The open question

The duty runs to "a landlord, or agent thereof." A community association charging a lease-approval or tenant-screening fee is neither, on the ordinary meaning of those words. It is a third party exercising a power under a recorded declaration, charging a fee to a unit owner who is the landlord.

But the association is performing the function the statute regulates — screening a prospective tenant and charging for it — and it is doing so at the landlord's request as a condition of the landlord's lease. Whether that makes it an "agent" is not addressed anywhere in the statute, and we found no guidance or decision resolving it.

We are not going to resolve it either. It is genuinely open, and a board acting on an assumption in either direction has no authority behind it.

What a board can do about the uncertainty

The risk is asymmetric, which usually points to a cheap answer.

If an association's lease-approval fee is at or under $50, the question never arises. If it is materially above $50 — and New Jersey association fees of $100 to $250 are common — the association is relying on an unresolved reading of a penal statute enforced by the Attorney General.

Splitting the fee into a documented cost-recovery component and defending the balance is one approach. Reducing it to the cap is another. Doing nothing and waiting for a test case is a third, and it is the one with the worst downside, because the remedy sends money to the applicant.

The screening itself is the bigger exposure

Worth saying, because the fee is the smaller of the two issues. New Jersey's Division on Civil Rights adopted disparate-impact rules at N.J.A.C. 13:16, published in the New Jersey Register on December 15, 2025, covering housing among other areas.

Under those rules a neutral policy causing disproportionate harm must serve a legitimate purpose with no less discriminatory alternative available, and the Division's own housing example is that a provider should "individually assess each applicant's ability to pay" rather than apply a credit-score threshold.

An association that screens tenants is a housing provider under the Law Against Discrimination. A fee cap costs money; a screening policy that fails the disparate-impact test costs considerably more.

The practical package

Three things belong in the same review. What the association charges for lease approval and whether it can justify it as cost. What its screening criteria are and whether each one survives the no-less-discriminatory-alternative question. And whether the declaration actually authorises the approval process the board is running, because a fee with no documentary basis is vulnerable before anyone reaches the statute.