Is this legal?

Our maintenance supervisor brought the catalog in with enormous eyes wanting to know if this could possibly be legal, ANYWHERE!

I believe it is legal as long as the apartment community has a court order saying that they are allowed to lock someone out. Where I work the constable actually does the lockout and will come to the apartment community to do so.

During an eviction, the constable comes to our building and supervises our maintenance team changing the locks. This would be a much simpler process - you could just install that, quickly, and then once the eviction is finalized they would be able to change the whole lock set later. It doesn't seem any different than changing the locks, really.

It's being marketed as a way to collect rent. That's what's bothersome...not the device, but the way it's presented.

The advertisement is very sketchy and probably not legal to lock a tenant out in order to collect rent. However, once the sheriff comes to deliver a writ of possession during an eviction process, we place the 'boot' on the locks to prevent further entry from the tenant until the locks are changed.

Also, we sometimes use there when we suspect a tenant has "skipped" and has abandoned a unit. This happens in lower income properties where tenants choose to skip and leave furniture and avoid paying rent.

In Houston, TX it is legal but the real question is why would anyone do it. It doesn't help you collect the rent. A lot of companies use this method after failed attempts of reaching the resident to discuss their non payment. The thought is, it will force the resident to speak with you. This is normally done in lower end communities and the result can be very bad. The law here states that if you do lock someone out you MUST be available to them to let them back in when they call. Day or night! Do you really want to go over to let an angry resident in at any hour of the night? A lot of them will gain entry by force causing damage. More expense for the property, because if they aren't paying rent you probably won't recover any damage cost either. Just not a good idea at all.

I work in the Houston area and have had to do this before. However, you have to give advance notice of a lock-out and usually this get's someone's attention. If they do not call me or come in then I will put it on their door. Yes it ticks them off and I really hate doing it, but I've worked for some people who said "eviction or lock out" and it's cheaper than going to file for eviction. As previously mentioned, once they call you have to have someone take it off. If I do a lock out, I usually call several times and leave messages AND send several notices. It's just a last ditch effort before I have to spend the money and file eviction.