California Apartment Association

Under a bill opposed by CAA, all property owners who regularly rent out a single-family home would have to register the property annually with California’s Department of Business Oversight, a costly and ineffective mandate that would compromise privacy rights of both landlords and tenants.

“This is extremely overreaching at a great cost to the State of California with no clear benefits except to collect and make public the data,” CAA says in its opposition letter to the legislation.

Assemblyman Ian Calderon

The bill, AB 2282 by Assemblyman Ian Calderon, D-Whittier, is intended to dissuade large-scale buy-to-rent investors from purchasing homes and turning them into rentals — a practice that has helped increase the rental housing stock following the foreclosure crisis.

The legislation would create an unnecessary level of bureaucracy for mom-and-pop owners, whose properties would be listed on a publicly accessible website.

“These families provide some of the most affordable housing in the state. While the bill mandates data be collected in a ‘way that protects the privacy of tenants,’ it does nothing to protect the privacy of millions of California’s small property owners,” CAA’s letter says. “The fact that the property address and the number of single family rentals in a designated ZIP code will be listed on a public Web site is – in and of itself – an invasion of the property owner’s and tenant’s privacy.”

Originally, the bill also would have set a limit on the number of single-family homes made available primarily as rentals — a provision the author has removed.

The remaining registration provision, however, would discourage small property owners — not real estate investment firms — from investing in real estate.

Moreover, the bill overlooks the upside of REITs buying, fixing them up and renting out single-family homes that otherwise would still be boarded up and subject to vandalism.

If not for these investment companies, many homes that went vacant during foreclosure crisis would remain empty, deteriorating and contributing to neighborhood blight.

“By putting these homes back on the market for rent, these companies have helped to alleviate our lack of available housing in California and have supported the housing recovery in the areas where they have purchased,” CAA’s letter says.