line profitability with their Wall Street overseers. Tenants are telling us that rather than doing anything that was helpful, American Homes 4 Rent’s employees and property managers were pushing them to voluntarily break the lease and return the property to AH4R. They were doing this not to help their tenants but because, according to numerous media accounts and reports like this one https://www.foxbusiness.com/real-estate/wall-street-bets-virus-meltdown-landlords-chance-grow, the pandemic has resulted in a huge increase in the number of renters looking to move out of apartments and into single-family houses. Instead of helping their current customers, it appears that American Homes 4 Rent was actually trying to get out what they view as potentially “problem” tenants (meaning impacted by the pandemic and having trouble paying timely) and replace them with new tenants with higher credit scores, higher income, and who appeared to be less of a risk to the company’s profits. This is unbelievably outrageous – even for AH4R. We are hoping that this is not true. That’s why we are asking you for help. If you are (or were) a tenant of American Homes 4 Rent during the pandemic and they did something to help you under their hardship policy, please tell us about it. If you don’t wish to discuss it in a public forum, contact us privately by using our Contact Page https://protenantagency.fairness4tenants.com/contact-us/ to send us a private message.

We are asking for your help with this because if we determine that no one or very few people were actually helped under the hardship policy, we are planning to do all we can to put them on blast in the media and with their investors. We also believe that if these allegations are true, this despicable act – done in this current environment – could be the catalyst we need to spark real action against AH4R. Please let us hear from you. Thanks.