AAGLA Advocacy Update: Major State Bills Held in Committee

AAGLA Advocacy Update: Major State Bills Held in Committee

The Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles is pleased to announce that three potentially problematic bills were held in legislative committee and are now “dead.”

The three bills are:

• Assembly Bill 380 (Gonzalez) - Price Gouging – This bill would have doubled from 30 days to 60 days the prohibition applicable to housing rental prices by removing from the definition of “housing” the requirement that rental housing have an initial lease term of no longer than one year. Under the proposed bill, following a proclamation of a state of emergency or upon the declaration of a local emergency, for a period of 60 days following that proclamation or declaration, it would have become unlawful for any person, business, or other entity, to increase the rental price advertised, offered, or charged for commercial real property, to an existing or prospective tenant, by more than 10%.
• Senate Bill 52 (Perez) - Rental Rate Algorithms – This bill would have restricted the use of rental pricing algorithms. Specifically, it would have banned the offering of such algorithms to competitors in the same or related market, prohibits knowingly using these algorithms, and forbid incorporating nonpublic competitor data into any rental pricing algorithm.
• Senate Bill 384 (Wahab) - Preventing Algorithmic Price Fixing Act: Prohibition on Price-Fixing Algorithm Use - This proposed bill would have banned the creation and employment of pricing algorithms that use the confidential, competitive data of rival companies.

The Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles aggressively opposed these proposed new laws; as a result, we were able to have these three proposed bills stopped in committee before a vote on the floor.

These three bills will now become two-year bills and may be reintroduced next year in an amended form.