BRU Rent Court Data Dashboard
As part of our Rent Court Watch program, BRU started collecting data in October 2022 to track patterns across failure-to-pay-rent dockets. Below are some of the emergent patterns we have discovered so far. As of the end of July 2023, we have tracked data on 1460 failure-to-pay-rent cases. If you are interested in reading more about BRU Advocates’ experiences in rent court, you can check out our Rent Court Watch Blog. You can view and download a summary of all our findings by clicking Here.
If you want to become a Rent Court Watch Volunteer and help us track date, you can sign up on our Volunteer Page!DATA LAST UPDATED:
9/18/2023
Number Of Data Points:
N=2018
Most tenants who show up in court are Black women.
This coincides with other studies, both locally and nationally, that have consistently shown black tenants and especially black women are disproportionately affected by evictions.
Tenant Gender
Tenant Race
Judges rarely ask if a property is licensed.
Did the judge ask about licensure?
In Baltimore City, a landlord is legally required to be licensed to access failure-to-pay-rent proceedings, but in practice judges often don’t directly ask about licensure. To file a failure-to-pay-rent case, landlords are required to put down a license number, but there have been cases where a landlord has been able to secure a judgement while unlicensed, demonstrating that there may be little verification of whether the listed license exists or is expired.
Tenants are often being evicted over very small amounts of money.
The lowest amount of money listed on a complaint that BRU Tenant Advocates witnessed was $9. The highest amount was $25,000. The Average amount was $2761. For perspective, the average monthly rent in Baltimore City was $1261 as of July 2023.
Number Of Data Points:
N=637*
Complaint Dollar Amounts
Average: $2553
Mode: $1000
Median: $1400
*BRU began tracking filing amount data in February 2023Tenants are significantly less likely to have representation.
Did the tenant have representation?**
**24.7% of tenants who show up to court have access to some kind of representation, often through day-of-hearing consultations through the right-to-counsel program. Tenants only appear in about 38% of cases, and the overall representation rate for all cases observed by BRU is 9.7%.Was the landlord represented by an agent?
Was the landlord represented by an attorney?
More and more, BRU is seeing landlords forego attorneys, turning instead to rent court agents, while tenants still usually have no representation at all. *though numbers are better than before right-to-counsel was implemented.
Tenants are always required to be present for their cases unless represented by an attorney, while landlords are not - BRU has reported on this unfair double standard before. Maryland allows landlords to use non-attorneys - called agents - to represent them in court without the landlord being present. More and more frequently, landlords are opting to hire for-profit rent court agents who specialize in making eviction proceedings as quick and painless for the landlord as possible, all while costing a landlord much less than an attorney.
Rent court agents present several major issues for tenants: An agent may have never seen the property in question before or spoken to the tenant before arriving in rent court. BRU Rent Court Watchers have witnessed agents file complaints with incorrect names and amounts, and even incorrect addresses before because they have no familiarity with the tenant’s situation. Agents often have no access to ledgers, so they may be unaware of payments made by tenants after the complaint filing date, causing confusion when the hearing occurs and the agent claims the tenant owes a balance that’s already been paid. Agents usually have no knowledge of past issues and correspondences concerning the landlord-tenant relationship, and are thus unprepared in the case of maintenance, health, and safety issues being raised about a property. When an agent comes unprepared, it can often undermine defenses the tenant may have.
Even more concerning is the way agents are used to mask the identity of landlords - Many tenants end up in rent court because of their landlords dodging communications with tenants. Tenants come to court hoping the hearing will force their landlord to speak with them directly, only to be shocked when they find the landlord is not there and a person they’ve never met or talked to is there in the landlord’s stead. This reinforces a system where tenants often do not know who they are renting from beyond a generic LLC name, and landlords are allowed to dodge accountability for ignoring issues with a property.
Many agents specialize in evictions and essentially go to failure to pay rent court all day every day, making them experts at the ins and outs of the court. This is leading to new problems in eviction court as agents develop friendships with judges and bailiffs, learn how to handle cases as rapidly and impersonally as possible, and develop methods for interacting with tenants that may cause confusion for tenants or sway the situation in the landlord’s favor.