Five Bills On The Governor's Desk, And Eleven Days To Go

The Legislature adjourned August 31 and the Governor has until September 30 to act. Five bills on his desk change how you evict, how you advertise pets, what your HOA can block, what you can build on your lot, and whether your carrier can walk. Here is what each one does to an income property owner, in plain terms.

The Legislature adjourned August thirty-first. The Governor has until September thirtieth to sign or veto what they sent him. That is eleven days from today. Anything he neither signs nor vetoes by then becomes law without his signature.

Most of what came out of this session will not touch you. Five bills will. I have gone through them in the order that matters least to most, and I am telling you what each one does to an income property owner, not what the press release says.

One housekeeping note before we start. Everything below is enrolled and presented, which means both houses passed it and the text is locked. It is not law yet. If the Governor signs, most of it starts January first, twenty twenty-seven unless the bill says otherwise, and two of these say otherwise.

Number five: SB 1160, your eviction filings in a public spreadsheet

Senate Bill 1160 tells the Judicial Council to build an automated system that pulls unlawful detainer case data out of every county court, quarterly, aggregated by ZIP code, and posts it publicly.

Read the calendar before you get worked up. The Judicial Council has to assess which county courts can actually submit the data by July 1, 2032. Counties found ready begin quarterly reporting January 1, 2033. Every county reports, and the first public spreadsheet goes up, January 1, 2034. The whole build is contingent on the Legislature appropriating money for it, which is not a small asterisk.

What it does to you: nothing, for seven years. Then it changes the conversation permanently. Aggregated filing data by ZIP code is exactly the input a city council uses to justify a local ordinance, and exactly the input a reporter uses to build a map. Your filings might all be clean. Aggregated data does not care about clean.

The practical move is not a compliance move. It is a documentation habit. Property management files that can survive being looked at are worth building now, because in 2034 the question stops being whether you filed and becomes why your ZIP shows what it shows.

Number four: AB 956 and SB 1117, the ADU pair

These two arrived separately and land together, and they are the good news of the session.

AB 956 requires local agencies to ministerially approve up to two detached, new-construction accessory dwelling units on a single-family lot. The old number was one. It also revises the rule that voids covenants prohibiting or unreasonably restricting ADUs, and widens its reach from lots strictly zoned single-family to lots zoned to allow single-family residential use. If your governing documents have an ADU restriction buried in them, this is the second bill in two sessions aimed squarely at it. The bill does not force ministerial approval of a junior ADU on a lot that already has two detached units.

SB 1117 changes the math on impact fees. Fees on a qualifying ADU get calculated based only on the interior livable area above 750 square feet. Not the whole unit.

What it does to you: it improves the return on the dirt you already own. Two units where you could build one, and the fee exposure on a larger build shrinks to the part above 750 feet. For a South Bay lot where land is the expensive ingredient and you are never buying more of it, that is the most useful thing Sacramento did all year.

The caution is the one I give every owner who calls me about this. Ministerial approval is not the same as cheap or fast. You still have utilities, setbacks, fire access, and a contractor's calendar. Run the numbers on the actual build before the bill number gets you excited.

Number three: AB 1684, your association cannot say no to air conditioning

AB 1684 voids any provision in a common interest development's governing documents that prohibits or limits installing, upgrading, replacing, or using a cooling system that complies with applicable state and local building codes. Portable units, window units, evaporative coolers, heat pumps and similar systems all count. An association that willfully violates it is exposed to actual damages, a civil penalty up to two thousand dollars, and attorney fees.

What it does to you as an owner: it removes an excuse. Anyone who has managed a condo rental in a building with an aggressive architectural committee knows the pattern. Tenant asks for cooling, you file an application, the committee sits on it, summer ends. That path closes.

What it does to you as a board member: it becomes your problem, and the penalty language is not decorative. In my experience the associations that get hurt by a bill like this are the ones whose architectural guidelines have not been touched since the nineties and whose manager has never been asked to read them against current law. If you sit on a board, put the cooling system provisions of your guidelines in front of association counsel before the next hot week, not after the first demand letter.

Number two: SB 1296, the written pet policy

SB 1296 is the one that touches your paperwork first, because it is written to operate April 1, 2027.

Every landlord needs a pet policy in writing. A link to it goes on the property's website, in any digital advertisement you control, and in what you feed to a rental search engine, to the extent the platform allows a link. A written copy goes out with every rental application, electronically if the application is electronic, and the application needs a space where the applicant acknowledges receiving it.

The bill does not hand you a checklist. It says the policy must include a clear, plain-language description of the rights, responsibilities, and requirements for tenant pet owners at the property, including any other material rules, conditions, or restrictions. Read that as: if you have a breed rule, a weight limit, a cap on the number of animals, pet rent, a deposit, or an insurance requirement, it belongs in the written policy, because each of those is a material term. You can change the policy later, but only for prospective tenants, and the version that counts is the one in effect when the application was handed over.

If you do not allow pets, you are not off the hook. The bill says a complete prohibition is a pet policy, so it gets written down, linked, and handed out the same way. If you place no rules on pets at all, the policy has to say that. None of this changes anything about service animals, support animals, or other assistance animals. The bill says so in one sentence: it does not alter any obligation or right under state or federal law. They were always a separate question, and they still are.

And there is an enforcement hook with teeth in it. Fail to disclose the policy before you charge an application fee, and an applicant who becomes ineligible or declines to proceed because of that failure can request the fee back in writing. You have seven business days to refund it, and a timely refund ends your obligation to that applicant under the section.

Two smaller provisions worth knowing. A tenant's failure to sign a pet addendum cannot be the sole basis of an unlawful detainer. And there is a substantial compliance clause: give the applicant the material terms, fix a nonmaterial error when it is pointed out, and you have not violated the section.

What it does to you: this is a real property management workload, and it is the kind that gets missed because it is not dramatic. Nobody sends you a letter reminding you to post a pet policy. You just find out later that an application fee you collected has to go back.

If the Governor signs, the work is straightforward and it is not optional. Write the policy. Post the link. Attach the policy to the application packet and add the acknowledgment line. Then have your attorney read it, because fair housing and assistance animals is the corner of this where practitioners get hurt and where I stop talking and defer to counsel.

One thing the bill does not do, because I have seen it claimed: the enrolled text says nothing about whether a pet fee can be called nonrefundable. That question is governed by the security deposit statute you already live under, not by this bill.

Number one: SB 1301, the bill that decides whether you keep the building

Every landlord in California spent the last few years learning about rent caps. A lot of us spent the last two learning something more expensive, which is what happens when the carrier walks.

SB 1301 is aimed at that. Effective January 1, 2028, it requires a residential property insurance nonrenewal notice at least 90 days before the policy expires, up from 75. If the policy fails to meet underwriting guidelines because of something curable, the insurer has to send a notice at least 120 days out explaining what needs to be remediated, and has to give the policyholder not less than 90 days to do the work. You get a detailed, plain language explanation of the grounds for nonrenewal, plus all nonaerial imagery the insurer relied on. Aerial imagery is carved out, which matters, because a drone or satellite photo is how a lot of these decisions start. Ask for the inspection findings and the insurer has 15 days to produce them. Insurers cannot decline renewal solely on the basis of certain claims or a prior inquiry. Roof age alone is also off the table, but only if you obtain and pay for an independent inspection confirming at least five years of useful roof life remaining. Annual reporting to the Insurance Commissioner starts April 1, 2029.

What it does to you: it turns a letter you cannot argue with into a problem you can solve. That is the whole difference. A nonrenewal you learn about 75 days out with no stated reason is a scramble into the FAIR Plan and a hit to your operating number that you carry for years. A nonrenewal that arrives 120 days out, names the condition, hands you the ground-level photos they used, and gives you 90 days to fix it, is a maintenance item.

If you own income property anywhere with fire exposure, and in Southern California that is most of us, this is the most valuable bill of the five. It is also the one that takes the longest to help you, so plan on 2028.

The bill that is not on the desk

The biggest number of the session is a bill that died.

AB 1157 would have dropped the statewide cap from five percent plus cost-of-living, ten percent maximum, down to two percent plus cost-of-living, five percent maximum. It would have pulled separately alienable properties, meaning single-family homes, condominiums and individually owned townhomes, into both the rent cap and just cause. And it would have deleted the January 1, 2030 sunset so that all of it ran indefinitely.

It failed passage in committee on January 13, 2026, and died on January 31 under the constitutional deadline for bills carried over from the prior year.

So here is where that leaves the landscape. The statewide cap under AB 1482 still expires January 1, 2030. Civil Code sections 1947.12 and 1946.2 both repeal on that date. And the Legislative Analyst's report on whether the thing worked is due on or before the same day the law dies, which is a piece of legislative drafting I still cannot read with a straight face.

One correction I make every time this comes up, because I hear it stated wrong constantly. Propositions 10 in 2018, 21 in 2020, and 33 in 2024 were not referendums on AB 1482. All three were efforts to repeal or weaken Costa-Hawkins so cities could pass their own stronger local rent control, and voters declined all three. The statewide cap was enacted by the Legislature in 2019, by statute, in between the first two of those votes. If you argue this in front of a council, get it right. The other side will.

AB 1157 is dead for this session. The 2030 sunset is not going to sit there quietly for three more years.

What to do in the next eleven days

Nothing in the statute changes until the Governor acts. What changes now is your calendar.

Pull your pet policy and your pet addendum language, and if you do not have them in writing, start the draft. If your governing documents restrict cooling systems or ADUs, get them in front of association counsel. If your insurance renewal is coming up in the next two years, start the file now on the conditions a carrier is likely to flag, because SB 1301 only helps the owner who is ready to remediate. And if you were counting on the statewide cap disappearing in 2030, understand that it survived this session by one bill failing in one committee.

I will publish what he signs.

Sacramento passes it. You live with it.