Laura Kate Jones, a real estate agent in Los Angeles, is trying to find an apartment for a client whose Pacific Palisades home turned to rubble this week. The woman and her two children were left with no belongings but the clothes on their backs.
Ms. Jones has been scouring the West Los Angeles rental market to find a house that the family could rent for the next eight months, or longer. On Friday morning, she noticed something disturbing on the rents of at least three of the properties she had been tracking: 15 to 20 percent increases overnight.
The sudden surge in rental costs took Ms. Jones by surprise, but aligned with what she has noticed since wildfires started to tear through the Los Angeles area on Tuesday. Ms. Jones was touring a rental house in Beverly Hills with her client on Thursday when the listing agent raised the monthly cost by $3,000 — on the spot. Agents and landlords are aware that some displaced Angelenos might be willing to pay given the circumstance.
“People are so panicked and desperate to get into a house right now that they’re just throwing money into the wind,” Ms. Jones said. “People taking advantage of this. It’s horrendous.”
California’s state of emergency, declared by Governor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday, bans price gouging for a range of goods and services, including rental housing. That means any rent increase above 10 percent since the start of the state of emergency is illegal for the duration of the crisis.
But since Tuesday, some landlords and their agents have raised prices by more than what California law allows. These price increases come as hundreds, if not thousands, of displaced Los Angeles residents search for interim housing while they figure out their next steps, worsening an already tight rental housing market in the region.
A review of active rental listings on Zillow shows that rents for several properties in West Los Angeles have increased by more than 10 percent since Tuesday. These price jumps have ranged from 15 percent on a five-bedroom house near Century City, to an eye-popping 64 percent spike for a one-bedroom rental in Venice.
“There will be a desperation on the part of folks who will need housing, and an opportunity for property owners to take advantage of that,” said Rachel Bogardus Drew, senior research director at Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing nonprofit. Dr. Drew has studied how disasters affect rental housing markets.
Samira Tapia, a real estate agent in Los Angeles, has also been working with families devastated by the fires. Among her clients is a couple with a 1½-year-old baby, whose Altadena home is no longer standing. One rental house the family visited, in North Hollywood, surged by $800 a month on Wednesday, to $5,700.
When she pulled pricing data this week from the agents’ listing service, Ms. Tapia found that out of more than 400 listings in the Central Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley areas, about 100 had raised rent by more than 10 percent since Tuesday.
“Through working with these families, I’ve been seeing an unfathomable amount of illegal price gouging,” said Trey White, a real estate agent from Pacific Palisades whose house was spared, but is working with members of the community who lost theirs. “That’s taking advantage of displaced families who are already in a crisis and a state of emergency.”
Chelsea Kirk, director of policy and advocacy at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a small Los Angeles nonprofit that focuses on tenant and housing rights, said she anticipated that the fires would lead to greater strain on the Los Angeles housing market, especially as former homeowners opt to rent, either temporarily or permanently. Landlords in the city are already asking for “outrageous” rental prices this week, she said.
Rental price gouging in Los Angeles is not a new concern for Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, a community-based organization that holds weekly tenants rights clinics. In the past, during emergency orders that banned rent increases above 10 percent, tenants have flagged illegal jumps in rent to his organization, which has helped file complaints with authorities.
But it falls on tenants to report the rent increases and fight them, Mr. Gross said, complicating enforcement of the price-gouging prohibitions.
“We are bracing ourselves, because we’ve been through various things like this before,” Mr. Gross said.
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