Half Moon Bay launches rental registry

“I’d call it a success. It isn’t easy starting from ground zero and trying to develop this list and put this together,” he said. “I think it’s miraculous and amazing what our staff has been able to accomplish — and that staff is basically 1 1/2 people.” 

Landlords are required to enter information like the number of bedrooms and bathrooms per unit and monthly rental prices into a portal that was free for the first two months, beginning in June, but now costs $75. 

But hundreds of property owners were incorrectly notified that if they don’t register rental properties with the city, they could be fined up to $100 and receive a citation, causing unhappy residents to contact the city. 

A majority of the time, this occurred because the city has little ability to know what single-family homes are being used as rental properties and went off of assessor’s records that were different from the owner’s home addresses, Doughty said. In some cases, those single-family homes were in trusts, causing the address discrepancy.

The letters, which warned of increasing penalties and late fees, were the fourth notification sent to addresses the city believed could be rental units. On the positive side, the harsher warnings resulted in the registration of close to 200 legitimate rental units, Doughty said. 

Some landlords, like Joe Falcone, who received an incorrect citation warning after already registering his Half Moon Bay rental property, found the issues to be emblematic of a larger problem. He’s suspicious of the city’s obtaining and management of his personal data and doesn’t believe the program is beneficial. 

Despite the city’s apology letters to affected individuals, Falcone remains doubtful of the city’s capacity to successfully manage its housing situation and believes it’s taking too adversarial an approach with landlords, offering them little incentive to maintain housing stock. 

“Even in the best of times, these programs are difficult to implement. It’s difficult to get compliance, particularly when there are no perceivable benefits to a landlord,” he said. “There’s a certain point where you will look at the situation, say ‘it’s not worth it,’ and you will sell out.”  

If mom-and-pop landlords like the Falcones find that selling, rather than renting single-family homes is less trouble, Half Moon Bay will find itself with a larger dearth of viable rental property, he warned. 

Instead, the city should either offer landlords benefits with a rental program — like free-of-cost inspections to ensure the housing stock remains high-quality — or scrap the program altogether and come up with more positive housing solutions, like incentivizing rentals of accessory dwelling units or subsidizing rentals to employees like farmworkers and teachers, Falcone said. 

“I think they need to throw it away and come back with an incentive system that addresses all the creative things people have brought into the community,” he said. 

Doughty maintained that the rental registration program is particularly important in a town like Half Moon Bay, which doesn’t receive housing market data collection in the same way larger cities like San Mateo or Redwood City naturally do. Those areas, unlike Half Moon Bay, typically have enough vacant properties on the market to collect estimates of rental prices through public information. 

The rental registration will work in tandem with rent control and increased tenant protections to help the city better care for vulnerable residents, Doughty said. 

“The great part about that is that we’re getting an incredible picture of what rents are for a one bedroom, two bedroom, three bedroom [that] we’ve never had,” he said.