How do you make residents pick up dog poop!?!?

We are not a brand-new community so doing a Poo Print kind of thing is very difficult. But, we have a TON of pets in our community with over 350+ apartment homes.

Dog poop is a CONSTANT problem! No matter how many pet stations I have out there, it seems that there are always complaints about poop! We have issues with leashes being used since that is a LAW here in TN, but the poop issue is about to drive me up the wall!

How do managers in large communities work at keeping their resident's responsibility of picking up after their pets thoroughly ENFORCED?

Out of extreme frustration during Covid, we've found a "bandaid" solution for part of the property. First, I was able to borrow a nest camera, until the property could buy a cheaper one.

We set up the camera in an empty unit to look out the window. It's wedged on the inside of the window and you don't notice it from the outside. On this particular property, I wouldn't put anything outside that wasn't nailed down. It has help capture over a dozen offenders....especially ones that claim they "didn't have a pet". Now this will only work if you can get a wi-fi signal. So luck was on our side. The empty unit was very close to the clubhouse. You can also replicate this with a doorbell camera. We forked over the $5 or $10 to have cloud storage, but there are several cameras on Amazon that you can use with a cloud subscription.

Another suggestion is a deer/trail camera. We used this approach to catch illegal dumping on the back of the property. It was clear enough to read the license plate and be able to give that information to the police. You can usually pick one up for $40 or less. No internet or wifi needed. Same with our laundry room clock. Looks like a big clock, but it's really a camera. No internet or wi-fi necessary. It constantly records and just records over itself when it gets full. Think we can usually go back about 4 days if we need to review something. If it's something we need to keep we just download the clip to our computer. I believe we paid around $80 for the clock (about 5/6 years ago) and it may have come from HD Supply.

Currently, considering going back to the deer camera approach once we cannot use the wi-fi signal any longer. There are also trail cameras and security cameras that operate from a cell signal, that would require a small monthly fee, but we wouldn't need internet/wifi.

Something we tried that marginally worked was having residents send us "proof" of the offending party. With so many door bell cams and cell phones, we had 2 tenants, in particular, that would call every day about the dog poop. The residents that were upset could send us photos of the person & pet who were causing the problem. Photos had to be timestamped or include the metadata, the video had to also be the whole clip and had to be able to verify date.

Without a service like Poo Prints its kind of hard to control. You will need to make sure that you have record of all animals on property, this typically requires surprise inspections. I was shocked at how many pets we did not have record of. Most of the policy abiding residents will happily pay to have their dog registered with the service as they get pretty ticked off at the residents that don't clean up.

We put a note on the interior of the entry doors, just a few sentences stating to pick up dog waste. We also sent letters to all, stating that in order to keep the grounds and your homes nice, please pick-up dog waste, or something along those lines. Lastly, we put in a dog waste station from www.dogwastedepot.com/ , the one that includes bags, but NO waste bin (because we didn't want to maintain an additional waste receptacle), shown here www.dogwastedepot.com/MINI-DOG-WASTE-STA...SYSTEM-Prodview.html . We give the bags away free, and our maintenance personnel refills the bags in the station periodically. We put this station at the far edge of the property, so if pet owners still don't pick up, or don't pick it all up, then it's not bothering those who DO NOT have pets.