Letter from the Executive Director For August 2016

MassLandlords appears to be dormant in July and August because we don’t have meetings, but we’ve been using the summertime to lay groundwork for the future. This month we’re going to discuss our major services and how we’ve been working to improve them.

You will have noticed that our newsletter is now being delivered in mobile-friendly emails and also print-friendly typesetting. If you want a print newsletter, please subscribe. The more we print, the less each one costs, the cheaper the per-issue price will be. This newsletter is a guide to housing policy and best practice. Remember that our news is good only to the extent our local network keeps us informed. If you have leads or updates about local issues, send them to us!

Another service we’ve been working on is our rental forms. We have started to comprehensively merge the forms created by the Rental Housing Association of Greater Springfield into ours. You will recall that in June we voted to accept this organization’s assets. This includes the forms. We want to make sure that legal best practice and knowledge is filtered up from the local level to be shared with members state-wide. If you have a killer lease clause that you want to share, we’re all ears. We aspire to be brief, complete, and readable, and completeness means taking suggestions from all quarters.

We have also been reevaluating our message boards. These allow members to communicate with one another locally for advice and suggestions. The current implementation with Google Groups has some challenges with it. Here are three examples: Members replying to digests may accidentally create new threads with unhelpful titles. There is no common group for all members to interact. Subscribing and unsubscribing requires central administration. We have found alternatives to Google Groups. There’s a survey coming out that we hope you will participate in. It will help us to select the best software.

Finally, as you’ll read in this newsletter, our service directory was threatened with becoming obsolete when Angie’s List became free. Fortunately, your steadfast team of volunteers and staff have a brilliant idea for how to flip Angie’s List on its head and offer something truly complementary and landlord-specific. We will be exploring this as soon as possible, after we complete the rental forms and message board upgrades. In the meantime, there are still hundreds of providers listed that have been used by real landlords.

Remember that these four services are in addition to our local events, Home Depot savings, discounted credit scores, and many more resources online at MassLandlords.net.

Are there services you want that we don’t offer? Do you want help getting access to your benefits? Let us know, we’re here to help you.

Sincerely,
Doug Quattrochi
Executive Director
C: 617-285-7255