Can you lease to a company whose workers don't have SSNs

Question

We do corporate leases fairly often in our portfolio, 900 units, and the lease is always with the company, not the individual workers. The company signs, the company pays, the company is the tenant of record. So the SSN question mostly doesn't apply the way people think it does. I've never asked a corporate entity for a Social Security number because they don't have one, they have an EIN, and that's what goes on the application. What the workers themselves carry is the company's problem from a compliance standpoint, not ours. Where it gets complicated is when a company asks you to put the individual employees on the lease alongside or instead of the entity. We've had requests like that and we've said no, partly for this exact reason. Keep the lease with the business, get the EIN, run a credit pull on the entity, get a solid security deposit or prepayment, and the worker documentation issue sits with them. I'm not an attorney and our situation is different from a single-unit landlord, but that's how we've structured it so far without running into a legal wall.

tomasz_wro · Answer

Had one situation where a staffing company talked me into adding the three individual workers as co-tenants on a duplex unit in Wrocław-adjacent suburb, 2021. Two of them had no Polish PESEL equivalent documents and when the company folded six months in I had zero legal footing to pursue the individuals. Lost about 11k PLN chasing it through courts that couldn't even serve papers properly.

EIN or NIP on the lease, entity only, big deposit up front. That's the whole lesson.

bethany_okafor · Answer

The part I'd push back on is treating "no legal wall yet" as validation of the structure. A 900-unit operation has legal cover that a single-unit landlord doesn't, and the risk calculus is completely different when you're the one signing personally.

If I were screening a corporate tenant at my scale I'd want two years of financials on the entity, not just an EIN pull, because a shell LLC with an EIN and no real balance sheet is basically the same credit risk as a stranger off the street.

leilani_r · Answer

The market you're in matters a lot here. We're in a corridor that handles a significant amount of ag and construction contract labor, so we see this constantly. The companies coming to us are often project-based, meaning they exist for 18 months, finish a highway contract or a harvest cycle, and then they're functionally dormant. EIN is real, credit pull comes back thin or nonexistent, and the security deposit becomes the only real lever you have. We started requiring two months upfront plus first, so effectively three months before keys move, and we stopped apologizing for it. A company with 40 workers housed somewhere needs the beds badly enough to meet that or go find a motel.

The place where I'd add something the post above didn't get into is what happens at the back end when the contract ends and the company just... Stops. We had a commercial cleaning firm, EIN verified, decent deposit, paid on time for nine months, and then the client they were servicing pulled the contract and within six weeks we had 11 people in four units with no paying entity behind them anymore. The company didn't formally terminate the lease, the workers didn't leave, and we were in a situation where the legal tenant was an entity that had essentially evaporated operationally. Unlawful detainer against a company that has no assets moving is its own flavor of terrible. We now write a clause requiring written notice 60 days out if the underlying service contract terminates, with the deposit forfeited if they don't comply. Whether that's enforceable everywhere I genuinely don't know but it changed the conversation when we had a similar situation the following year.

Can you lease to a company whose workers don't have SSNs

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