Free All-States Letter of Recommendation

How to Use the All-States Recommendation Letter

Generate the All-States Notice

About This All-States Notice

Reference Request or Recommendation Letter — Which Do You Need?

Two different documents are involved in a rental reference, and it is easy to arrive at the wrong one.

A previous landlord reference request is what a prospective landlord sends out. It is a form addressed to someone who rented to the applicant before, asking them to fill in what happened. If you are the landlord screening an applicant, that is the document you need, and it is on our previous landlord reference form page.

A letter of recommendation — this page — is what a landlord writes. It is an outbound letter vouching for a tenant, usually because the tenant is applying somewhere else and has asked for it. You are the referee, not the enquirer.

The distinction matters because the risks run in opposite directions. When you send a request, your exposure is in what you ask and how consistently you ask it. When you write a letter, your exposure is in what you say, whether it is supportable, and what you leave out. This page is about the second.

What Goes Into a Landlord Recommendation Letter?

A useful letter is specific, factual and short. The reader is deciding whether to trust the applicant with a property, and vague warmth does not help them. Ten elements cover nearly every case.

Your identity and standing. Your name, your role in relation to the property, and the company if there is one. A reader needs to know whether they are hearing from the owner, a manager, or someone else.

The tenant’s full legal name, matching the name on the application they have made elsewhere.

The property address, which lets the reader verify the tenancy independently against public records.

The tenancy dates. Precise start and end. This is the single most-checked fact in any reference and the one most often found not to match the application.

The rent, and whether it changed. A figure sustained over years says more about affordability than a stated salary.

The payment record, stated factually. “Paid on or before the due date throughout” is worth more than “always a good payer”, because it is checkable and it is what you would say again if asked.

The condition of the property, and ideally whether the deposit was returned in full — the most compact evidence of property care available.

Lease compliance. Whether notices were served, whether there were unauthorised occupants or pets, whether the tenancy ended with proper notice.

Your recommendation, in plain terms. Whether you would rent to this person again. Readers look for this sentence first, and its absence is noticed.

Verifiable contact details. A phone number and email at which you can actually be reached, so the reader can confirm the letter is genuine. A reference nobody can verify carries much less weight than one they can.

What Should You Leave Out?

What a reference omits is as important as what it says, and the omissions are not optional.

Never mention a protected characteristic. The Fair Housing Act at 42 U.S.C. § 3604(a) makes it unlawful to refuse to rent, or otherwise make a dwelling unavailable, because of race, colour, religion, sex, familial status or national origin, and subsection (f) extends the same protection on the basis of handicap. Many states and cities protect further characteristics, commonly including source of income, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, age and military status.

The trap is that mentions are usually well meant. “A lovely young couple with two well-behaved children” supplies familial status. “She was quiet, especially given her disability” supplies handicap. “A hard-working immigrant family” supplies national origin. None of those is intended to harm the tenant, and every one of them hands the reader information they must not use — and creates a written record that a later decision was made with that information available.

Leave out anything you cannot support. A reference is a statement about a real person that a third party will act on. If you would not be comfortable repeating a sentence under questioning, with the tenancy file in front of you, it does not belong in the letter.

Leave out matters outside the tenancy. Relationships, health, finances beyond rent, immigration status, and anything you learned informally rather than as their landlord are not yours to pass on. Immigration status in particular should never appear: enquiries about it are restricted or prohibited in a number of jurisdictions, and volunteering it is worse than being asked.

Leave out other tenants’ information. In a shared tenancy, write about the person who asked you, not about the household.

Honesty, Defamation, and the Reference You Cannot Give

The hardest reference is the one you have been asked for and cannot honestly give. It is worth understanding the position before you are in it.

You are generally under no obligation to write one at all. A landlord asked for a reference can decline. Declining is a legitimate answer and is usually a better one than writing something warm you do not believe.

Truth is the foundation of any defence. Across jurisdictions, a statement that is true is the strongest position in a defamation claim. That is why a factual reference — dates, amounts, counts, what was served and when — is safer than a characterising one. “Rent was received late on nine occasions” is a record; “they were an unreliable tenant” is a judgement that has to be defended as an opinion.

Many states recognise a qualified privilege for references given in good faith to a person with a legitimate interest in receiving them — the rationale being that the reference system stops working if honest referees are exposed. The scope of that protection, and what defeats it (commonly malice, or reckless disregard for the truth), varies by state, and it is not a licence to say anything. Treat it as a reason to be factual rather than a reason to be careless, and take advice if you are being asked about a tenancy that ended badly.

The neutral reference is the practical middle path. Confirming dates, rent and deposit while stating that it is your policy not to comment further is honest, is not defamatory, and does not falsely vouch for someone. Template 10 below is written for exactly this. Many management companies use nothing else.

Do not write a glowing reference to move a difficult tenant on. It is a common temptation and it puts a false statement in writing, over your signature, that another landlord will rely on to their cost.

Writing a Reference for a Tenant Who Has Not Moved Out Yet

Most references are written after a tenancy ends. A significant minority are written while it is still running, because the tenant is applying for their next home before giving notice — and that changes what you can honestly say.

Write in the present tense and say the tenancy is ongoing. A letter that describes a current tenancy in the past tense implies it ended, and the reader will assume there is an end date you have not given them. State when the tenancy began, that it continues, and whether notice has been given.

You cannot speak to what has not happened yet. Condition at move-out, whether the deposit will be returned, and whether proper notice was given are all unknown. Say so rather than predicting: a letter that confirms twenty-two months of on-time payment and says the property has been well kept on every visit to date is entirely useful without guessing at the ending.

Be aware of your own incentive, and manage it. A landlord who wants a tenant to leave has a reason to write a warmer letter than the tenancy deserves; one who wants them to stay has a reason to be cooler. Readers know this, which is why a current landlord’s reference is discounted relative to a previous one. The remedy is the same as everywhere else on this page: write facts, and the incentive stops mattering.

Do not treat the request as notice. A tenant asking for a reference has not given notice and may not go. Respond to the reference request, and handle notice separately and formally if and when it comes.

How Long Should You Keep a Copy, and Can the Tenant See It?

Keep a copy of every reference you write with that tenancy’s file, on the same retention schedule as the lease and the move-out paperwork. The reason is practical: references generate questions long after they are sent, and the only satisfactory answer to “what did you say about me?” is the document itself.

Whether a tenant is entitled to see a reference you wrote about them is a question of state law and of who holds it, and it varies. The straightforward course is to give them a copy when they ask, unless there is a specific reason not to. A reference you would be uncomfortable showing the subject is usually a reference that needed rewriting before it was sent — which is the same honesty test that governs every other section of this page.

How Does a Landlord Reference Differ From a Character Reference?

Applicants often supply both and treat them as interchangeable. They are not, and knowing the difference changes what you should write and how a reader should weigh it.

A landlord reference is testimony about a commercial relationship. You had a written contract with this person. Money was owed on fixed dates and either arrived or did not. Property in your ownership was returned in a condition you inspected and recorded. Everything you say is grounded in a documented history, which is why a landlord reference carries more weight with another landlord than any other kind.

A character reference is an opinion from someone with no contractual relationship — a colleague, a friend, a community figure. It speaks to what a person is like rather than to what they did as a tenant, and it is not backed by a file.

Three practical consequences follow. First, write within your relationship: as a landlord you are being asked about a tenancy, and straying into general character assessment weakens the letter by mixing evidenced statements with unevidenced ones. Second, a reader should discount a character reference for a tenancy decision, not because such references are dishonest but because they cannot speak to payment or property care — the two things that actually predict the next tenancy. Third, a character reference is not a substitute for a rental history: where an applicant has no prior tenancy, the substitutes that help are evidence of financial reliability, not warmth about their personality.

If you are asked for a character reference about a former tenant, you can of course give one — but say clearly which kind of reference you are giving, so nobody treats an opinion about a person as a record of a tenancy.

What Should You Write for a Tenant You Evicted?

This is the request landlords least expect and handle worst, usually by ignoring it. There is a correct answer and it is not complicated.

You are not obliged to write anything. Declining is legitimate, and for a tenancy that ended in eviction it is often the cleanest course. You can say simply that you are not able to provide a reference.

Do not write a positive letter to be rid of the problem. The temptation exists — a reference that helps them secure somewhere else is a reference that gets them out of your property or off your ledger. It also puts a false statement over your signature that another landlord will rely on, and it is the clearest example of the harm this whole document type can do.

If you write anything, confirm the record and stop. Template 10 is designed for this: dates, rent, deposit, and a statement that it is your policy to confirm records only. It is accurate, it vouches for nothing, and it does not require you to characterise the tenancy.

Be precise about what actually happened. An eviction filed is not an eviction granted; a case settled is not a judgment; a tenant who left after a notice was served was not evicted at all. These distinctions matter to the person reading and they matter legally, because an inaccurate statement that someone was evicted is exactly the kind of assertion that causes trouble. If you are unsure of the procedural history, confirm it from the court record before writing a word about it.

Say nothing you would not repeat with the file open. That test does all the work here, as it does everywhere else on this page.

Which Letter Should You Use? A Short Decision Guide

Work down these questions in order. The first one you answer “no” to decides the letter.

1. Would you rent to this person again? If no, stop here. Do not choose a positive template. Either decline to write a letter, or use the neutral verification at template 10, which confirms the record without vouching for anyone. This is the only question that can rule every other template out, which is why it comes first.

2. Is there a problem in the tenancy the reader would care about? If yes and it was resolved, template 8 is the honest choice — it states what happened, states how it was handled, and still recommends. If yes and it was not resolved, go back to question 1.

3. Does your company policy allow you to comment at all? Many managers may confirm records only. If that is your position, template 10, regardless of how good the tenant was. Say it is policy, so the reader does not read restraint as reservation.

4. Who is the reader? An employer, template 14. A lender, university or association, see the section on other readers below. A landlord, continue.

5. What is the reader most likely to be worried about? Match the letter to the doubt. Finances or a thin credit file, template 4. Property condition, template 5. An animal, template 6 — or template 13 where th