The Income Property Blog
Category Archives: law and regulations
Apartment Operators Use of Technology May Not Be Right For All Residents
Most professional apartment operators are constantly reviewing technology options to improve the efficiency – and profitability – of their operations. From the Los Angeles Times comes this cautionary tale of what happens when an owner pushes a technological fix onto his residents:
Elderly renters living in the Woodlake Manor Apartment building in South Los Angeles have sued their landlord, Jones & Jones Management Group Inc., alleging that their digital shortcomings could leave them vulnerable to eviction under the Woodland Hills company’s new requirement that they make all their payments online.
SF Tech Boom Not a Boom for Landlords
From The New York Times:
Thousands of people are expected to become rich in the latest Bay Area tech boom, and in San Francisco these newly minted millionaires will receive a benefit originally meant to help the poor and working class: rent control.
Not that they have a choice. The law applies to rental apartments built before June 1979, regardless of the tenant’s income. Rent increases are limited to less than inflation — last year the increase was 0.1 percent, an all-time low.
New York City Rent Control Law remains under Review
An earlier post described a recent lawsuit filed in New York City, fighting the city’s rent control law on the grounds that the law often benefits wealthy tenants, smacking “into the Fifth Amendment’s safeguards against government seizure of private property without just compensation.”
What’s important with this lawsuit is that most rent control legal challenges go nowhere. Indeed, the landlord in this lawsuit lost in U.S. District Court and the Second U.S. District Court of Appeals. But the U.S. Supreme Court is taking a hard look at the landlord’s appeal and, some court watchers say, may lead to the U.S. Supreme Court revisiting the issue.
New 2012 Laws for California Landlords
With another new year comes another round of new legislation affecting California’s apartment owners and managers.
1. California Landlords May Ban Smoking in Rental Units and/or Common Areas:
Beginning January 1, 2012, a residential landlord can prohibit the smoking of cigarettes and other tobacco products on the property, including any dwelling unit, building, other interior or exterior area, or the premises on which the property is located.
For new tenants on or after January 1, 2012, the areas where smoking is prohibited must be stated in the lease or rental agreement. For preexisting tenants before 2012, a new provision prohibiting smoking is a change in the terms of tenancy that requires adequate written notice, depending on whether the tenancy is month-to-month or for a fixed term.
Rental application fees growing in use in San Francisco
The New York Times reports that with the San Francisco rental market heating up, many landlords are back to charging rental application fees from prospective renters”
“When Divanny Lamas decided to move to San Francisco from Silicon Valley, she knew thehunt for an apartment would be competitive — but it was far worse than she imagined.
At a “nice” $3,500-per-month loft in the Mission, “80 people showed up for the open house,” said Ms. Lamas, 23, who recently began working at a tech company in SoMa. “And the landlord said to me that he’d gotten 250 applications.”
The cost of applying was $40, so if the landlord wasn’t exaggerating, he grossed $10,000 in application fees.
Call it a deposit with no return.