A City Takes Control of Its Rental Market.

Use Case: Rent Licensing and Stabilization Products: Slate and BuildingBlocks City Size: ~30,000 residents, Coastal California

The Challenge

Monterey, California is a renter-majority city, with roughly 66% of its housing units occupied by renters. The city's leaders knew that protecting that population meant understanding the rental market first: who owned what, how much they were charging, and whether properties were being maintained to a safe standard. In November 2023, the City Council passed Ordinance No. 3671, establishing a mandatory Rental Inventory Program and setting a January 1, 2024 deadline for a public-facing registration portal to be live.

The ambition was significant: build a comprehensive, real-time picture of the city's roughly 8,000 rental units, create a path to enforce compliance, run a parallel rental assistance program for residents in need, and eventually protect the city's stock of deed-restricted affordable housing from quietly slipping out of compliance. The city moved fast, partnering with Tolemi to have the system up and running in time for the ordinance's effective date.

What Monterey Built

Monterey designed a rental program that operates on multiple levels simultaneously, connecting registration and compliance, tenant assistance, and long-term affordable housing preservation through a single data platform.

The registration system, built in Slate, allows property owners across the spectrum from individual landlords to large management companies to register units online, submit exemptions, pay fees, and receive automated communications. City staff manage the full review process in the same platform, approving registrations, assigning follow-up tasks, and tracking compliance in real time. The rental assistance program runs alongside it: residents apply through the same system, staff review applications, flag suspected fraud, verify income eligibility, and manage disbursements without switching between tools or spreadsheets.

BuildingBlocks gives Monterey's leadership the analytical layer that makes the program strategically useful rather than just operational. Staff can map registered properties against the city's full suspected rental inventory, break down rent levels by unit size and neighborhood, track vacancy rates, and identify corporate and LLC ownership patterns across the city. When staff wanted to understand which landlords were charging utility surcharges beyond what the market supported, they could answer that question directly from the platform. When the question was which neighborhoods had the highest concentration of out-of-town landlords, same answer.

As the program matured, Monterey expanded it in two meaningful directions. The city added AB 1482 rent increase tracking to monitor whether landlords were staying within California's statewide rent cap. It also built out a first-of-its-kind affordable housing compliance module in Slate, consolidating what had previously been deed restriction agreements, loan records, and affordability period data scattered across scanned documents and shared drives into a single trackable system. Staff now receive automatic alerts when units are approaching the end of their affordability periods, giving the city a fighting chance to intervene before affordable units are lost.

What It's Achieved

In its first year, the program registered over 5,400 rental units, reaching approximately a 67% compliance rate against an estimated universe of 8,000. The city collected over $210,000 in registration fees and, for the first time, had comprehensive contact information for rental property owners citywide, a resource that proved immediately valuable for emergency communications. Staff identified 168 vacant units and 300 properties owned by landlords with 10 or more units, giving the program team a clear picture of where to focus enforcement attention.

In January 2025, Monterey's housing staff presented a full rental market analysis to City Council covering rent levels, owner concentration, vacancy patterns, and fee surcharge data, drawn entirely from the platform they had built. It was the kind of evidence-based policy conversation the city hadn't previously had the data to support.

Why Monterey's Approach Stands Out

Monterey didn't just build a compliance registry. The city built a policy infrastructure designed to protect renters on multiple fronts at once: making sure landlords are registered and accountable, getting rental assistance to residents who need it, and preserving the affordable units that took years of public investment to create. The fact that all of it runs through a connected data system means that staff can see the full picture of the rental market, act on what they find, and make the case to leadership with evidence rather than estimates.

For a city of 30,000 people taking on one of California's most complex housing challenges, that's a meaningful accomplishment.

[PLACEHOLDER: Client quote, reach out to Anastacia or Jacob for a testimonial]