2021 was HOME Line’s busiest year on our tenant hotline with a record number of calls/interactions and time spent with clients, nearly doubling from the previous year. Also, attendance numbers at HOME Line trainings and presentations shattered previous records as the community seeks to learn how to navigate shifting situations and laws. Audiences recognize HOME Line as a trusted expert to offer timely updates on complicated and frequently shifting rules.
Reviewing the tenant hotline and presentation numbers from 2021 provides an important snapshot into the challenges renters have been facing, and how HOME Line increased its capacity in order to fill urgent community needs.
Tenant Hotline:
Since 1992, HOME Line has kept a thorough database record of every client interaction (calls, emails, etc., which we generally just refer to as “calls”). We maintain data on where calls come from, the issue(s) that a tenant calls us about, and a variety of demographic data points.
2021 was our tenant hotline’s busiest year ever. We had a record number of new calls (15,553), eclipsing the previous record set in 2014. More impressive was our record number of total calls. In 2021, we took 25,155 ‘total’ calls (new calls plus follow-up calls with existing clients). This shattered our previous high in 2019 of 22,800—over a 10% increase.
Calls in both 2020 and 2021 (the pandemic years) have also changed. In the pre-pandemic years, hotline calls realistically averaged about a half an hour from the moment we answered a call to the entry of the information in our database. During the pandemic, calls are much closer to an hour on average. Situations and shifting laws are more complex. Our clients are generally experiencing more complicated and concerning issues than in prior years (due to a combination of pandemic-related issues), which helps explain why our calls have grown longer during this time.
Presentations:
HOME Line has provided public education on tenant/landlord law—through trainings, presentations, and speeches—since our doors opened in 1992. However, 2021 was a record year. Last year, we gave 105 presentations, almost exclusively through webinars, to a record 7,300 attendees. This shatters the previous record number of attendees from 2020 of 4,800. This number was enhanced largely through our regular, free, Wednesday afternoon webinars updating stakeholders throughout the state in the latest on changes in the eviction moratoria affecting tenant/landlord law in Minnesota.
To give some scale to how large our presentation attendance was last year: since 1992, we’ve spoken to slightly over 72,000 attendees at a variety of speeches. In 2021—over 7,300. Despite offering presentations for 30 years, 2021 had over 10% of HOME Line’s all-time presentation attendees.
Audiences have recognized HOME Line as a trusted voice to offer timely updates on complicated and frequently shifting rules at both the state and federal levels.
We rely on the support of the community to help us continue to offer trainings and provide free and essential legal advice to tenants who call or email–over 15,000 renter households each year. Your support to HOME Line assists us in integrating legal services, organizing, and public policy. Thank you for considering a donation:
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