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While we get started…

Visit localhousingsolutions.org
Click on “housing data” in the menu to explore the Housing Needs Assessment tool and other resources

CLAUDIA AIKEN

Director, New Research Partnerships

NYU Furman Center

KIMBERLY RUBENS

Chief of Policy and Research

City of Baltimore DHCD

Welcome!

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Welcome to Data Talks at the Housing Solutions Lab!

Introduction to using data to understand rental properties

Fireside chat with Allison Pretto

Q&A

Agenda

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Data Talks 3 | Surveying Residents

Using surveys to understand housing needs

March 2024

Data Talks 5 | Presenting Data to the Public

Storytelling with local data

August 2024

Data Talks 4 | Understanding Housing Quality

Code enforcement data, property inventories, and more

June 2024

Upcoming Data Talks

in Spring and Summer 2024

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Why Do We Need Local Rental Data?

Cities need information about rents, rental properties, and rental property ownership to:

Enforce housing quality standards
Enforce tenant protections and rent regulations
Monitor rent trends
Design and target programs for rental assistance, property repairs, eviction prevention, etc.

There are few national datasets that include accurate, granular, and timely information about rents and rental properties

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Local Rental Data Sources

Rental Registries

Property Tax Assessments

Deeds

Already exist in your locality

Varies by jurisdiction

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Deeds and Property Tax Assessment Data

Cities often have access to these data through their tax assessor’s office, clerk of local courts, or open data
Deeds are recorded at the time of a property’s sale. They include the names of the buyer and seller, the date of sale, and the purchase price
Annual or semi annual property tax assessments can include information about a property’s value, number of units, last sale date and price, and owner name

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Shortcomings of Local Property Data

Corporate owners often create anonymous shell entities such as LLCs, making it difficult to figure out who owns what
Deeds and tax assessment data do not include critical information about current rents and other rental property characteristics that cities may need
Administrative property data may be hard to access, or in a hard-to-use format

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Rental Registries

Some localities create and maintain databases about rental properties and ownership
Registries may require rental property owners to provide:

Individual name (not LLC) and contact information
Number and size of units
Rent levels and occupancy statistics
Other property characteristics (e.g., parking spaces)

If the rental property owner must register in order to operate, the registry may also be known as a “rental licensing program”

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What Are the Benefits of a Registry?

Housing quality: registries are the basis for proactive inspections, which can be more effective than complaint-based programs
Rent regulations: a robustly enforced registry reduces the number of renters paying more than legally permitted
Data collection: information about rental ownership allows policymakers to target resources, and implement policies to support small landlords and deliver rental assistance
Data collection: registries can also help cities track investor ownership and compare outcomes across landlord types

Housing Quality

Research has demonstrated that complaint-based inspection programs do not adequately or equitably identify housing code violations. In order to implement a proactive inspection program, localities must be able to identify rental properties and their owners, which requires a registry.
More proactive approaches to rental inspections have been shown to make a significant difference on housing code enforcement. Examples from Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Buffalo demonstrate that rental registries can encourage re-investment in poor quality housing by owners, reduce cases of dangerous buildings, and discourage landlord absenteeism.

Rent Regulations

Rental registries can monitor compliance with rent regulations, which helps localities enforce these regulations.
In Newark, NJ, implementing a rental registry was linked with an increase in the number of landlords complying with the city’s rent control ordinance – from 520 in 2018 to an all-time high of 2,885 in 2020 (an increase of 454 percent).

Data Collection

Rental registries have great value as data collection tools.
Understanding rental ownership and rental property characteristics allows planners and policy makers to effectively target resources and implement policies to support small landlords, deliver targeted rental assistance, and identify inequities in utility costs or access to amenities.
There are also many examples of housing policy research that have been made possible by rental registries.

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Calling for a National Model Rental Registry

LINK

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What Are Possible Unintended Consequences?

Some cities worry that landlords will pass on registration and inspection fees to their tenants. Or that fees will discourage creation of rental housing.
Cities can forestall these concerns by:

reducing registration fees
providing financial assistance or incentives to low-income landlords
taking a cooperative approach to enforcement
incorporating limits on “pass-through” in their rent stabilization ordinances (where applicable)

The evidence for whether rental registries have unintended consequences for renters is mixed.
A 2003 report for the City of Milwaukee examining rental licensing programs in fifteen cities warned that the fees and administrative costs of these programs could be passed on to renters, thereby decreasing affordability.
Yet, officials in Minnesota cities with rental licensing programs believed that even if the costs of the license and fees were passed on to tenants in the form of rent increases, those increases would be nominal (no more than $10 per month).
A slightly more recent (2009) survey of a representative random sample of 2,036 rent-stabilized landlords in Los Angeles found that nearly 80 percent of owners claimed not to pass either registration or inspection fees on to their tenants.
There may also be some preventative actions cities can take. When rental registries are linked to rent control or stabilization ordinances, cities can precisely regulate how much of the fee may be “passed through” in the form of a rent increase. Cities can also adopt a cooperative approach to enforcement, offering education and technical and financial assistance, which may reduce landlords’ need to raise rents.

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Rental Registry Scan

We tracked 46 registries across the U.S. to learn more about when they were created, what information they collect, and how they are used

This scan will be published on localhousingsolutions.org in the coming weeks.

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Rental Registry Scan

The most commonly stated purpose for registries in our scan was housing quality and safety (22 registries)
Others were created primarily to enforce rent control laws (6 registries, all in California)
Some cities cite contacting landlords as the primary purpose (5 registries)
A minority were created to protect tenants and track evictions (3 registries)

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Key Features of Rental Registries

Coverage
Information collected
Fees and fines

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Key Features of Rental Registries

Coverage: what properties are required to be registered?

Most registries in our scan (83%) apply to ALL non-owner-occupied rental properties
Others apply only to rent-stabilized units
Some make registration mandatory only for multifamily properties

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Key Features of Rental Registries

Information: how do cities set a balance between collecting useful info and creating an overly onerous process?

Registries collect contact information for owners. Many require owners to provide the name and address of an individual (not an LLC), and some also collect information about property managers
Many collect some property and unit characteristics (number of units, parking spaces, number of bedrooms in units)
Some collect current rents, rent increases, services included in rent, and security deposits
A few ask about tenant occupancy and lease start/end dates

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Key Features of Rental Registries

Fees and Fines: how often must owners register, what fees do they pay, and what penalties do they face?

Most require registration annually or every few years
About half of registries charge a per-unit fee (ranging from $5 to $100), others charge on a per-property or per-registration basis
Most localities fine owners for non-compliance (ranging from $25/day in College Station, TX, to $500/day after the first 10 days of noncompliance in Seattle)

Frequency and Fees

Most rental registry ordinances require landlords to register annually,
A few require registration only every few years, when applying for or renewing a certificate of occupancy, or at point of sale.
A minority of registries are based on one-time registration.
In our scan, roughly half of registries levied a per-unit fee, most commonly between $15 and $50 per unit.
Registration may also be tied to an inspection, which can incur its own fees. About half of registries in our scan require inspections as part of the registration process, and inspection fees typically range between $50 and $100 per unit.

Penalties

Most localities place a fine on landlords who fail to register. In our scan, these fines range from a $40 one-time fine in Youngstown, OH, to $500-a-day in Seattle, WA, to up to $5,000 in Oakland, CA.
Other enforcement mechanisms exist, as well. Penalties may include prohibitions on raising rent, leasing vacant units, or filing for eviction; the local government taking possession of the noncompliant property; or in rare cases, as in Maplewood, NJ, imprisonment.
Some localities have offered incentives, such as allowing only registered landlords to apply for rental assistance or other public programs, or engaged landlord liaisons to encourage registration.

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Enforcement and Compliance

Enforcement is often a challenge
Evidence suggests compliance varies widely by jurisdiction. A 2022 study of 10 cities by De la Campa and Reina found that compliance varied from 10% in Indianapolis to over 70% in Trenton
Compliance requires robust enforcement. Cities may need to make tradeoffs (e.g., limiting who must register, and how often) to reduce costs

Compliance can be difficult to measure, and varies widely by jurisdiction

Elijah de la Campa and Vincent Reina found in a 2022 study of ten cities that compliance with rental registries ran the gamut from “around 10 percent in Indianapolis, to upwards of 70 percent in Trenton, to nearly 95 percent for San Jose’s more limited registry.”

Compliance requires robust enforcement, which incurs significant operational costs.

Rental registries across the country are managed by a variety of municipal agencies including housing departments, county assessors, community development offices, and building inspectors. Some cities create entirely new licensing and registration offices to manage their registries. Regardless of where it is housed, implementing a rental registry requires staff capacity for landlord outreach, processing applications, IT management, and audits and inspections–and comes with significant administrative costs.
For instance, San Francisco estimated in 2019 that creating a registry only for its rent-stabilized units would entail a start-up cost of $300,000 and annual costs of between $1.7 million and $3.6 million. The large range is based on whether the city adopts a more passive or active approach to enforcement. Meanwhile, the Oakland, CA calculated in 2022 that the initial cost of setting up a registry would be $325,000, with $789,000 per year in operations costs, mostly going towards staffing.
Cities typically aim to cover most or all of their operation costs with the revenue generated from fees, but may need to make important trade-offs (such as exempting single-family rentals from registration) in order to do so.

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Enforcement and Compliance

Cities can use various strategies to increase property owner compliance, including:

Offering incentives like requiring registration in order to file evictions or receive rental assistance
Sending carefully crafted mailers to landlords
Creating a citizen reporting system
Analyzing existing administrative data to identify properties likely to be rentals, in order to target outreach

Strategies for Increasing Compliance

Research from Newark’s Office of Rent Control and the Behavioral Insights Team of the What Works Cities Economic Mobility Initiative found that sending landlords a “behaviorally informed mailer” encouraging them to register (and citing a clear deadline and consequences for failing to meet it) increased their likelihood of doing so by more than 20 times and resulted in the registration of over 1,900 properties in two months.
A guide on rental licensing prepared by Alan Mallach at the Center for Community Progress recommends tactics such as mass mailing and creating a citizen reporting system by which residents can see whether their rental is listed in the database, and if not, can submit an anonymous report.
Sharing data across city agencies can help identify rental units that are not registered, but should be. By linking data on housing complaints, inspections, code violations, and permits with their rental registry in a database called NEOCANDO, researchers at Case Western University in Cleveland have been able to identify properties that are likely to be rentals and help the city target campaigns for registration and housing code enforcement.

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housingsolutionslab.org

Ingrid Gould Ellen, Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, Director for Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy

ingrid.ellen@nyu.edu

Thank you!

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Appendix

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Identifying Owners of Single Family Properties

Twin Cities, MN

LINK

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Identifying Unsubsidized Affordable Housing

Denver, CO

LINK

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Assessing Housing Quality and Ownership

Cleveland, OH

LINK

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Preserving Small Rental Buildings

Chicago, IL

LINK

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Rental Unit Registration

Skokie, IL

LINK

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Rental Registration

College Station, TX

LINK

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Residential Rental Registration Program

Portland, OR

LINK

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