San Francisco Property Management

Most San Francisco rentals run on a calendar set by the Rent Board. Nearly every residential owner must report their units to the Housing Inventory by March 1 each year, vacant and owner-occupied units included. Reporting is free, but without it there is no rent increase license, and an annual or banked increase cannot take effect. The Rent Board fee for 2026–27 is $59 per unit, also due March 1, and requests for an exemption from the 2027 fee are due December 14, 2026.

Utopia handles those filings along with marketing, screening, leasing, rent collection, maintenance coordination, owner accounting and evictions. ^{[source][source]}

Units built before June 1979 are under the Rent Ordinance’s increase limit, shown in the table above. Newer units are exempt from that limit, but since January 20, 2020 they still need a just cause to end a tenancy. An owner who skips an annual increase can bank it and apply it later, without compounding and only with a current rent increase license.

With allowable increases this small, the rent set at the start of a tenancy carries the property for years, which is why new leases are priced with care. ^{[source][source]}

For no-fault evictions noticed between March 1, 2026 and February 28, 2027, such as an owner or relative move-in or a capital improvement, relocation is $8,245 per tenant, capped at $24,733 per unit, plus $5,497 for each tenant who is 60 or older or disabled, or for a household with minor children.

Buyouts follow their own sequence: a Pre-Buyout Disclosure Form to each tenant and a declaration filed with the Rent Board before talks begin, a signed agreement no sooner than 30 days after talks start, a 45-day window in which the tenant can cancel, and filing between day 46 and day 59 after signing. ^{[source][source]}

The building type shapes the work. The Sunset and Parkside are mostly 1925–1950 single-family homes on 25-foot lots that read as row houses, about a third of them rented. In the Inner Richmond, two- to four-unit buildings make up 44% of the housing. The Mission is 72% renter-occupied, largely in flats and small apartment buildings with a median build year of 1939. SoMa and Mission Bay are the opposite: most homes are in buildings of 20 or more units built in the 2000s, outside the increase limit. Citywide, about 63% of renter households live in buildings built before 1980. ^[source]

The Mandatory Soft Story Retrofit Program is close to finished: of 4,958 listed buildings, about 95% have completed their work and 228 are marked non-compliant (DataSF, October 2026). Anyone buying an older wood-frame building should check its status first.

San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance limits criminal-history screening by affordable housing providers. It does not reach ordinary market-rate rentals, which follow California’s fair housing rules instead. ^{[source][source]}

San Francisco rents have climbed fast. Apartment List put the city’s median asking rent at $3,878 in October 2026, up 25.7% from a year earlier, and its vacancy index fell to 2.6% in September 2026 from 3.8% the year before. Zillow’s rent index shows a similar rise of about 25%. In a market moving this quickly, last year’s comparable is the wrong benchmark for a new lease. ^[source]

• Marketing, tenant screening, leasing and rent collection
• 24/7 maintenance coordination and monthly owner statements
• An 8–10% base management fee, lower for larger portfolios
• No leasing, lease-renewal or start-up fees

Tell us when the building was built and what is due on the Rent Board calendar; we will set out our fee and the filings we take on before you sign.