Well, here’s an early New Year’s present! Erin Keane, acting Comptroller of the City of Chicago has released the new rate of interest on security deposits governed by the Chicago Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance for the period from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2014. This rate changes annually and dictates the interest to be paid to tenants under Section 5-12-080 of the CRLTO.
The rate for 2014 is:
Warning, this is a “perspective” post for landlords! A Chicago landlord and prospective client called me the other day and said he wanted to kick his tenant out. Being the helpful landlord-tenant attorney I am, I began to discuss the Illinois eviction process. I started to tell him about how he needs to serve a notice of termination of tenancy and the procedures to evict in the Circuit Court of Cook County. He stopped me. He said he wanted to kick the tenant out, literally. Then, I had to stop him.
At long last, the City of Chicago has released the bedbug pamphlet that needs to be provided to tenants under tenancies covered by the Chicago Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance. The bedbug ordinance Brand new section 5-12-101 of the Chicago Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance provides:
I received a great email from a person I spoke to about a landlord tenant issue just a bit ago. We did not come to an engagement on the case, but this landlord wanted to update me about the eviction situation. The landlord suggested I pass along one simple tip to my readers and so I’m going to do that.
Update: look here for information on the 2014-2015 winter moratorium
It is that time of year when Christmas is in the air and tenants across Cook County get a respite from eviction in the form of an eviction moratorium. On December 12, 2013, the Circuit Court of Cook County entered general order 2013-07 effectively stopping the Cook County Sheriff from enforcing eviction possession orders. The Sheriff of Cook County has been ordered to cease the execution of orders for possession beginning on December 16, 2013 (they don’t evict on weekends, so really, tenants who are not evicted by December 13 will be unaffected until the moratorium ends) and to resume evictions effective January 3, 2014 (a Friday, so, again, there really are no evictions until January 6, 2014).
In recent months, the judges in the Forcible Entry and Detainer Department of the First District of the Circuit Court of Cook County have begun suggesting, more and more, that parties before them use the “new” form “Agreed Settlement Order”. The form, which has been around since early 2013, provides a quicker and easier way to begin a settlement order with a tenant in a Cook County eviction case.
For our office, the beginning of the “eviction” season started out a bit slow (it is not a bad thing that landlords are, hopefully, collecting rent and doing better screening so that we do less evictions!). However, for us, things in the eviction courts are starting to heat up. I am predicting, based only on anecdotal evidence from my office’s caseload and a few of my attorney friends, that the eviction lawyers, judges, and courts in Cook County will be busily processing forcible entry and detainer cases in the next 60 days and that, if the fall/winter weather is uncooperative, this will lead to a major backlog in eviction case enforcement early in 2014.
It was great to get a chance earlier today to speak to the agents at Re/Max Signature about recent legislative changes affecting the Chicago rental market! We had a great discussion about CRLTO compliance, the new Keep Chicago Renting Ordinance, Lock Changes, amendments to fair housing granting Section 8 participants protected class protections, and bedbugs. … Read more
So, we’ve discussed notices, relocation assistance/rent control, and registration as we broke down the Keep Chicago Renting Ordinance. Today, we will wrap things up by addressing the various ways the law allows for compliance and, more directly, non-compliance.
Okay, so we have gone through the notice provisions and the relocation assistance portions of the brand new Keep Chicago Renting Ordinance. Today, we will address the section of the law dealing with registration requirements for foreclosed rental properties under 5-14-060 of the Chicago Protecting Tenants in Foreclosed Rental Property Ordinance.