Olympia’s rental housing registry faces tech snags, rising costs and landlord woes
The City of Olympia’s rental registry program has been running for more than a year, after its implementation in March 2024. Program Manager Sarah Wiliams and Susan McLaughlin, the director of Community Planning and Development, walked the City Council through a one-year update on the program Aug. 19 and highlighted a number of challenges it’s facing.
Some of those challenges include landlords not registering properly, not having a business license, or not renewing registration properly, as well as city staffing issues.
Program details
Williams said the established program goals are to ensure basic life, health and safety in rental housing, to preserve existing rental housing, and to share information and resources with landlords and tenants. She said the registry program emerged as a part of the ongoing efforts to provide tenant protections and prevent displacement in a way that focuses on cooperating with landlords.
To meet the goals of the program, landlords are required to register their rental properties annually with the city, obtain and maintain a state business license with the endorsement of the city through the Department of Revenue, and schedule inspections of a portion of the rental units once every five years with a qualified third party housing inspector.
The annual registration fee is $35 per unit. The business license fees include a one-time application fee with the Department of Revenue of $50 and then $35 annually to renew for the Olympia endorsement and state license renewal fee.
Williams said the city doesn’t currently have average inspection costs listed, but they will be added once more inspections have been completed.
Williams said the city is split into five zones for inspections. One zone, around downtown, is due for inspection each year over the five-year inspection cycle. She said inspections began in January, and as of July 9, 555 units have been registered.
Only 28 other units are due for inspection by the end of the year due to the number of units that have been registered, and so far 13 have been completed.
Williams said staff originally projected a total of 15,500 rental units in Olympia in 2023. She said staff estimated that 25% of these units would be registered by the end of 2024, and 50% would be registered by the end of 2025.
Now, staff say there’s a total of 18,423 rental units in Olympia, almost a 3,000-unit increase. Williams said of those new units, 52% of them have begun the registration process or have formally requested exemptions.
With the new numbers, about 28% of total units are completely registered. About 6% of units registered last year and have yet to renew their registration. About 12% of units submitted incomplete applications.
That still leaves almost half of rental units in Olympia that have not started the registration process. The renewal period is open from October to December.
Williams said by the end of program year three, they want to see at least half of rental units registered. She said by program year four, they want to see revenues meet or exceed expenses, and 70% of units registered by year five.
Challenges with the program
Williams said the rental registry program has operated for roughly 17 months now and has presented some challenges.
She said one of the main challenges is surrounding initial registration — specifically the city’s current registration software. Landlords currently register their units using the licensing module on the city’s permit portal SmartGov.
Williams said the software is not intuitive and is time consuming for landlords, and it allows incomplete applications to be submitted. She said a lot of staff time has been dedicated to working through those incomplete applications.
She said because the system is parcel based, landlords complete a separate, unique application for each property they’re renting. The software doesn’t have an auto-fill function.
“Many landlords have expressed frustration that they have to enter the same information multiple times, like their contact information for each application,” Williams said. “A significant amount of staff time has been spent providing customer service and remedying these application errors and omissions based on the software limitations.”
Williams said another big issue comes down to program requirements. The City of Olympia requires landlords to obtain a business license with the city’s endorsement. She said rental units are not validly registered unless the landlord has an active business license, unless they’re exempted.
She said some landlords don’t realize that they need both a state license and an Olympia endorsement, and many of them have contacted city staff for guidance on how to complete that application process. She said some landlords have been dissatisfied with the level of assistance that city staff can provide due to it being a separate application process through a separate entity, the state Department of Revenue.
Williams said another requirement that’s not explicitly in city code, but helps gather helpful information, is the rent roll. A rent roll is a spreadsheet that includes each unit’s address, square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and the monthly rental rate.
She said many landlords — more than expected — struggle with uploading that rent roll spreadsheet into the software and require lots of staff assistance to walk them through that process.
“These issues surrounding program requirements through business licensing and rent roll account for a majority of the over 2,100 rental units that are associated with incomplete applications,” Williams said.
Williams said the enforcement of the business license requirement has significantly increased since the rental registry program was established.
Another challenge of the program is registration renewal. Williams said the rental registration program is on a calendar year renewal cycle, January through December. The Department of Revenue renews business licenses based on the date of issuance. She said this has caused some confusion among landlords.
“Some landlords thought that when they renewed their business license, the city’s registration automatically renewed, while others renewed registration and not the business license,” Williams said.
She said a little over 1,000 units that were previously registered didn’t properly renew in the second year of the program. Several landlords submitted new registry applications rather than renewing their existing registration, which led to staff manually updating registrations and records to accurately reflect renewal rather than new registration.
Williams said staff recognize the need for more guidance to landlords, so they developed a clearer step-by-step guide for renewing those registrations that was sent out in March to property owners who had not yet renewed.
She said program costs have also exceeded original projections based on other cities with similar programs, such as Lakewood. Williams said this is common, but still concerning.
She said there are three issues contributing to that challenge, including not reaching the number of registrations originally projected at this point in the program’s history. Williams said registration is mostly on track for 2025 but fell short in the first year of operations.
Williams said staff focused more on educating the public on the program in its first year rather than enforcement of the requirements.
She said another contributing factor is the challenges related to initial registration and renewal, which has required excess staffing levels.
“The program has required two full-time administrative staff to intake and process applications, myself and our permit specialist, whereas one-and-a-half full-time staff were projected to be needed originally,” Williams said.
Williams said landlords also have expressed frustrations about not knowing the cost of inspections, as well as not having a full understanding of how the city selects inspectors.
The final contributing factor is an increase in staffing costs. The salary and benefits costs associated with staff needed to operate the program was projected in 2023, and since then, the city conducted a classification and compensation study that was implemented this year, increasing costs.
Moving forward
Williams said the plan of action to help meet program goals comes at no extra cost, nor code changes.
“We expect to help mitigate some of the previously mentioned challenges, and these are changes that we plan to implement over the next few months,” she said.
One of the changes is to establish a procedure to capture business license revenue to help sustain the program. Another change is to switch modules within the current software that’s being used to register properties from licensing to permitting. Williams said that would help improve customer experience through easier-to-navigate applications. She said that would in turn reduce staff time and allow them to collect data more effectively.
Williams said part of the switching modules allows staff to create separate applications, one for larger property owners and smaller businesses. The split would be one application for properties with one to four units, and another with five or more units.
She said the applications for one- to four-unit properties will have the rent roll data collection integrated into the application itself, which will eliminate the requirement to upload a separate spreadsheet. She said staff expect that this will help reduce staff time, because they found that landlords of single-family or lower-unit homes are typically the ones who have the most trouble with creating a rent roll.
“Larger properties often already maintain an active rent roll and just need to adjust to meet city requirements,” Williams said.
The city also will publish the average inspection costs, once more have been done. Williams said that will help support landlords and increase program transparency.
She said the council could consider some adjustments to the program that would require code amendments or additional funding. One adjustment would be to increase staffing for more program support.
Another change could be to invest in alternative software. Williams said this would improve the experience for landlords and help staff automate data collection and evaluation more effectively. But a different software program would cost at least $60,000 annually.
The council could also consider extending the registration renewal period so that landlords don’t need to renew annually. That would require a code amendment. Williams said it would reduce staff time dedicated to processing registrations. However, the city would lose annual comparison data, and she said it may exacerbate the issues of landlords not updating current contact and other necessary information.
The city also could eliminate the rent roll requirement and instead rely on external data sources for tracking trends. Williams said this would significantly reduce staff time related to data entry and management, and simplify the registration process for landlords.
At the same time, she said this would cut the city’s access to unit-level data and single-family rental data.
Lastly, the council could consider shifting to an affidavit model for inspections, in which landlords self certify that their rentals meet health and safety requirements, rather than proactive inspections, which would significantly reduce staff time managing the inspection program, as well as reduce the time burden and cost to landlords for rental housing inspections.
However, Williams said it leaves room for landlords to self certify without fully evaluating their units for health and safety concerns and relies more on tenant complaints.
Council member Dani Madrone recommended the council give the program more time to run and have staff work through the day-to-day process improvements. She said then staff could get to a point where they can recommend specific next steps on how to improve the program.
“This is a new thing for our city. It’s a new thing for our staff. It’s a new thing for us,” Madrone said. “And so we’re still learning a lot, and I just have full faith in these folks in front of us to work through some of these challenges.”
Mayor Dontae Payne said when the council originally voted to implement the registry program, it knew the program wouldn’t be perfect from the start, and that it would likely need to be revisited and revised.
He said the council is hearing a lot about how the program is driving landlords out of the city. However, he said there’s no evidence in the data of that actually occurring. He said he wants to know if this program can tell if landlords are actually leaving.
He said he does think the program is important because running multiple properties is a business.
“I do ultimately think that the intention behind this program — preserving our housing stock — has to be something that I think is most important for us and that we lead with, which is why I continue to be supportive of the program and want to see it succeed,” Payne said.
Council member Kelly Green said there’s some value in moving quickly with fixing the program.
“Every day that we don’t change it, you all are still struggling with the same challenges you just shared with us, and so I want to be conscientious about how can we tackle this in a way that also either relieves some pressure or gets the added resources, whatever that is, in a pretty timely manner,” Green said. “Because I hate to see us kick the can because of annual work plans and schedules and all the things, and in the meantime, you’re caught in the middle of having to take all the phone calls and continue to juggle with what’s already been hard.”
Staff will likely be coming back to council in a study session or to the Land Use and Environment Committee for a briefing before any policy or budgetary changes are made.
This story was originally published August 25, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
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