Beverly Hills Property Management

Property Management in Beverly Hills, CA

Bessa Properties manages rental homes, condos, and apartment buildings in Beverly Hills: rent collection, maintenance, leasing, and the city's own rent stabilization rules, handled by a California DRE-licensed company.

Beverly Hills is not the same job as the rest of LA

Beverly Hills management is two different jobs. One is a house or condo the owner is not living in, after a move or an inheritance, that needs a tenant who will treat it well. The other is an apartment building south of Wilshire, bought decades ago, with long-term tenants and rents that have not kept pace. Both need careful management, but for different reasons.

For the house owner, the question is the tenant: who they are, how they will treat the property, and what happens if something goes wrong at 11pm. For the apartment owner, the question is the city. Beverly Hills runs its own Rent Stabilization Ordinance, separate from the City of Los Angeles RSO, with its own registration system, its own increase limits, and its own relocation fees. Getting a notice wrong here costs real money.

We handle both. The work is mostly unglamorous: chasing a plumber, filing the registration, pricing a unit correctly the first time so it does not sit empty through the fall.

How Beverly Hills rules affect you as an owner

The Beverly Hills Rent Stabilization Ordinance sits in Title 4 of the municipal code, split into Chapter 5 and Chapter 6. Chapter 5 is a small legacy category: units in buildings constructed before September 20, 1978 whose original monthly rent was $600 or less. Everything else the ordinance covers falls under Chapter 6. It applies to residential buildings with two or more units, unless the building received its certificate of occupancy after February 1, 1995 (BHMC 4-6-1). Single-family homes, most condominiums, and government-owned or operated units sit outside it entirely.

For a covered unit, the code allows one increase per tenant in any twelve-month period (BHMC 4-6-3 for Chapter 6, 4-5-303 for Chapter 5). The city publishes the maximum rather than leaving owners to work it out: Chapter 6 currently sits at 3.6%, re-set each June, and Chapter 5 at 3.37%, which the city updates monthly. Skipping a year banks nothing. An owner who passes on one increase cannot take two the next year, only the current percentage applied to the current rent. The notice needs thirty days and has to be served personally or by mail in the manner Code of Civil Procedure 1013 describes. And an owner who is not in substantial compliance with the city's registration requirement is not entitled to take the increase at all. We confirm the current figure with the Rent Stabilization Division before any notice goes out. The full sequence, including the Chapter 5 surcharges and what the notice has to contain, is in our guide to raising the rent in Beverly Hills.

Registration is not optional. Every covered unit has to be registered with the city's Rent Stabilization Division, and changes in ownership, management, or contact information have to be reported within 30 days (BHMC 4-6-10). We keep the registration current as part of routine management, so it is never the thing that stalls a rent increase or complicates a sale.

Evictions in covered units need one of the reasons the ordinance lists: unpaid rent, an uncured obligation of tenancy, nuisance, illegal use, refusal to execute a lease, refusal of access for repairs, unapproved subtenants, use by the landlord, a change of building manager, demolition or condominium conversion, withdrawal from the rental market, or a disruptive-tenant determination (BHMC 4-6-6). An owner or family move-in is possible but requires 90 days' notice, a relocation fee, and a commitment to live in the unit. Relocation fees are set by unit size, adjusted every July 1 for inflation, and increased for households with a senior, a disabled person, or a minor (BHMC 4-6-9). The schedule the city published for July 1, 2026 is $8,636.20 for a studio, $12,756.96 for a one-bedroom, and $17,283.53 for two bedrooms or more, with another $2,000 where a tenant is 62 or older, disabled, or a minor. This is the part of Beverly Hills ownership with the least room for a do-it-yourself mistake, and it is where we insist on an attorney's review before any notice is served.

Newer buildings and most condos fall outside Chapter 6, but they can still be under California's statewide cap and just-cause law (Civil Code 1946.2 and 1947.12) once the building is more than 15 years old. A single-family home owned by an individual can be exempt from the state cap if the lease contains the required notice language. We draft leases with that language when it applies.

Short-term rentals are a separate matter. The city prohibited them citywide effective September 5, 2025, and the municipal code now requires an initial lease term of at least one year on single-family and multifamily property. A group of hosts sued the city over the ban in August 2026, and the ordinance is in effect while that case is pending. We manage furnished units on the same twelve-month terms as unfurnished ones; what we will not set up in Beverly Hills is a tenancy shorter than the ordinance allows. We wrote up what the one-year lease rule changed for owners, including how it runs into state just-cause protection at the twelve-month mark. Adding a unit to the lot? The city’s September 2026 ADU ordinance ties a new ADU to the same short-term rental rules, and we set out what it lets you build in ADU rules in Beverly Hills.

Four ways Beverly Hills differs from the rest of the county

A playbook built on Los Angeles or South Bay buildings mostly transfers. Four things do not, and those four are where the money gets lost.

There is no city buyout procedure

In the City of Los Angeles, paying a tenant to leave means working through the tenant buyout notification program: disclosure first, a rescission window for the tenant, then a copy of the signed agreement filed with the housing department. Culver City and Inglewood each wrote their own version into their ordinances. Chapter 6 has nothing equivalent. That is not an invitation to improvise. It means there is no city form to follow and no filing that makes the agreement official, so whether it holds depends entirely on state law and on how carefully it was drafted. Use a landlord-tenant attorney. Our guide to buyout agreements across LA County sets out what the cities that do regulate them require, which is a reasonable benchmark even where the local code is silent.

Relocation money follows the specific ground, not the at-fault label

It is natural to sort terminations into at-fault and no-fault and assume the fee follows that line. Beverly Hills does not work that way. The ordinance (BHMC 4-6-9) goes ground by ground, and two of the grounds an owner would naturally file as the tenant's doing still carry a fee on a Chapter 6 unit: refusal to execute a lease (BHMC 4-6-6(E)) and a change of building manager (4-6-6(I)). The plainly no-fault grounds carry one as well, including use by the landlord (H), demolition or condominium conversion (J), and withdrawal from the rental market (L). Nothing is owed on unpaid rent, an uncured obligation of tenancy, nuisance, illegal use, refusal of access, unapproved subtenants, or a disruptive-tenant determination.

The ground also decides what you can charge the next tenant (BHMC 4-6-5). After one of the at-fault grounds the unit resets to market. After any ground that carries relocation, and after a disruptive-tenant eviction, it does not. A renewal the tenant refuses to sign is therefore the expensive one to get wrong, because you can owe the fee and still be held to the old rent. Get the current figures from the Rent Stabilization Division and have a landlord-tenant attorney look at the ground before a notice is served. We go through all thirteen grounds, the notice periods, and the filings that have to happen first in our guide to ending a tenancy in Beverly Hills.

Registration is an annual cycle, not a one-time filing

Registering a unit once does not keep it registered. The city runs a cycle every year, and the 2026 deadline was August 31. Miss it, or let the file fall out of substantial compliance, and the annual increase is off the table until it is fixed, which is a quiet way to lose a year of it. We keep the filings current and keep the city's confirmations on hand, so a rent increase or a sale never waits on a registration question.

Business tax is a separate filing with the city’s finance office. Classification E in Beverly Hills Municipal Code section 3-1-219 covers the leasing or renting of any residential property or dwelling unit, with no minimum unit count in the text, and charges an annual tax per $1,000 of gross receipts, provided total receipts average more than $3,600 per unit. A rented single-family house falls inside that wording even though it sits outside the rent stabilization chapters. How Beverly Hills compares with Culver City, Inglewood and Los Angeles is in our guide to city business tax certificates for rental owners. Confirm your classification and the current rate with the city or your CPA before you file.

A sale here is not taxed the way a sale in Los Angeles is

Measure ULA, the Los Angeles transfer tax on higher-value sales, reaches only property inside the City of Los Angeles. Beverly Hills is also not one of the five Los Angeles County cities that adopted an elevated city transfer tax of its own; Culver City is, which matters if you own on both sides of that line. So neither tax lands on a Beverly Hills sale, though the county's documentary transfer tax still does. The exception is the address problem described above: a Beverly Hills Post Office parcel north of the city limit sits inside the City of Los Angeles, so Measure ULA can apply to its sale and LA's own rent stabilization ordinance can apply to its tenancies. Confirm the jurisdiction before you price anything, and confirm the tax treatment with your CPA and the escrow officer. If you are weighing the decision itself, we wrote about holding versus selling an LA rental.

Who this suits

A house or condo you are not living in

We list the property, screen applicants against income, credit, and rental history under California fair housing rules, draft the lease, and then manage the tenancy: rent on the first, repairs handled by vendors we already use, a walk-through with photos before and after. Owners who live out of state or abroad get the same monthly statement and the same call when something needs a decision.

A small building, two to eight units

This covers the fourplex or a courtyard building with a mix of long-term and newer tenants. The work is keeping the registration current, applying the annual increase correctly, staying ahead of the older plumbing and electrical, and turning units properly when one finally opens up. A unit that has been occupied for twenty years can need real work before it re-rents.

Larger apartment buildings

For buildings with more units, the emphasis shifts to systems: a maintenance schedule, a vendor bench that can handle a re-pipe or a roof, consistent rent enforcement, and clean records that hold up if 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 and federal fair housing law
• Lease drafting with the correct Beverly Hills and state disclosures
• Rent collection, late-rent follow-up, and monthly owner statements
• Maintenance coordination with licensed vendors, including after-hours calls
• Rent Stabilization registration, annual increase notices, and city correspondence
• Move-in and move-out inspections with photo records

The flat-fee option

A fee set as a percentage of rent rises every time the rent does, with no change in the work being done. We offer flat-fee management instead: one predictable monthly amount per property that covers rent collection and maintenance coordination. Leasing, when a unit turns over, is billed separately. You know what management costs before the year starts, and it does not move when your rent goes up.

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 Culver City, Inglewood, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Mid-City, Pico-Robertson and Palms.