Inspections - Mandatory Rental Registration and Inspections: Policy Issue
Overview
Laws that mandate inspections for rental housing exist in a variety of forms across thousands of towns, cities and counties throughout the country. These programs are designed to ensure public health and safety, mitigate blight and abate overcrowding through the enforcement of building and health codes.
Mandatory inspection regimes often include rental registries, which collect data from local housing providers and catalogue a jurisdiction's rental properties into a single database. At a minimum, this data includes a mailing address and housing provider contact information. However, some registries are mandatory and require regular inspections, rent prices, eviction records, licensure and fees.
Industry Position
Mandatory rental housing inspection laws place an unnecessary financial hardship on operators, infringe on personal privacy rights and single out rental housing while excluding other property types. NAA encourages policymakers to consider other proven approaches that target chronic code violations, such as complaint-driven property inspection programs.
Registries with onerous reporting requirements and associated fees impact housing providers in their ability to provide affordable homes for residents to thrive in.
As an Owner or Operator, How Does this Affect My Business?
Mandatory inspection programs often place a significant financial burden on apartment owners and operators. Housing providers are commonly required to register all units with the municipality and pay a per unit fee or tax, which funds the municipal inspection program and inevitably places upward pressure on rent costs. In addition to registration fees, apartment owners and operators are subject to regular inspections, re-inspections and inspections at random.
The longstanding approach to inspections across the nation is the complaint-driven model. With this system, officials inspect properties after a resident files a complaint. If applicable, the results of these inspections may be included in a rental registry.
A mandatory inspection model requires regular and proactive inspections of all properties, regardless of any reason to believe that an infraction has occurred. This model can lead to superfluous inspections. Furthermore, this practice raises privacy concerns when city officials can enter a resident’s home against a resident’s wishes and without any personalized probable cause.
Contact Information
To learn more about this issue, please contact NAA's Public Policy team.
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