Does your City require Landlords to register rentals?

[Nathan Gesner]

Denver hopes to require Landlords to obtain a license and register their rentals. They started doing this in 2019 with vacation homes and now want to do it for all rentals. Why? It's under the guise of protecting the public, but that's like requiring every adult to take a breathalyzer before getting into a car because 5% of the population may be drunk.

https://www.9news.com/article/...

Notice there will be an administrative fee and an inspection every four years. That means more City employees to administer the program, shuffle the papers, inspect the properties, enforce the rules, collect the fines ($1,000 per day for a violation), etc. Taxes will go up.

Imagine a landlord with 100 rentals. Each rental would have to be registered and inspected once every four years. That will take a minimum of one hour of time per rental, adding 100 hours to that Landlord's workload every four years. Easy for a Landlord with 1-2 rentals but a larger Landlord or Property Manager will need to hire additional staff. 

Registration fees for the owner. The City will have to raise taxes to cover the administrative costs of the program. Large Landlords and Property Managers will have to hire more staff. This will all result in costs going up, which will be passed on to the end user.

[Nathan Gesner]

Originally posted by @Russell Brazil:

Yes. The only people who should be concerned are slumlords who keep their properties in uninhabitable conditions.   I go in and out of homes constantly that have unregistered rentals, and many of them are absolutely terrible the conditions slumlords allow their properties to be in. Many of them should be in jail instead of allowed to own property. 

I see them in my city, too. But what percent of all rentals are slums? I bet dollars to donuts it's less than 10% and probably closer to 5%. So the government wants to create an administrative monstrosity to deal with the few? And do you really believe those slumlords are going to register and start complying with new regulations when they don't even care about the current ones? You'll either drive them deeper underground or they'll spook, the property will be converted to something decent, and then we'll have more homeless and people on government subsidies.

It will be as successful as the war on drugs, war on poverty, and war on homelessness.