ESA Policies at Large Property Management Companies

If a leasing office, a management company, or a screening portal is asking for documentation for your emotional support animal, the useful question is not “what does the law say” in the abstract. It is what that specific company publishes, and which of their two intake routes you are supposed to be in.

This hub collects what large apartment operators and pet-screening platforms actually publish about pets and assistance animals — quoted from their own pages, with the date we read them. It is general information, not legal advice.

The two routes, and why the difference matters

Almost every large operator runs two separate intakes, and putting your animal in the wrong one is the single most common reason a request stalls:

• The pet route. Pet application, pet fee, pet deposit, monthly pet rent, breed and weight limits, sometimes a species list. This is a business policy, and the company sets it.
• The accommodation route. A reasonable-accommodation request under the Fair Housing Act, reviewed against a disability and a disability-related need for the animal. An assistance animal moving through this route is not being treated as a pet.

If you fill in the pet application because it is the form on the screen, you have asked to keep a pet, and the pet rules will be applied to you. The accommodation request is a different ask and usually a different form.

What the accommodation route does and does not get you

An approved accommodation typically sets aside the pet-specific rules that would otherwise block or price the animal — the breed list, the weight cap, the pet fee and pet rent, the species restriction. It does not set aside the rules that apply to every resident: you are still responsible for damage, for the animal being under control, and for it not being a nuisance to neighbors.

It also does not guarantee a yes. A housing provider may ask for reliable documentation that you have a disability and a disability-related need for the animal, and may deny a request that does not meet that standard. Anyone promising you guaranteed approval is selling you something they cannot deliver.

One thing did change recently and is worth knowing before you file anything: HUD withdrew its long-standing assistance-animal guidance notices in September 2025, and in May 2026 issued enforcement guidance that treats individually trained animals differently from untrained emotional support animals. The Fair Housing Act itself, the reasonable-accommodation regulations, private lawsuits, and state assistance-animal laws are all unchanged — but the federal backstop is thinner than it was. We wrote a plain-English breakdown in what HUD’s 2026 guidance actually means. The practical upshot: the quality of your documentation matters more now, not less.

Screening portals

Large operators increasingly hand the review itself to a third-party platform. If you have been sent to a link like yourcommunityname.petscreening.com, you are in one of these.

• PetScreening — publishes the most detailed process of any platform we found, including that its review team contacts the healthcare provider who signed your letter. Assistance animal profiles are free; pet profiles are not.
• OurPetPolicy — publishes an explicit checklist of what an assistance-animal letter must contain, and states it will never ask for your specific diagnosis.

Apartment operators

These are ranked the way the industry ranks itself, by units under management on the National Multifamily Housing Council’s 2026 Top 50 Managers list, rather than by who happens to be easiest to write about.

• Greystar — the largest apartment manager in the United States, and the only operator here whose own renter guide states plainly that assistance animals are not pets under federal law.
• AvalonBay — publishes a named restricted-breed list and a restricted-species list, and says nothing at all about assistance animals on its pet page.
• MAA — no breed or weight restrictions at all, but a narrow species list that rules out most non-dog, non-cat animals through the pet route.
• Cortland — an 80-pound weight cap, a named breed list, and a published waiver that covers service animals specifically. That wording gap matters if your animal is an ESA.

Companies we looked at and deliberately left out

We only build a page where a company publishes something specific enough to quote. Several obvious targets did not clear that bar as of July 27, 2026, and we would rather say so than write a page with the company name swapped into a template:

• RealPage — widely used across multifamily for screening and resident portals, but we could find no RealPage assistance-animal or pet-screening product to describe. Communities running RealPage software still handle accommodation requests through the leasing office or a separate pet platform.
• FPI Management — absorbed into Asset Living and no longer appears on the 2026 NMHC Top 50 Managers list as an independent manager.
• Equity Residential, Camden, and several other large operators — either publish nothing at company level about assistance animals, or publish pet rules that vary so much community to community that a national page would mislead more than it helped.

What to do next, in order

1. Find out who actually decides. Ask the leasing office whether accommodation requests are handled in-house or through a portal, and get the name of the portal. The answer changes what you submit and to whom.
2. Ask through the accommodation route, in writing. Email beats a conversation at the desk, because it creates a dated record of when you asked and what you asked for.
3. Get documentation that survives a phone call. Both major portals verify with the provider who signed the letter. A letter from a licensed professional who genuinely evaluated you and will confirm it is worth more than an instant certificate. Our guide to who can write an ESA letter covers who qualifies.
4. Check your state. Several states set their own rules on top of federal law — including minimum client-provider relationship periods in California, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana and Montana. See the state-by-state requirements.
5. Know the denial rules. If a request is refused, what a landlord can and cannot deny sets out the grounds that hold up and the ones that do not.

If you still need the letter

An accommodation request is only as good as the documentation behind it. We connect you with a licensed mental-health professional in your state who evaluates whether an emotional support animal is appropriate for you, and issues a housing letter if it is. See how the ESA letter evaluation works.

Sources

Company statements on the linked pages are quoted from each company’s own published material, read July 27, 2026, and each page states that date in its own sources note. Rankings are from the National Multifamily Housing Council’s 2026 Top 50 Managers list. HUD’s September 2025 withdrawal and May 2026 enforcement guidance are covered in detail on our HUD 2026 guidance page. Policies change; if you find something here that no longer matches what a company publishes, the company’s current page wins.