How to find your building's year built

The Los Angeles County Assessor keeps a property record for every parcel in the county, searchable by street address, and it carries two of the three facts a coverage question turns on: the year the building was built and the number of residential units on the parcel. That second one matters more than people expect, because a house is outside the city's ordinance only while it is the only home on its lot, and a back house or a permitted conversion changes the count.

What the assessor's year is, exactly, is the year recorded on the assessment roll rather than a transcription of the certificate itself. For almost every building the two agree and the assessor's is the one worth starting from. Where they disagree the certificate wins, and the section below is about that case.

One thing to know about any copy of this data, including the copy this site reads: an assessment roll is published once a year, so a record always describes the roll it came from rather than today. For a question about the rent caps that almost never matters, because a building finished since the last roll is decades past the city's cutoff and cannot change an RSO answer either way.

ZIMAS is the City of Los Angeles parcel viewer, at zimas.lacity.org. It takes a street address and returns the city's own record for the parcel: the zoning, the year built, and whether the parcel sits inside city limits.

That last one is why it is worth opening even when you already have the year. A Los Angeles mailing address is not the same thing as a City of Los Angeles address. The postal name covers unincorporated pockets the county governs directly, and it misses large parts of the San Fernando Valley that are inside the city under other names, Van Nuys and Canoga Park among them. The city's ordinances stop at the city boundary whatever the envelope says, so the boundary is the first gate and ZIMAS is where it is settled.

ZIMAS also carries the designations that decide other questions about a lot, which is why it comes up on this site outside the rent pages too.

A certificate of occupancy is the city's sign-off that a building may be lived in. It has a number and a date, it is issued once for the original building and again for work substantial enough to need it, and the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety holds the file.

It is worth asking for by name. The useful version of the question to a landlord is not whether the building is old but what the number and date on the certificate of occupancy are, because that is a specific thing that either exists in a city file or does not. A claim that a later certificate was issued, which is how a pre-cutoff building would come to sit outside the ordinance, is checkable in exactly the same way.

Remodeling does not produce a new certificate of occupancy on its own. A new kitchen, new windows, new plumbing and a gut renovation do not reset a building's age for the purposes of either rent cap. What would reset it is a new certificate, and a new certificate has a number.

The order is the certificate of occupancy, then the city's and county's parcel records, then everything else. A date in a listing, a date in a lease, a date a manager remembers and a date on a plaque by the door are not records and do not compete with one.

Five claims come up again and again when a landlord says a building is newer than it is, and each of them resolves against a document rather than against an argument. That the building is outside city limits, which ZIMAS answers. That it is a single-family home, which the assessor's unit count answers. That the certificate of occupancy is later than the building looks, which Building and Safety answers. That a substantial remodel made it new construction, which only a new certificate could have done. And that the unit is not registered with the LA Housing Department, which is not a test of coverage at all: registration is the owner's obligation, and an unregistered stabilized unit is a compliance failure by the owner rather than a defense.

Get the claim in writing before you go looking. A written claim that turns out to be contradicted by a city record is a more useful document than a verbal one, and asking which exemption is being relied on is a reasonable question to put in an email.

A year is not always enough, and there are three cases where it is not. The city's cutoff is a day rather than a year: October 1, 1978 falls three months before the end of its own year, so a building whose record reads that year sits on one side of the line or the other and the year on its own does not say which. For that one building in a thousand the certificate's actual date is the only thing that answers it.

The second is that being newer than the cutoff is usually the end of the RSO question and not always. A unit built after it that replaced a demolished rent stabilized unit can itself be covered, and nothing in a year built tells you whether that is what happened. The LA Housing Department is the only place that answers it for a specific address.

The third runs the other way. AB 1482's new construction exemption is an age test rather than a status a building keeps, and the line moves forward every January, so a building that was exempt when a tenancy started becomes covered later in the same tenancy. The year does not change; which side of the line it falls on does. The AB 1482 exemptions go through that one in full.