By Iris Craige, Assistant Director of Policy and Advocacy

December 8, 2025

In October 2023, the Los Angeles City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee directed the city’s housing department (LAHD) to study trends in housing stock ownership over the past five years. They wanted to know how many privately owned residential properties had been sold to corporations, and what tools might help small landlords keep their properties. LAHD’s recent Concentration of Ownership report details their findings and makes recommendations for stemming the tide of corporate home ownership in Los Angeles.

The report confirms what SAJE has been reporting for years: rental housing stock in the City of Los Angeles has become increasingly corporatized, with entity ownership expanding across rent-stabilized properties, especially in the smaller multifamily buildings that once anchored neighborhood affordability. The report also highlights a pattern often ignored or misunderstood in ownership narratives: corporate landlords aren’t always institutional firms. Individuals operating through multiple LLCs may present as small owners even though they control property portfolios worth tens or hundreds of millions. 

The report also challenges the wisdom of creating exemptions in tenant protection laws for small landlords. LAHD does not have the resources to investigate the growing number of complex financial structures that govern rental housing in order to identify fraudulent small-owner claims.

Notable Findings

LAHD looked at the change in annual counts of rent-stabilized (LARSO) units owned by organizational entities from 2018 to 2023. They found:

• Entity ownership of two- to four-unit RSO buildings grew 29%
• Entity ownership of five- to ten-unit RSO buildings grew 19%
• The 25 largest landlords now control roughly 10% of all LARSO units
• Several individual owners manage dozens of LLCs, concealing large, citywide portfolios, which complicates the simple binary of mom-and-pop v. corporate landlords

Why LLC Ownership Structure Matters

Many of the behaviors that policymakers associate with institutional landlords, such as rampant habitability violations, coercive buyouts, and rotating ownership designed to evade accountability, also are being carried out by individuals managing large portfolios organized into opaque networks of LLCs. And, unfortunately, LLCs allow these owners to operate like corporations while being regulated like small landlords. LLC structures:

• Shield owners from personal liability for habitability or harassment violations
• Allow large landlords to appear “small” or “mom-and-pop” by fragmenting properties across entities, thus obscuring true portfolio size, making regulating scale difficult to enforce and/or understand
• Enable violators to dissolve and re-form under new LLCs

LAHD is not resourced to reliably distinguish between a true mom-and-pop landlord and a multi-LLC asset manager. As a result, policy exemptions designed to protect small landlords instead create loopholes for much larger actors to the detriment of tenants living in their buildings. And, when landlords hide behind a web of LLCs, their identity is obscured, making it difficult for tenants to determine who is responsible for repairs and impeding the city’s ability to enforce legal protections designed to keep tenants safe. 

Recommendations for Further Study

LAHD concludes its report with five “options for further study.” SAJE believes that city council members should instruct LAHD to move forward with all five.

Option 1, Linking Ownership Growth to Displacement Risk: Analyzing these data sets can reveal clear patterns of illegal landlord behavior while identifying the entities driving housing inequality in the City of Los Angeles. The city already possesses the data needed to identify bad actors, but it must provide LAHD the mandate to analyze data towards maximizing its enforcement capacity. 

Option 2, Property Flipping: LAHD proposes studying how property flipping impacts tenants and neighborhoods using permit data and sales trends. Examining resales would allow the city to see how flipping contributes to gentrification, the loss of rent-stabilized housing, the skyrocketing cost of single family homes, and the consolidation of housing ownership into investor networks. 

Option 3, Acquiring Properties from Distressed Landlords: LAHD recommends studying the extent to which distressed small landlords and homeowners lose properties to large actors via short sales or foreclosures. According to LAHD’s data of 2024 Registered Foreclosure Properties, from January 2024 to January 2025, there were 2,009 foreclosures; 1,609 were single-family homes. Relevant data include the city’s Foreclosure Registry Program and First American foreclosure data. If the city does not track how many of these move into institutional portfolios, they cannot create policies to deter these practices, nor create alternative solutions to creating affordable housing in an unaffordable city (e.g., direct acquisition of distressed properties toward building CLTs or first-time home buyers).

Option 4, Use of LLCs by Small Landlords: As city council members increasingly see small landlords as vital to maintaining housing equity in Los Angeles, studying recent trends that landlords use to obscure ownership dynamics will help LAHD discourage fraud and protect tenants and small landlords alike. Doing so would help the city distinguish between genuine mom-and-pop landlords and property owners who masquerade as small or mom-and-pop landlords through LLC fragmentation. 

Option 5, Countywide Portfolio Mapping: Though this would be the most complex and resource intensive option, creating a database capable of tracking rental housing market dynamics across Los Angeles County’s myriad jurisdictional boundaries is foundational to enforcing every tenant protection policy. While the city may be limited in its capacity to punish illegal behavior beyond its boundaries, it must be able to track ownership across city boundaries in Los Angeles County. However, a countywide view allows us to better understand the true scale of ownership at the local level and will strengthen enforcement capacity based on real ownership dynamics rather than relying on landlords’ mailing address or single-entity registration.

By adopting all five LAHD research options, the city can develop the infrastructure required to distinguish genuine small landlords from large multi-entity operators, improve tracking of displacement, and hold landlords accountable at scale.