At least one area landlord is concerned with the validity of results obtained by USG in its recent Landlord Library publication.Area landlord George Kanellopoulos, who received low ratings in the library, said the publication did not give a fair representation of tenants for some landlords and rental companies. Kanellopoulos was given an overall rating of 5.5 on a 10-point scale, the second lowest among individual landlords in the survey. But, as he pointed out and USG director of the landlord library Kevin Cope acknowledged, only four of Kanellopoulos’s 120 tenants were contacted to establish the rating. A larger sampling would’ve given him a better rating, Kanellopoulos said.”If they had asked the other 116, they would not have given less than eight, nine and ten,'” he said.USG collected 1,500 pieces of survey data from students living in the campus area. Those surveyed were chosen randomly from the student directory, said Cope. Students were asked a series of seven questions, and their responses were tabulated into a mean score on a scale from 1 to 10.Cope said USG did not always know that the number of responses represented a small sampling. That came about, he said, because a team collecting the samples failed to find out from some of the rental companies and landlords how many units they managed.For 14 of the 29 rental companies and eight of the 12 individual landlords named in the library, no information was given on the number of units managed.Cope said the team was unsuccessful in contacting all of the landlords and rental companies. He blamed unlisted phone numbers and unreturned phone calls. When only a few responses were available for landlords who managed a large number of units, that landlord was excluded from the library, Cope said.The problem with Kanellopoulos arose because USG “had every indication” that he owned only a few properties, Cope said. The indication, he said, was the amount of information they received from the survey and because Kanellopoulos could not be reached.Kanellopoulos said he was angry and embarrassed that potential tenants might get the wrong impression about his management.”It’s not a good representation of the good and bad,” Kanellopoulos said. “They should offer an apology to people who could have been affected.”
Jamie Pietras contributed to this story.
