West Hollywood Property Management

Property Management in West Hollywood, CA

Bessa Properties manages apartment buildings, condos, and houses in West Hollywood: rent collection, maintenance, leasing, and the city's Rent Stabilization Ordinance, handled by a California DRE-licensed company.

A small city with its own rulebook

West Hollywood is not the City of Los Angeles, and that matters more here than almost anywhere else in the county. The city has run its own rent stabilization program since the 1980s and registers every rental unit inside its borders; as of 2025 it reported 15,788 units in the program. If you own a building here, the city already knows about it.

The owners who call us usually fall into a few groups. Someone holding a fourplex or an eight-unit courtyard building on a side street between Santa Monica Boulevard and Fountain Avenue, bought years ago, with tenants who have been there a long time and rents well under market. Someone with a condo in one of the newer buildings near the Sunset Strip or along Doheny that they no longer live in. Or someone who inherited a house in West Hollywood West or the Norma Triangle and would rather rent it than sell it into a slow market.

How West Hollywood rules affect you as an owner

The Rent Stabilization Ordinance lives in Title 17 of the West Hollywood Municipal Code. Which parts apply to your property depends on when it was built and, for single units, when the tenant moved in. A building with more than one unit that received its original certificate of occupancy before July 1, 1979 is fully covered. A single house or condo built before that date is fully covered only if the current tenant moved in before January 1, 1996. Everything else that is rented for profit, including buildings built after July 1, 1979 and houses or condos with a tenant who arrived in 1996 or later, is exempt from the rent limits but still subject to the city's eviction and harassment protections. Most of those newer buildings also fall under California's statewide rent cap and just-cause law once they are more than fifteen years old.

For a fully covered unit, the city sets one rent increase a year, called the annual general adjustment. It equals 75% of the change in the regional Consumer Price Index, it is announced before July 1, and it runs from September 1 through August 31. For the year that ended August 31, 2026 the figure was 2.25%. An increase that is not taken during the year it applies to is gone; the city does not allow banking. An owner can only take it at all if the unit was registered, was re-registered after the last vacancy, all annual fees are paid, and twelve months have passed since the tenant moved in or the last increase. We confirm the current number with the Rent Stabilization Division before any notice goes out.

Registration is annual and it is not just for rent-controlled buildings. The fee is $144 per unit, half of which can be passed through to the tenant at $6 a month. Since 2023 owners of exempt units, including post-1979 buildings and single houses or condos, have had to register them in the city's non-rent-controlled unit registry with the tenant's name and initial rent; fines for skipping it start at $1,000 per violation. Every new tenancy has to be re-registered through the Landlord Service Portal, and the unit is not in compliance until that is done.

When a covered unit turns over voluntarily, state law lets the owner set a new market rent for the next tenant. That reset is lost if the last tenancy ended through a no-fault termination, if the building had uncorrected code violations, or if the prior tenant was pushed out. It is the single biggest reason to keep an older building clean on paper, because the reset on a long-term unit is where much of the value in a West Hollywood building sits.

Evictions need one of the reasons listed in Municipal Code section 17.52.010: unpaid rent, an uncured lease violation, nuisance, illegal use, refusing a renewal on similar terms, refusing access, an unauthorized occupant, and a short list of no-fault grounds such as owner or relative move-in. No-fault terminations require relocation fees under section 17.52.020, set by bedroom count, raised every July 1 with inflation, and higher when anyone in the household is 62 or older, disabled, terminally ill, living with a dependent minor, or lower income. The fee is paid when the notice is served, and every termination notice has to be filed with the Rent Stabilization Commission within five days. We do not serve a no-fault notice in West Hollywood without an attorney reviewing it first.

Short-term rentals are off the table. Municipal Code section 19.36.331 prohibits offering or advertising a vacation rental, which the city defines as any stay under 31 days, and the city has stepped up enforcement in recent years. There is a separate home-sharing license for residents, but it is not a route for renting out an investment unit by the night. A furnished twelve-month lease is fine, and we manage furnished units on the same terms as unfurnished ones.

The soft-story retrofit ordinance (Ordinance 17-1004) applies to wood-frame buildings with parking or open space under the living floors that were permitted before January 1, 1978. Owners get a notice from the city and a schedule of milestones from screening report to finished construction. If you own a dingbat here, budget for it and plan the tenant notices around it.

The city is also reviewing the ordinance itself, with community meetings for tenants and landlords in September 2026 on proposed changes. Nothing has changed yet; we will update this page when it does.

Who this suits

A condo or house you are not living in

We list the property, screen applicants on income, credit, and rental history under California fair housing rules, draft the lease with the West Hollywood and state disclosures, register the tenancy with the city, and then run it: rent on the first, repairs by vendors we already use, a photo walk-through before move-in and after move-out. Exempt from the rent limits or not, the registry filing gets done, because the fines for missing it are real.

A small building, two to eight units

This is the typical West Hollywood holding and the one where management earns its keep: registration and fees kept current, the annual adjustment taken every year it is offered, galvanized plumbing and old electrical panels dealt with before they fail, the seismic retrofit coordinated if the building needs one, and a long-occupied unit turned properly so it re-rents at market instead of sitting.

Larger apartment buildings

For bigger buildings the emphasis shifts to systems: a maintenance calendar, a vendor bench that can handle a re-pipe or a roof, consistent rent enforcement, and records clean enough to hold up when a tenant files a petition with the city or a buyer asks for the rent roll.

What management includes

• Pricing against current comparable rentals on your block, not a citywide average
• Listing with professional photos across the major rental sites
• Applicant screening that follows California fair housing rules, including the state's limits on criminal history screening
• Lease drafting with the correct West Hollywood and state disclosures
• Rent collection, late-rent follow-up, and monthly owner statements
• Maintenance coordination with licensed vendors, including after-hours calls
• City registration, re-registration after each vacancy, annual adjustment notices, and Rent Stabilization Division correspondence
• Move-in and move-out inspections with photo records

The flat-fee option

Owners of rent-stabilized buildings notice something about percentage-based management: the fee goes up every September when the rent does, and the work does not change. We offer flat-fee management instead. One predictable monthly amount per property covers rent collection and maintenance coordination; leasing, when a unit turns over, is billed separately. You know the cost of management before the year starts, and it stays put.

We quote the fee in writing after a short conversation about the property. Read more about flat-fee management or request a quote.

Frequently asked questions

We also manage in nearby Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Culver City, Inglewood, and Santa Monica.