Gaining insight from business decision-makers: Surveying landlords to explore influences of smoke-free apartment policy adoption

The San Mateo County (California) Tobacco Prevention Program distributed over 1,000 mailed surveys on the topic of smoke-free apartment policies to a sample of property owners in the community, receiving more than 250 completed responses. The survey gathered landlord attitudes toward smoke-free policies (benefits and barriers of adopting a policy), history with smoking at their properties (complaints received from tenants, existing indoor and outdoor policies), and additional descriptive data.

Preliminary analysis showed 62% of property owners reported having a smoke-free policy (6% indoor only, 23% outdoor only, 32% both indoor and outdoor). 38% of property owners reported having no policies related to smoking.

Landlords with no policies were substantially less likely to report having previously received complaints from tenants (21.6% versus 46.1% of those respondents with any policy).

Compared with property owners who reported some type of smoke-free policy at their apartment buildings, those without any policy indicated higher average ratings for identified potential barriers to smoke-free adoption. These barriers include being perceived as unfair to smokers, possibly encountering legal problems, and difficulty of enforcing smoke-free rules. Landlords without policies also had lower ratings of several categories of potential benefits to smoke-free policies, including repair costs, insurance premium discounts, and fire risk.

Allowing for open-ended responses in the survey revealed several additional landlord-generated benefits of adopting smoke-free policies, including better marketing opportunities and reduced cigarette butt litter pickup. Applications for the field include better tailored educational efforts focusing on the influences that landlords without smoke-free policies identify as relevant.