Here & Now

Chris Mokler on the Retention of Wisconsin Eviction Records

Zac Schultz:

For the opposing viewpoint, we’re joined by Chris Mokler, director of legislative affairs for the Wisconsin Real Estate Investors Association. Thanks for your time today.

Chris Mokler:

Thank you for having me on.

Zac Schultz:

So what would be the impact of this rule change for landlords?

Chris Mokler:

Well, the biggest thing that this does is it creates more work for the landlords and it also harms other tenants, other good tenants. I’ll explain the second one first. If this rule were put into effect, good tenants who pay their rent on time are now going to be equal in their footing on their applications with tenants that have had evictions. A landlord, for the first part of my answer was, a landlord is going to have to do more research and try to figure out because a landlord owes a duty to not only other tenants of the building but neighbors to the buildings in the cities because if there’s a problem, those are the first people that are going to be upset, which is going to be police calls. It’s going to be a problem with city leaders and have to be dealt with and nobody likes that.

Zac Schultz:

What percentage of landlords use Wisconsin’s electronic case search to research perspective renters? Is it nearly all will do some cursory search?

Chris Mokler:

I would assume that. There’s no way for me to have a number but it’s an available service to help make a determine, just like a bank does when it’s giving you a loan, they look at your credit report. This is one of the best ways a landlord can look and make sure they’re going to be putting a good tenant in their building.

Zac Schultz:

Do you think all of those landlords understand that some of those eviction notices may have been filed inaccurately or weren’t actually resulting in a full eviction and there’s a difference between that and a full eviction, and should there be a difference?

Chris Mokler:

We’ve been promoting. Yeah, we’ve been promoting that to our landlords. Just don’t look at the first page that looks at evictions and dig into it. Look at it. Some might have a stipulated dismissal where the tenant and the landlord came to an agreement and that agreement is put in writing and signed and the judge agrees to it. There could be lots of reasons but we certainly teach to dig into it. A lot of landlords will still rent to people with evictions but they want to know what the situation was with eviction.

Zac Schultz:

With this tight housing market, what are landlords facing right now in terms of the number of people applying for an apartment or a unit somewhere?

Chris Mokler:

Well, obviously they’re getting a lot of people applying for units. It’s maybe slowing down a little bit now. Rents are becoming a little bit more leveled off and obviously there’s been more apartments built in the last couple of years. Obviously not enough, we still need housing in Wisconsin, not only single-family homes, but apartments. So it’s been working out and, yeah, the landlords getting a lot of applications showing the apartment a lot of times. When I leave here, I’m going to be showing an apartment two times.

Zac Schultz:

So the tenant advocacy groups are saying that these records should be treated differently because they believe that housing is a human right. Should that play into this argument before the Supreme Court?

Chris Mokler:

Housing is a human right, perhaps, but it’s up to some tenants that have evictions and, unfortunately, repeated evictions. Again, landlords aren’t going to automatically not take you just because you have an eviction. They’re going to look at the scenario. But when you have several evictions, owing a lot of money and no effort from what we can tell to pay it back, therefore, it gets to be a problem of why should you rely on a mom and pop operation that may only own a couple of units, like most landlords in Wisconsin do, to risk their financial future. Oftentimes these landlords have another job and they’re doing this on the side and, you know, they’ve got to make a bank payment. According to the National Apartment Association, only about 7 cents, maybe a little less for small landlords, of every dollar of rent, assuming that the rent is paid in full, actually goes to the landlord. So one little hiccup and the landlord’s not making any money. They got to pay the taxes, the utilities, all that stuff.

Zac Schultz:

This rule change is looking to make a pretty considerable timeline change, for up to 20 years for a record following someone online versus just one year. Is there a happy medium? Like how valuable is an eviction record for 20 years ago versus one from two or three years ago?

Chris Mokler:

Well, in Act 317 from I believe it was 2021, 2020, I’d have to go back and look, we actually proposed a rule change that the state is not currently following, and I can’t get into — there’s a lot to it, which we don’t have time for, but there’s a two-year limit on certain evictions that can be removed from CCAP, the circuit court automation program, that we actually proposed, and they want to change that to one year. We just think that’s too tight.

Zac Schultz:

So we have about a minute left here. One of the county clerk of courts said that the amount of renters asking judges to expunge these records immediately, as soon as after an eviction is filed or closed, is on a dramatic uptick, that more and more people are doing this. So would a more uniform policy make sense if some people are more easily able to get their personal eviction records erased when some people aren’t?

Chris Mokler:

As to a more uniform policy, you see this happening a lot in Milwaukee and perhaps in Madison. Obviously, there’s a lot more tenants there. When it comes to getting it, I think the current law should be followed, which in some cases, we don’t think it is as far as expungement. There’s certain cases where expungement is good and there’s certain cases where expungement is not open records for all to see like we do here in Wisconsin.

Zac Schultz:

All right. Chris Mokler, thanks very much for your time today.

Chris Mokler:

Thank you. Have a great day.