Rental Registry

July 31, 2025
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Overview

Rental registries are key tools for understanding a city’s housing landscape. While there is a large range of information that can be collected, at their heart, rental registries are databases that contain information about rental properties and their owners. This information can be used to promote healthy and safe housing via proactive or performance-based inspections for housing quality; those inspections can be used as a basis for providing licenses. Rental registries provide the foundation upon which programs aimed at safeguarding rental housing are built.

Dual Strategies and Smart Scaling

Ordinance 1 (Seattle, WA, Population Size: 755,078)

  • Rationale for inclusion
    • Seattle is a good example of a single ordinance addressing 2 key policy actions: Rental Registries, coupled with proactive inspections.
    • Scaled fee system (initial property fee baseline, with per unit cost for multi-unit properties)
    • Phased rollout (speaks to feasibility and capacity)
    • Targeted roll out (starts with known bad actors)

Important considerations

  • While each property must register and be inspected, large properties will only inspect 20% of the units. This is probably a capacity measure, but it’s generally best to inspect all units.

Property owners source their own inspectors, they aren’t city inspectors. Inspectors do need to register with the City, attend training, and meet certification and other requirements.

Tying Enforcement to Registration

  • Ordinance 2 (Detroit, Population Size: 633,218)
    • Rationale for inclusion

Implementation Tools & Resources