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An Important Message to ERAP Tenants and Landlords
October 11, 2022
As of October 7, 2022, the Prince George’s County Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) has assisted 9,461 County households and distributed over $93 million dollars in rent and utility assistance. The Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) continues to assist as many County residents as possible and is processing previously submitted applications. In order for this process to work efficiently and expeditiously, DHCD requires the cooperation of tenants and landlords.
If you have applied for ERAP, your application will be assigned to a reviewer. The reviewer will contact you via e-mail to request any missing or updated documentation needed to properly review your application. If the tenant or landlord does not respond to multiple requests by the reviewer for additional documentation, the reviewer must mark the application as “No Response” and the application will be purged from the ERAP database.
It is important that you check your e-mail inbox for an email from a “no-reply@co.pg.md.us” sender. You can also proactively add no-reply@co.pg.md.us to your safe senders address book. The e-mail will tell you what documentation you need to upload to your application portal. Please check your junk and spam folders to ensure the email request did not go into one of those folders.
When uploading documents to the portal, please use a desktop or laptop computer. The ERAP database system does not recognize uploads from mobile devices such as a tablet or cell phone. The system will not capture the documents uploaded when using mobile devices. If you do not have access to a desktop or laptop computer, please use a computer at your local library, the landlord’s leasing office, or contact one of DHCD’s community partners to make arrangements to upload your documents from their computers. A list of DHCD’s community partners can be found on the ERAP webpage.
DHCD’s policy is to allow tenants 14 days and landlords 7 days to submit requested documents. DHCD wants to assist those in need but cannot wait endlessly for unresponsive tenants or landlords.
If you are a tenant and receive an eviction notice, court summons, notice to vacate, or notice of intent, please call the ERAP Hotline on (301) 883-6504 and press 9 to provide your document to the customer service call center representative. ERAP will expedite applications with pending evictions and court summons.
Tenants should also be aware that when a landlord agrees to accept an ERAP payment on your behalf, the landlord signs a Landlord Agreement with DHCD. In this agreement, the landlord agrees not to evict the tenant for 90 days. If a tenant is on a month-to-month lease or the lease has expired, tenants should use this time period to secure a new lease from the landlord, if the tenant intends to remain in the unit. DHCD encourages landlords to work with tenants once their rent is brought current by ERAP.
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