Landlords usually have their discretion when it comes to renting out their houses to potential tenants.
So many landlords don’t want to rent their houses to single men and women for the following reasons:
Nuisance:
Many young unmarried men between the ages of 20 to 35 are known for creating a nuisance in the premises they occupy. Over the years I’ve had to settle quarrels between tenants on issues surrounding disturbance such as noise from very loud music in the morning and at night, sex noises, littering of the common pathways with junk, fumes from cigarettes and other hard drugs, banging on doors, walls and floor, night parties and many more. The incessant cases of this nature put the landlords on a high jump on a daily basis, the fact that one tenant would do things to discomfort other tenants is enough to disallow similar folks from taking up apartments in the said property. Landlords today, always emphasize their unacceptance of single tenants so as to reduce internal quarrels and save them the stress of always intervening on the aforementioned issues.
Squatting:
In my many years of experience in property management, I’ve come to realize that it is becoming very difficult to separate unmarried tenants from bringing squatters into their apartments. Be it a single room with shared facilities or an apartment with private facilities, single tenants within the youth age bracket are most likely to accommodate squatters. When there are multiple squatters in a house, the available facilities would be pressured to function beyond their programmed capacity. For example, if water is supposed to be pumped twice on a daily basis, the squatters may end up overworking the pumping machine thereby forcing water to be pumped up to five or six times daily so that water would be enough to circulate to all flats or apartments. Also, the amount of electricity consumed would rapidly increase because of the high usage by more people on the premises, same with the number of times that waste would be carted away, the waste baskets might end up being filled up earlier than expected which comes to more expenses and inconvenience. Generally, the cost of management would drastically increase because of squatters.
Conversions:
Single tenants are prone to changing the building design to their taste, we have seen in many cases how unmarried tenants break part of the partition wall of an accommodation so as to connect rooms. Some go as far as building studios, or carving out offices in block walls without the written or oral consent of the landlord first sought.
Subletting:
Unmarried tenants are usually in the habit of giving out their apartments to friends, family members and strangers after collecting a substantial amount from them in the name of commission and transferring possession to them without recourse to the landlord. Only for the landlord or his management to discover later, especially during rent renewal where the payer’s name is different from the real tenant’s name, further investigations usually unmask the subtenant. Sadly the subtenant may have been oblivious to the tenancy agreement between the real tenant and the landlord, eventually, the subtenant is made to dance to the music which in most cases is immediate dispossession of the said apartment.
Crime:
The rate at which young men and women engage in criminal activities nowadays poses caution on most landlords. That they no longer rent their houses to unmarried people in order to avoid having internet fraudsters popularly known as Yahoo boys, armed robbers or prostitutes which might attract the law enforcement agency to the property or put the other tenants in a state of fear, trauma or danger. If crime is ascribed to a particular house, other potential tenants may be discouraged from renting such apartment, this still falls back to the landlord who is at the receiving end.