Fresno City Hall image via wikipedia user Nightryder84

Mayor Lee Brand and City Manager Wilma Quan announced that the City of Fresno’s Rental Housing Registry has reached 85,000 units since the first notices were mailed to property owners less than a year ago.

The rental registry’s purpose was to create a website where property owners and managers can easily register the estimated 80,000-90,000 rental units in Fresno city limits and to ultimately improve the quality of the city’s rental housing stock.

“Our dream of having an accurate, comprehensive registry of Fresno’s rental units is now a reality,” Brand said. “This ambitious program, which was created from scratch by a talented local team, has now become the gold standard for cities around California that want to safeguard and improve their housing stock to provide decent, safe and sanitary residential rental units for the community.”

Proposed by Mayor Brand and passed by the Fresno City Council in January 2018, the rental registry is a key part of the Fresno’s Rental Housing Improvement act that was designed to create a database of all single-and multi-family residential units within the city.

All residential rental properties in Fresno are required to be registered and to update changes of ownership or contact information. While there are no fees to register a rental property, there are penalties for a failure to register.

Tenants can also search the city’s website to verity if the property where they live has been registered, which provides more transparency and accountability to the process.

“Housing experts were telling us that if we got to 80,000 units registered that we should consider the registry as populated as possible and focus on the inspection program.  We have surpassed that goal in under a year, and have a robust registry and an inspection program that continues to improve efficiencies and performance,” Quan said. “Our Rental Housing team has exceeded expectations once again, allowing our program to efficiently reward good property owners and quickly identify the bad ones.”