About

Hi, I’m Benjamin.

And Rental Awareness is my little corner of the internet for something I’ve become increasingly interested in: understanding how laws can change from one state to another.

What started as a website focused on rental and housing information is now something much broader, partly by choice and partly because we ended up with a second website on our hands.

Today, Rental Awareness is focused on state-specific laws, regulations, and everyday legal questions across the United States.

I started noticing how often a simple question can have a completely different answer depending on where you live.

Can you drive a UTV on the road?

What are the rules for private roads?

What does a particular state require for a vehicle or recreational activity?

What is allowed in one state that is restricted in another?

These questions are not always easy to answer by simply searching for the general rule. The state matters.

That is what led us to shift the direction of Rental Awareness.

Instead of trying to cover one narrow area, we’re building a place where people can explore these questions state by state.

What You’ll Find Here

Rental Awareness covers laws and regulations that affect everyday life.

Some of our articles look at one particular state. Others compare the rules across several states. You can browse everything we’ve published so far on our articles page.

Our topics can include:

  • Employment and labor laws, including overtime, breaks, leave, and PTO
  • Family and domestic law, including custody, divorce, guardianship, and emancipation
  • Criminal law and personal safety, including self-defense, weapons, and DUI laws
  • Traffic, vehicle, and transportation regulations
  • UTV, off-road vehicle, and recreational vehicle laws
  • Property and land laws, including HOA, fence, easement, and private road rules
  • Landlord and tenant questions, including deposits, notice, and habitability
  • Probate, inheritance, and end-of-life law
  • Firearms and weapons regulations
  • Outdoor, recreational, and lifestyle rules
  • Consumer, business, and civic laws
  • Other laws that can differ depending on where you live

We’re especially interested in the questions people actually search for.

Not just broad explanations of what a law is, but questions like:

What does this state require?

How is this different from another state?

Are there restrictions I should know about?

Where can I find the official rule?

Those are the kinds of questions we want to help answer.

Why We Ended Up Running One Site Instead of Two

For a while, we had two websites.

Rental Awareness was the original, and the older of the two. Then we took on LegalAwareness.org, a state-by-state legal reference library that had spent years building out guides across hundreds of topics and all fifty states. It covered employment law, family law, criminal law, property law, probate, and a long list of everyday subjects, all organized state by state.

It was a genuinely good library. The problem was that it was a second website.

Running two sites is not twice the work. It’s more than that. Two sets of hosting bills, two sets of updates and security patches, two content plans, two inboxes, two of every small maintenance task that quietly eats an afternoon. For a small team, that gets expensive fast, and it splits attention that neither site can really spare.

We could have kept both running at half strength. We didn’t want to do that.

So we made the simpler decision. Everything moved into Rental Awareness, the older and more established of the two domains, and LegalAwareness.org was retired. Every article came over in full. We didn’t trim the library down to fit a narrower focus. We widened our focus to match what the library already covered.

You can read more about that move on our LegalAwareness.org has moved to RentalAwareness.com page.

So Why Keep the Name Rental Awareness?

Fair question, since we now publish a lot that has nothing to do with renting.

The name came from the site’s original focus on rental and housing information. When the two sites merged, we thought about rebranding entirely and decided against it. Rental Awareness was the older domain with the longer history, and throwing that away to start fresh under a new name would have meant losing the one thing that made it the sensible home in the first place.

The subject matter has changed. The idea behind the name still works.

Awareness matters.

Whether you’re renting a home, starting a job, driving a vehicle, sorting out a family matter, owning property, or simply trying to understand a rule in your state, knowing what applies can make a difference.

So Rental Awareness is now about being aware of the rules that apply where you are, whatever those rules happen to be about.

Meet the People Behind Rental Awareness

Rental Awareness is not a huge organization with a room full of experts.

It’s a small group of people who research, write, edit, and maintain the site. The standards that work follows are written down in our Editorial Policy.

Everyone has a different part to play.

Benjamin Thompson edited

Benjamin Thompson

I’m the person who started Rental Awareness and the person behind much of its direction.

My work now revolves around researching state-specific laws and turning complicated information into articles that regular people can actually read.

I enjoy the research side of the work, especially when two states take completely different approaches to what initially seems like the same question.

I also spend a lot of time thinking about how an article should be organized so that someone can quickly find the state and information they are actually looking for.

Rental Awareness started in a different place, but this new direction is where I want to take it.

Christopher Anderson

Christopher Anderson

Christopher helps research and write articles covering laws and regulations across different states.

He works on a variety of topics and is particularly useful when an article requires comparing how several states handle the same issue.

His job is often less about making a subject sound complicated and more about figuring out what the actual question is, finding the relevant information, and explaining it clearly.

Daniel Harris

Daniel Harris

Daniel contributes research and articles on state-specific legal and regulatory topics.

He works across different categories, helping us expand coverage beyond the subjects we initially focused on.

Daniel also helps with articles where the details matter, especially when a general rule has important state-specific differences.

Henry Dean

Henry Dean

Henry spends a lot of his time digging through state-specific information and helping organize it.

His work can involve comparing requirements, checking different state sources, and identifying details that may be easy to overlook.

When an article covers multiple states, that kind of research becomes particularly important.

Henry helps us keep the focus where it belongs: on the rules that actually apply to each state.

Samuel Turner

Samuel Turner

Samuel works on the editorial side of Rental Awareness.

He helps review articles, improve their organization, catch unclear statements, and make sure state-specific information is presented in a way that readers can follow.

He also contributes research of his own and helps revisit older articles when information may need to be clarified or updated.

Tiffany Sanders, J.D.

Tiffany Sanders, J.D.

Tiffany is the newest member of the team, working as a freelancer, and she has credentials the rest of us do not.

She earned her J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law and practiced as a consumer lawyer for five years before moving into legal publishing.

Over the past 15 years she has written and reviewed legal content professionally, including supervising the legal writing team at an Inc. 500 company and editing materials for a nationwide bar review program.

Her role here is to review our articles for legal accuracy. When an article has been through that review, you’ll see a line at the top or bottom naming her and giving the date she read it.

That review is about accuracy, not advice. Tiffany is not acting as anyone’s attorney through this website, and reading a reviewed article doesn’t make her yours. What her involvement does mean is that someone with actual legal training has checked whether we described the law correctly.

And Then There’s Ollie

Every small team needs one member who does no research, checks no sources, and still acts like he runs the place.

That’s Ollie.

Ollie

He has never written a word for Rental Awareness. He has, however, interrupted more editing sessions than we can count — usually by dropping a ball on someone’s keyboard or deciding that 2 p.m. is a mandatory walk time.

So we made it official.

Title: Chief Morale Officer

Duties: Sleeping through research calls, enforcing break times, supervising from under the desk, and greeting every delivery like it’s a security threat.

He takes the job seriously. We think that matters.

How We Research

We try to keep our approach simple.

When we write about a state law, we start by identifying the state and the specific question we’re trying to answer.

We then research publicly available information, including state government websites, statutes, regulations, and official agency information when available.

From there, we organize the information into something that is easier to understand.

We don’t expect readers to take everything we say on faith.

For important questions, we encourage readers to check the current official source for their state.

Our full research and correction process, including how we handle updates and what role technology plays in our workflow, is set out in our Editorial Policy.

How the Site Is Funded

Rental Awareness is free to read.

The site may carry advertising, and we may occasionally use affiliate links. These help cover hosting, research time, and the cost of keeping the site running.

What they don’t do is change what a state law says.

A commercial relationship never determines the factual conclusions in an article. Our Disclaimer explains exactly how advertising and affiliate links work here, and what they do and do not mean.

We’re Still Building This

Rental Awareness is a work in progress.

Merging two websites means we now have a large library, and a large library means there is a lot to keep an eye on. Some articles came over from LegalAwareness.org and are due for a review. Others cover rules that have changed since they were written.

There are a lot of states, a lot of laws, and a lot of topics to cover. We’re not going to pretend that we’ve covered everything, that every article is perfectly current, or that every question has an answer here yet.

We’re working through it one topic and one state at a time.

We’ll update older articles when we find important changes, improve explanations when something isn’t clear, and continue expanding our state-by-state coverage.

If you notice something that needs correcting or find a topic we should cover, we’d genuinely like to hear from you. The fastest way is through our contact page, or you can email [email protected] directly.

Corrections are most useful when they include the article URL, the state involved, and a link to an official source if you have one.

One Important Thing

Rental Awareness is an informational website.

We’re not a law firm and we’re not a government agency.

Most of our contributors are researchers and writers, not lawyers, and we don’t present them as anything else. Where a contributor does hold legal credentials, we say exactly what those credentials are and nothing more. Nobody here is acting as your attorney or legal representative, including when an article has been reviewed for legal accuracy.

Our articles are meant to help you understand a topic and give you a useful starting point for further research.

Laws can change. Local rules can apply. And the answer to a legal question can depend on the details of a particular situation.

For something important, always check the current official rules for your state and consider speaking with a qualified professional when appropriate.

Our full Disclaimer sets all of this out in more detail, and our Privacy Policy covers what happens to any information you send us.

Thanks for Being Here

Whether you’ve been reading Rental Awareness since the rental days or you’ve just found us while looking for an answer about a state law, thanks for stopping by.

We’re building this site with a pretty simple idea in mind:

Different states have different rules. Finding the right one shouldn’t be so difficult.

That’s what we’re working on.

Benjamin Thompson Founder, Rental Awareness

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