West Palm landlords required to give 60-day notice before 5% rent hikes
West Palm Beach is joining the list of cities that are trying to offer some protection to renters dealing with South Florida’s blistering housing market.
Landlords in the city will now be required to give tenants 60 days notice if they plan to raise the rent by 5% or more.
Renters would also get 60 days of notice before being forced into a month-to-month residential tenancy.
Tenants who aren’t afforded such notice will able to use that fact in any legal proceeding against the landlord.
Read more: Florida rental rates are slowing from their meteoric rise in some areas. Here’s where they’re not.
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The new requirement was approved by the City Commission on Monday evening as West Palm Beach joins Lake Worth Beach, Miami Beach and Miami-Dade County, which have approved similar rules.
State law already offers some protections for tenants. Landlords must provide a tenant with 60 days’ written notice before terminating a tenant’s lease.
In week-to-week rental situations with no lease, state law requires a seven-day notice, a 15-day notice for month-to-month rentals with no lease and a 30-day notice for tenants renting quarter to quarter with no lease.
A staff overview provided for West Palm Beach City Commission members noted that state law does not prohibit the city from extending notice time periods. And the overview noted that the law has no “specific notification requirements for landlords seeking to increase rental rates.”
Renters in South Florida are experiencing exploding rental costs
A review of 107 major real estate markets by Florida Atlantic University in April showed that Fort Myers had the biggest surge in rental rates, which were up 32.4% compared to the same time in 2021.
Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties weren’t far behind, with tenants seeing rent rise by 31.7%.
A 32 percentage point increase in a rental rate of $2,846, which was the average rent in Southeast Florida in April, would put the new rate at $3,757. That’s just the kind of jolt many renters in South Florida are experiencing. And renters say the big rent hikes are often made worse by getting little to no warning.
When The Palm Beach Post reached out to West Palm Beach residents through a Facebook community engagement page, tales of rental woes came pouring in.
One man said he took action after learning his rent was increasing from $1,600 to $2,500 per month. “We moved to a different state,” Eugene Bergman wrote. “Pay less for a bigger place outside Boulder, Colorado.”
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Chris Hoban, a 68-year-old on a fixed income, said it was only after she inquired about how much her rent would change did she learn that it would go up by $650 per month. Later, she said, she was told it would be going up by $1,000 per month.
Pattie Bremekamp said she lived in Rosemary Square in West Palm Beach in 2020 and “loved it.”
Rent for what she described as a spacious 1-bedroom unit was $1,700 per month.
“I moved out of state during the pandemic and have returned to find I cannot afford downtown,” she said. “I have really searched, and there is nothing affordable.”
Bremekamp said she is paying $2,300 per month for a place in Palm Beach Gardens, “which is really stretching it uncomfortably.”
Many, many others relayed similar struggles.
One woman, who did not want her name used, said her rent increased from $2,550 per month to $3,950 per month. “They said if we didn’t renew, it would be going on the market for $4,500,” she wrote. “We’ve been looking to buy, unsuccessfully, so we had to renew unfortunately for now.”
Also rising: Insurance, property taxes and maintenance
The boom in rental rates have been blamed on a variety of factors — an overheated national economy, a pandemic-driven surge of new residents from higher-cost places who can pay higher rents than was typical in South Florida and higher landlord costs for everything from maintenance, fuel and taxes being passed onto tenants.
“It is a horrible situation for all involved,” Ken Golding wrote. “Taxes will be going up on all non-homesteaded properties. Same with insurance. I sold some rentals because (I) could hardly keep up with taxes, mortgage insurance and maintenance.”
Golding added: “When you run the numbers on (the) price of property in today’s market, the rents have to be higher. Add the crazy demand and you do what you do. Regulations prevent us from easily adding more housing.”
West Palm Beach, like other cities in Palm Beach County, is trying to encourage developers to build more affordable housing. The city offers tax and other incentives to developers who promise to hold rents in some units below market rates.
The city fears early- to mid-career workers will be forced to leave for other locations, taking with them their creativity and vitality — and ultimately damaging the tax base.
Despite the city’s efforts — Mayor Keith James has set, hit and raised again targets for new affordable housing units — the supply for such units has not come close to matching the spiraling demand for them.
And that, real estate broker Jesse Bailey wrote, is the problem in a nutshell.
“I am a real estate broker specializing in small to midsized apartment building investment sales,” Bailey wrote. “I’m also an advocate for more supply of affordable housing. I am commonly seeing rent increases for Class B-/C multifamily buildings of 30-50% above in-place rents once a sale takes place and a new owner marks rents to market.”
Bailey added: “The lack of affordable housing is a problem that is decades in the making, largely the result of a massive undersupply of the type of small-format multifamily buildings once common in neighborhoods until zoning effectively prohibited them.”
The new rule won’t fix the rental problem, but it’s a start
West Palm Beach’s new 60-day notice rule won’t keep rents from continuing to soar, but it would give tenants some warning before the financial boom is lowered.
City commissioners, hearing from constituents who are frustrated and angry about the housing market, counted that as a victory. “We all have been receiving heartbreaking calls from residents and wishing that there was more that we could do as a city,” Commissioner Christy Fox said.
Commissioner Cathleen Ward, who, at 32, is the youngest commissioner, urged the city to go beyond traditional means to let residents know about the 60-day notice. She suggested the city put videos on Instagram and TikTok to reach younger tenants who might miss a city press release.
“This is good news,” Ward said. “I want to push out good news as fast as possible. We’re acting, and it’s fantastic.”
Wayne Washington covers West Palm Beach, Riviera Beach and race relations. E-mail tips to [email protected].
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