Is your self storage facility compliant with the SCRA? It should be.
The SCRA, or Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, is a law that grants active-duty military members protection from certain lien practices and defaults. Deployment changes the service member’s life drastically overnight – the SCRA protects them in case some recurrent payments get missed in the transition.
Violating the SCRA can open your business up to serious fines. Our Active Military Form helps you keep track of the necessary information about your service member tenants.
The Active Military Form is just one part of our comprehensive Self Storage Operator’s Toolkit, which is packed full of helpful checklists, forms, and templates to make running your business easier. It’s also got a few niche items like this Active Military Form that you might not have known you needed!
Proper record-keeping can help you avoid accidentally breaking the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (and the huge fines that can come afterward!). This form also gives you plenty of information you can use to verify that the tenant truly is in the military.
The biggest benefit of our Self Storage Operator's Toolkit is that you don’t have to come up with these forms yourself. Don’t waste time typing out record-keeping documents that already exist - with just a few clicks, you can have a ready-made, customizable template!
This form is intended to help you keep track of your service member tenants. It’s not a replacement for reviewing the law and consulting with a self storage attorney to ensure you’re compliant. You’ll also need to customize it to fit your state and business, but that’s easy.
This customer information sheet has slots for contact information and military-specific information. There’s a paragraph of information for the tenant telling them to contact you when they are transferred or deployed to a new area. That way you don’t accidentally send them into the lien process
After that, the form collects comprehensive information that will enable you to verify that they should be protected by the SCRA. This includes their branch, base, unit, and commanding officer information, which will all be useful if you end up needing to pursue a court order. Court orders are typically the only way you can pursue a lien in this situation.
Every operator needs a way to keep track of their active military service members (including the National Guard and Reserves). Many self storage operators even offer military discounts for service members. This sheet gives you an easy way to collect all the relevant information from your military tenants before you need it.
You can customize this letter to meet whatever specific needs you face (or whatever your lawyer recommends). Then, if you run into problems with the tenant in the future, you’ll be able to avoid running afoul of the SCRA. You’ll also have the information you need to get a court order to send the unit to liens.
More information is always better. Hopefully, you’ll never need to revisit this information! But, if you do, it’s much better to have a helpful form filed away than to wish that you did.
This Active Military Form is just one of more than a dozen ways our Self Storage Operator's Toolkit can make running a busy self storage facility simpler. Click the link below to get access to all the forms so you don’t waste time redoing work that established self storage pros have already done!
For more great resources and information, check out the links below!
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