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NEVADA VIEWS: A costly path to fewer homes, higher rents

As policymakers search for solutions to rising housing costs, rental registries are increasingly promoted as a “common-sense” step toward transparency. In fact, Nevada lawmakers have considered this problematic proposal in the past, with renewed efforts and working groups contemplating legislation targeted for the 2027 session.

At first glance, rental registries sound reasonable. Governments collect data on rental properties, pricing and ownership in the name of oversight. However, the harsh reality is that rental registries put states on a path that leads to fewer homes, high compliance costs passed onto tenants and diminished opportunities.

Rental registries are not a new policy tool, dating to the 1980s in cities such as New York and Berkeley, California, where they were originally implemented to enforce rent control or improve housing conditions. Despite decades of use of rental registries, these cities continue to struggle with affordability and housing quality challenges, raising questions about the long-term effectiveness of registries in achieving their stated goals. Los Angeles’ Systematic Code Enforcement Program has not translated into broadly affordable or accessible housing and the city of Louisville, Kentucky, just watered down its rental registry laws.

Additional concerns include inaccurate or incomplete data, such as findings from Philadelphia where ownership structures made it difficult to hold landlords accountable, undermining enforcement goals. Research has demonstrated that complaint-based inspection programs do not adequately or equitably identify housing code violations. Instead, regulators go on what landlords call “fishing expeditions” without reasonable suspicion or probable cause to gather confidential tenant rental data and confidential financial records of property owners.

Registries can introduce significant costs and administrative challenges. Studies note that startup and annual operating expenses — such as those estimated in San Francisco at up to $3.6 million annually — are often passed on to tenants through higher rents. Despite active enforcement and relatively high registration fees, the city of Berkeley caught only 5 percent of tenants paying a rent over the regulatory ceiling. These unconstitutional recurring fees, inspection requirements and compliance burdens disproportionately impact small landlords, reducing rental supply and discouraging investment.

For small, “mom-and-pop” landlords who provide much of a city’s naturally affordable housing, these added burdens can be the tipping point that forces them to sell or exit the market altogether. In places such as Seattle, increasing layers of rental regulation have coincided with a decline in smaller rental properties — the very units that tend to be more affordable.

A 2023 city audit found that 67 percent of landlords who exited the rental market cited difficulty complying with local rules, while 74 percent said regulations were too burdensome or complex. Now, Seattle’s housing market is largely absent of smaller, older, generally more affordable housing units, replaced by an increase in larger properties that demand significantly higher rents.

Further, rental registries raise serious privacy concerns. Santa Ana, California, does not require landlords to obtain consent from a tenant to provide their information in the city’s rental registry. A major data breach in Berkeley highlights serious concerns for tenant privacy: Tens of thousands of renters had personal data exposed through a registry breach, where sensitive, private data including names, phone numbers, email addresses and Section 8 status were exposed on a public-facing rent registry website for more than four months.

This incident underscores how registries, which often collect detailed tenant and landlord data, can create significant cybersecurity and privacy risks, especially when cities do not require tenant consent before collecting or publishing such information.

Beyond cost and privacy concerns, rental registries often pave the way for further intervention. Once governments collect detailed rent and property data, political pressure builds to act on it — frequently through rent caps or additional regulations. In effect, registries create the infrastructure for rent-control policies, even when that is not the original intent.

Rental registries may seem modest, but their long-term consequences are anything but. Nevada cannot regulate its way out of a housing shortage. Going down this path risks fewer homes, higher costs and reduced opportunity for the very families policymakers are trying to help.

If lawmakers are serious about affordability, the focus should be on increasing supply — streamlining permitting, reducing barriers to development and encouraging investment in new housing.

By Sarah Scattini
Special to the Las Vegas Review-Journal

Sarah Scattini is a Realtor and the 2026 president of the Nevada Realtors Association.