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Posted on Tue, Feb 15, 2011 : 11 a.m.

eTrakit and rental inspection reporting

By Edward Vielmetti

If you are planning to rent housing in Ann Arbor, it would be prudent to use the City of Ann Arbor's eTrakit system to identify issues with rental properties before you move in.

The city inspects rental properties on a schedule which anticipates that each property will be inspected every 30 months, and by looking up those records online you can check out a place that you might want to live before even making a visit.

What is eTrakit?

eTrakit is the city's permit tracking system. It was announced in June 2008 ("TRAKIT: Ann Arbor puts permit tracking system online", Ann Arbor Business Review, June 5, 2008). "TRAKIT was designed by CRW Associates, and cost the city $550,000. Access for contractors and other members of the public is free."

I've written about it before for looking up municipal permits issued by the Ann Arbor City Clerk - see "There's a permit for that in Ann Arbor: noise, chickens, block parties, dog licenses and banners", April 29, 2010.

To get to the system, use the web site http://etrakit.a2gov.org/etrakit2/. (A simpler URL, http://etrakit.a2gov.org, returns an error message.)

Looking up rental inspection records

Each permit in the system has a number, which is shows the type of permit, the year that the permit was pulled, and a sequence number to make the permit number unique. You'll see permit numbers like CR11-0010, and decode that as (roughly) the 10th permit pulled for a rental inspection in the year 2011.

I have not yet found a complete key to permit types, but here are some sample permit numbers that you might find along the way that would be relevant to a property:

  • BLDG, PB - Building
  • CR - Rental
  • CSTM - Connection of storm drain
  • ELEC, PE - Electrical
  • MECH, PM - Mechanical, e.g. boiler permits

You can search for records by permit type, by address, or by contractor name. I couldn't find a way to download a report from the system, so if you want to review all rental permits from the public interface, you have to page through them one at a time.

Inspection of rental properties

Rental properties are inspected by the Rental Housing division of the city's Planning and Development Services unit. The unit was reorganized in 2010 and Lisha Turner-Tolbert directs the division.

City rental properties are regulated under Section 105 of the Ann Arbor City Code, as well as any applicable state building codes. Properties are nominally reinspected every 30 months, and tenants with specific complaints or problems can contact the City of Ann Arbor Housing Inspection Unit at 734.794.6267 then select Option 3 to request an inspection.

If you look at a rental inspection report, it should have a list of violations found and the specific portion of the city code referenced. Some rental inspections that I have looked at have been extremely cryptic; e.g. this violation found on a property in my neighborhood can't be good:

3. GM5 - for penetrations thru the floor (basement ceiling, 1st floor flooring)

The notes in the record state that the property owner "could not decipher (the) list" and thus the inspection was rescheduled. You can download a list of housing violation codes, provided by the city, from the Ann Arbor Goverment Documents Repository; you'll see that GM5 means "seal all fire chases with a one hour fire rated material".

Failing a rental inspection

Some number of rental properties have failed their rental inspections so many times that the city will send a "Notice of non-compliant building." In this case it is not legal to occupy the building.

The eTrakit system tracks these notices on individual rental inspection records, but there is no simple report on the public interface that helps you see where all of these buildings are or if one of them is in your neighborhood.

A look at the inspection records of a number of properties shows that it is by no means unusual for properties to have failed part of their rental inspections but to remain rented. Illegal occupation of basements, plumbing problems, electrical problems, and non-working smoke detectors are all routinely found in rental properties.

What I couldn't find

So far I haven't located any summary information collected by the City of Ann Arbor about the quality of the rental housing properties that it inspects. It's not readily possible to construct a report from the public eTrakit data that summarizes what fraction of the rental housing units in the city are non-compliant, where they are located, and which non-compliant structures have been rehabilitated to the point of being available for occupancy again. Similarly, I could not find a simple way to estimate from the published data how many properties are in the city's backlog for rental housing that was inspected more than 30 months ago and is due for reinspection.

The quality of housing, especially student housing, has been a long point of contention in the City of Ann Arbor. Dale Winling's 2007 masters thesis, Student Housing, City Politics, and the University of Michigan, 1920-1980, tells some of the story — of 1920's Ann Arbor landladies protesting the University of Michigan dormitory building plans, and of the 1970's rent strikes led by the Ann Arbor Tenants Union. The ebb and flow of the student housing market has created a lot of wealth in Ann Arbor, and student housing quality ranges from luxurious to filthy, sometimes in the same block.

The simple recommendation for renters, though, is actually quite easy: before you sign a lease for a place to live, look up the inspection records in eTrakit — and decode the cryptic codes before you move in.

Edward Vielmetti writes about public records for AnnArbor.com. Email him at EdwardVielmetti@AnnArbor.com.