Pet hair bill in a land lease community

We were recently informed that a home owner received a bizarre letter of demand from their operator for the cost to remove some dog hair that had strayed over their site boundary. The home owner was invoiced for $35 by their operator for merely having groomed/brushed his pet dog approximately one metre outside the boundary of their residential site. Dog hair, the volume of which has not been ascertained, had fallen onto the common area of the community.

We have chosen not to name the residential community involved anticipating that the operator would likely be ridiculed and lambasted for their actions. We thought it an odd choice of action on the part of the operator and that invoicing/fining the resident might constitute an overreach from what’s contained in the Residential Land Lease Communities Act around home owner responsibilities or possibly community rules.

Perhaps the closest responsibility the operator was drawing on is that a home owner must not intentionally or recklessly damage or destroy a community’s common areas.

The Act very clearly says that operator responsibilities include maintaining the community’s common areas in a reasonable state of cleanliness and repair.

Within reason, permission to keep pets and the presence of pets in the community will come with traces of their existence like any being. We don’t think pet hair or shedding of pet hair on community grounds could cause damage or destruction that warrants the issuing of a cleaning bill.

Home owners are held to a standard of responsible pet ownership under a number of community rules, but this was the first time we have heard of billing for pet hair removal!

This article was published in the ‘Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre & Unprecedented' section of Outasite magazine issue 13. Outasite is published once annually. Outasite Lite email newsletter is sent several times a year – subscribe here. All past issues are available in the archive.