Would you want to live in an apartment
complex or rental housing if you discovered the property manager was getting a kickback, in the
form of cash, gift cards, gambling trips to Las Vegas or free parking lot
striping from the towing company that towed your or your visitor's
vehicle during the middle of the night and forced to pay $200+ to get it
released from the storage lot?
Property Management Companies,
who are members of the Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Tarrant County and Texas Apartment Associations expect
residents in their complexes to obey their rules, but, they turn around
and accept kickbacks and bribes from towing companies.
Property managers can't say they don't know they
couldn't accept kickbacks, because every office at an apartment complex
keeps an updated version of the TAA Redbook, that explains the State Law
regulations regarding the towing of vehicles.
One of the
problems with some property managers, are they are weak when it comes to
turning away a towing company salesman offering their services, signs,
including striping, parking permits, letters to be given to their
residents, and place orange warning stickers on vehicles all at a price they could not get from anyone else, free.
It never passes through a property manager or supervisor's
mind that they chance going to jail if they sign a contract with a
towing company, that includes all the above mentioned perks.
Towing
company salesmen or account managers are taught to make the property manager feel they will not be responsible for any vehicle that gets towed and they will be held harmless, another bald face lie. But, we see
many property managers belly up and accept bribes daily from towing
companies.
Poor residents that are struggling financially to make
ends meet, while their property manager is collecting not only a
paycheck, but kickbacks from the towing company for each vehicle towed.
Me,
personally, I think any property manager, should be allowed to authorize a towing
company to patrol their parking lot and allow their drivers to use their
discretion on which vehicle to impound.
But in some instances, a vehicle will
be impounded for barely touching the white/yellow parking stripe.
On
another instance, a wrecker driver will find a vehicle with the windows
rolled down and remove the parking permit, them impound the vehicle.
Still shocking illegal activity, is the wrecker driver taking a vehicle
that is perfectly parked and move the vehicle in the fire lane, over the
parking stripe, photograph it, then impound the vehicle, all because the
property manager them gave authorization.
Now since taking photographs or video of a vehicle prior to towing to validate the reason for impoundment, wrecker drivers tend to use this photograph documentation to their benefit.
This type of criminal conduct must be reported, investigated and prosecuted by law enforcement.
