Financial Penalties for Lease Violations

[Ken D.]

I'm in Minnesota.

I'm in the process of beefing up my existing lease with additional expectations of tenant behavior (such as not having other adults not on the lease living at the property). My understanding is that having such items in the lease gives me more flexibility to potentially evict people if I have a problem with them. My question, however, is whether I can have financial penalties in the lease agreement for violations?

For example, I had a friend who managed some very slummy properties tell me they had very strict penalties for cigarette smoking. A single occurrence of smoking in the unit carried a $250 fine. Is this legal?

Similarly, I don't allow dogs -- if we were to allow dogs, it would be a very hefty monthly surcharge -- but, if I go by the property and hear dogs in their apartment, my only recourse is to evict them and deal with all the hassle associated therein. Sometimes, these people have gone ahead and gotten pets despite what their lease says, other times they're just borrowing a pet from someone else, but I still don't want it in my unit even for a day or two because of smell and noise and bite-risk. I'm not going to evict someone for doing something small like that, but I'd like there to be some explicit penalty.

I can imagine potentially a variety of other items over time which it would make sense to handle in this way, but I haven't been managing long enough to know.... any suggestions?