The Americans With Disabilities Act and Real Estate

What Is The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)?

The ADA was passed into law in 1990. It is an act that prohibits discrimination in all areas of a disabled individual's public life including in the workplace, at school, on public transportation, or at private businesses. It also sets accessibility standards and provides accessibility guidelines for all institutions that fall under Title III of the ADA including restaurants, movie theaters, schools, daycare facilities, recreational facilities, doctors' offices, and most newly-constructed commercial facilities. 

Just like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prevents discrimination based on skin color, ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, or religion, the ADA guarantees those same civil rights to those with disabilities. There are many things to consider when accommodating clients with disabilities as a real estate agent. Ensuring that you comply with the ADA is not negotiable. The U.S. Department of Justice is known to penalize ADA non-compliance harshly.

Avoiding breaking federal law, however, is only one reason to ensure that your business meets the ADA's standards. In fact, doing what you can to exceed expectations can help positively influence your business’s appearance among the general public. It also sets a precedent among your company's competition and strengthens your local community with the support it provides. 

Did You Know? 

The ADA is responsible for regulating the rules that govern handicap access.

Handicapped parking spaces are often seen as the ideal parking space, but it is no mystery why the best parking spaces at the store are handicapped only. They are made wide for easy access from both sides for access to equipment like a wheelchair, and they are required to be placed close to the entrance for ease of access. Some of the rules governing accessible parking spaces include:

• There must be one accessible parking space per 25 standard parking spaces in a lot, with a minimum of one. 
• If the lot is small enough only to have one handicapped parking space, it must be van-accessible.
• The parking spaces must be located near an entrance to the building or the closest pedestrian walkways if there is no building access from the parking lot. 

The Americans With Disabilities Act and Real Estate

The ADA has far-reaching implications, not only for real estate but across nearly all professional sectors. Both public and private entities that own, lease, or operate a place of public accommodation are required to adhere to the ADA. This includes real estate, offices, and sales floors. 

The ADA has five titles or sections; each impacts real estate practice differently. Title I and Title III are the ones most applicable to real estate, but understanding all five titles and how they affect your business or professional practice is essential. 

Title I - Employment

Title I of the ADA is one of the two big ones for real estate professionals and brokerage firms. This section guarantees the Civil Rights protection of accessibility. Real estate offices of sufficient size - measured by the number of employees, with 15 being the cut-off - are affected by this section of the ADA and are required to abide by it.

Title I requires offices and privately-owned services to accommodate qualified employees or applicants, and to allow them to perform the job's essential functions, with or without reasonable accommodation, regardless of disabilities.

Accommodation most often takes the form of creating a more accessible environment for both employees and customers. For example, this can include rearranging an office space to accommodate a wheelchair or installing support rails in the bathroom stalls to support handicapped use. We will talk more about what you can do to meet these requirements later in this article. 

Title II - Public Services

Title II of the ADA applies specifically to State and Local Governments and sets minimum requirements for accessibility in public spaces like parks, government buildings, and public transportation.

Title III - Public Accommodations

Title III of the ADA uses “public accommodation” to refer to any place of public accommodation, publicly or privately owned. It requires property owners that lease or operate an establishment, such as a real estate office, a convenience store, a lawyer's office, or a corporate office building, to provide equal access to their offices for customers, employees, and qualified applicants alike. 

Services operated by private entities that see customers or have employees on site must comply with this title. 

Public accommodations are things like push-to-open doors, wheelchair access, and bathroom rails. 

Title IV - Telecommunications

Title IV of the ADA places another requirement on the state and phone networks to provide telecommunications methods, such as prompt-based menus for those who cannot speak, to those with disabilities that limit or remove the ability to talk over the phone. 

It requires that all government lines have accessibility requirements met for every department, from the DMV to the Governor's Office. 

Title V - Misc. 

Title V of the ADA provides for miscellaneous things like attorney's fees and sets further requirements on the Federal Government for accountability, support, and auditing violations. Title V also covers some specific conditions that are not considered disabilities, like broken limbs or cancer. 

Creating an Accessible Environment for Clients with Disabilities

There are also accessible design standards set forth for the construction of new commercial real estate. Modern facilities are often designed with many of the necessary features like special elevators and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. Older buildings have been required to retrofit and remodel their spaces to meet the standards set forth by the ADA.

The owner or lessor of the building must ensure this standard is met. However, it is up to each company to ensure that the public space and workspaces are set up to allow for accessibility. While the law doesn't have a robust list of codified requirements, it does require that a company do what it can to ensure accessibility and fair opportunity to those with disabilities. 

You can do many things to increase the accessibility of your office spaces, showrooms, and homes.

The significant areas are doorways, bathrooms, paths of travel, and workspaces. 

• Ensure that doorways are accessible and unobstructed so that wheelchairs, or other equipment related to a disability, can easily be maneuvered through.
• Bathrooms should have at least one accessible stall per six standard stalls, but never less than one. Paths to bathrooms should be easy for someone with a disability to access should they need to. 
• Workspaces may need to be altered or rearranged in significant ways to make tools, work equipment, or desk space accessible. The path leading to the workspace must also be arranged so that the person with a disability can move to and from their workspace unimpeded. 
• The paths of travel, whether they are the halls in your office, or the sidewalk leading from the parking lot to the front door, must be accessible. This means having ramps, unobstructed paths, and support rails where necessary. 

An accessible website is essential to knocking down communication barriers as well. Though the ADA doesn't have any codified language or rules that set requirements for the accessibility of websites, entities affected by Title I and Title III are required to provide reasonable accessibility to their webpage. There isn't much legal precedence on the limits and minimum requirements for an accessible website, so while it is unlikely that a business website will get a fine by the ADA, failure to reasonably accommodate disability could land the company in some hot water.

More than that, providing additional website accessibility puts the company in a positive light, exceeding their peers in ensuring civil rights are protected. Additional website accessibility is also good planning for the future. 

As our dependency on the internet grows, websites represent the first and most significant way that many potential customers will interact with a business. Accessibility opens the company to a larger market and is more future-proof for when the ADA might implement codified rulings about accessible websites.  

Damage to Company Reputation

In the real estate industry, having an ADA violation can look like a black mark on your record that will deter both potential customers and business partners away. In addition, it can prevent potential employees from applying who, despite their disability, are competent and valuable team assets. 

Fines

Violating ADA standards can result in monetary damages. As part of the ADA, the government's auditors can issue fines for failure to meet the requirements outlined in Title I and Title III. The law allows for a maximum penalty of $75,000 for the first violation and up to $150,000 for the second violation. 

Lawsuits

Like neglecting the Fair Housing Act, failure to meet ADA standards could also result in a lawsuit. Court fees alone can quickly accumulate into thousands of dollars, not to mention what it might cost if the company is found guilty of violating someone's Civil Rights. On top of this, fines may also be assessed if audits related to the case reveal violations. 

ADA compliance is mandatory, but it is also the right thing to do. Making sure that your business is in line with the requirements outlined in the five sections of the Americans with Disabilities Act is essential to any company’s success. It is necessary for real estate firms and businesses to accommodate employees, customers, and applicants to avoid discrimination.