Can You Still Rent a Beverly Hills House for Six Months? What the One-Year Lease Rule Changed

For Owners · Beverly Hills · September 2026 · 8 min read

An owner north of Sunset used to run his house the same way every year. Two furnished tenancies, ninety days each, people in town for a production, paid up front, out before the holidays. He called this summer to ask what the fall number should be. The answer was that there is no fall booking to price anymore. Beverly Hills stopped allowing that arrangement in September 2025, and a year later the rule is still standing.

Owners are still finding out about this one at the worst possible moment, usually with a signed short lease in hand. Here is what the ordinance says, what it replaced, where the court case sits, and the second-order effect that catches more owners than the ban itself.

What the ordinance actually requires

Beverly Hills Municipal Code section 10-3-508 was amended by Ordinance 25-O-2918, effective September 5, 2025. The operative line is short: the initial lease term shall be at least one year. The city’s own summary is blunter. A minimum initial lease period of 12 months is required for all single-family and multi-family units, and short-term rentals are prohibited in all single-family and multi-family units citywide.

Citywide means citywide. It reaches a full house, an apartment, a single room, a guest house, and an accessory dwelling unit. It reaches the pool, the yard, and the game court if you were thinking of renting those separately. The code carves out transitional housing, emergency shelters, congregate care, and supportive housing, and the city has treated in-home caregiving arrangements as outside the rule. There is no permit that buys you out of it and no annual allowance of short stays. After the first twelve months the tenancy can roll month to month, which is how most of them end up anyway.

What owners lost

The rules before this were workable if you knew them. A single-family residence or an ADU could be rented for periods shorter than six months, twice a year. A multifamily unit could be rented for thirty days or more. That is the framework the 2025 ordinance replaced, and it is why so many Beverly Hills houses sat on a two-lets-a-year rhythm and why the thirty-day corporate stay was a normal product in buildings south of Wilshire.

Both of those are gone. Not restricted, not permitted with conditions. Gone.

The lawsuit, and why it should not change your plan

On August 31, 2026, a group calling itself the Beverly Hills Vacation Rental Alliance sued the city in federal court for the Central District of California. The group is roughly two dozen renters, owners, managers and hosts. The complaint argues the ban violates property rights, due process, equal protection and privacy under the federal and state constitutions, and separately that the city modified the ordinance substantially without sending it back to the Planning Commission, which is a procedural claim under state law.

That case is pending. The ordinance is in effect while it is pending. An owner who books ninety-day stays this winter on the theory that the ban will fall is taking the enforcement risk personally, today, in exchange for a result that may never arrive and that nobody can put a date on. We would not underwrite a property that way and we would not advise an owner to.

The part that surprises people: twelve months is also a legal threshold

Here is the piece that gets missed. The city now requires you to offer exactly the lease length that triggers state just-cause protection.

California Civil Code section 1946.2 says that after a tenant has continuously and lawfully occupied a residential real property for 12 months, the owner shall not terminate the tenancy without just cause. Before this ordinance, an owner doing repeat short stays never got near that line. Now every compliant Beverly Hills tenancy runs straight into it by design. When a tenancy ends for a no-fault reason under the state law, the owner owes relocation assistance or a rent waiver equal to one month of the rent that was in effect when the termination notice went out.

The practical consequence is that tenant selection matters more than it did two years ago, and the lease you sign matters more than it did two years ago. A weak application used to be a ninety-day problem. It is now a tenancy you may need cause and money to end. Screening, a lease that is actually enforceable in California, and documented handling of the first missed payment are the three things that change outcomes here.

If the building is under Chapter 6, add a layer

Beverly Hills runs its own Rent Stabilization Ordinance. Chapter 6 covers multiple residential dwellings of two units or more, excluding units that got their certificate of occupancy after February 1, 1995, and excluding the older pre-1978 stock that first rented below the threshold the city uses to sort buildings into Chapter 5. For a Chapter 6 unit the rent can go up once in any twelve-month period, by the greater of 3% or the annual CPI change for the Los Angeles area, with written notice served the way state and local law require, and the unit has to be registered with the city. No-fault terminations in covered units carry the city’s own relocation schedule, which is set per unit size and is larger for senior, disabled and minor households. The city updates those amounts, so confirm the current figures with the Rent Stabilization Division rather than working from a number you saved last year.

We wrote the fuller version of all of this on our Beverly Hills property management page, including registration and the notice mechanics.

Furnished is still fine. Short is not.

The ordinance regulates duration, not furniture. A furnished twelve-month lease is legal in Beverly Hills, we manage furnished units on the same terms as unfurnished ones, and in this market the furnished version is often the better product anyway. The demand that drove the ninety-day furnished market, people on a production or a project who want to land in a finished house, has not disappeared. What changed is the term they have to sign.

Run the arithmetic on your own property before you mourn the old model. Two ninety-day stays leave six months of the year to fill or to carry empty, plus furnishing, utilities, cleaning between tenancies, higher wear, and a transient occupancy tax you collect and remit. A single twelve-month lease at a real market rent is one turnover, one set of costs, and twelve months of cash flow. For a lot of Beverly Hills houses the annual number is closer than owners expect, and the twelve-month version is considerably less work.

How the city finds out

The city says it monitors online activity to verify listings and enforce compliance, and it takes complaints online, by phone at (310) 285-1000, and at bhcp@beverlyhills.org. A neighbor who watches a different set of suitcases arrive every few weeks is the most common starting point. A live listing that advertises anything under twelve months is itself the evidence, and no platform is going to protect you from your own calendar.

Questions owners ask

Can I rent the guest house for the summer while my family is away?

No. Guest houses and ADUs are named in the city’s own description of what the prohibition covers. The twelve-month minimum applies to them the same way it applies to the main house.

My address is 90210 but I am not sure I am in the city. Does this apply to me?

Check before you assume either way. A Beverly Hills mailing address is not proof of Beverly Hills jurisdiction, and parcels in the area north of the city limit can sit inside the City of Los Angeles, which runs its own home-sharing rules. Pull the jurisdiction from the county assessor record and the city before you plan anything around a lease term.

Can I sign a twelve-month lease and agree with the tenant that they will really leave in three?

Do not do this on a handshake or with a side letter. The requirement is a genuine one-year initial term, and a lease structured to defeat it is the kind of thing that reads badly to a hearing officer and to a judge. If you have a specific situation, for example a tenant with a fixed work assignment, take the lease to an attorney and have it drafted properly.

What about a tenant who breaks the lease early on their own?

That is an ordinary lease matter, not a violation of the ordinance, and California law requires the landlord to mitigate damages by trying to re-rent. Document the departure, the re-rental effort, and the deposit accounting.

Does the rule reach my existing month-to-month tenant of nine years?

No. The requirement is about the initial term of a new rental. Your existing tenancy continues under its own terms and, if the unit is covered, under Chapter 6.

Should I wait for the lawsuit before deciding what to do with the property?

Waiting is a choice with a cost. The ordinance is enforceable now, the case has no scheduled resolution, and an empty house between hoped-for short bookings loses more in a year than most owners save by holding out. If the property is sitting, the practical move is to lease it properly for twelve months and revisit if the law actually changes.

Sources and disclaimer. Beverly Hills Municipal Code § 10-3-508, Businesses Prohibited; Minimum Initial Rental Periods (Ord. 01-O-2383; amended by Ord. 25-O-2918, effective September 5, 2025); City of Beverly Hills, Short-Term Rentals (scope of the prohibition, twelve-month minimum, enforcement contacts); California Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation, CEQAnet listing for Ordinance 25-O-2918; Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, City of Beverly Hills Imposes One Year Minimum Lease Requirement; Beverly Press, Beverly Hills sued over short-term rental ban (August 31, 2026 filing and the prior 2014 rules); California Civil Code § 1946.2 as enacted by the Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (twelve-month just cause threshold, one month relocation assistance); City of Beverly Hills, Summary of Chapter 6 Rent Regulations (coverage, increase formula, notice, relocation). Current as of September 2026. This is general information for property owners from a California DRE-licensed property management company, not legal or tax advice. The short-term rental ordinance is under active litigation and the rent stabilization figures change, so confirm your own situation with the Beverly Hills Rent Stabilization Division and with a California landlord-tenant attorney before signing a lease or serving any notice.