For landlords with one to four units, in eight states. Free, every other week.
Your state’s new landlord laws, with start dates and the official text, plus one old rule landlords still get wrong.
What a Card carries
One Card per signed law: what changed, who it reaches and who is outside it, what switches it on, the price tag, the day it starts, and what to find or count before then, with the text the state signed linked under it. A law that asks little of an owner of one to four units gets one line under the Cards. We read the whole bill so the Card is all you read. We quote the statute and do not argue with it.
California · AB 2025
Edited and AI-made photos in rental ads
Starts Jan 1, 2027
- What changed
- A rental ad with a digitally altered image must carry “a disclosure that the image has been altered”, on or next to it, plus the original or a link, a URL or a QR code to a public page showing it (Civ. Code 1940.11(b)). Altered means AI-generated, or edited to add, remove or change something.
- Who it reaches
- A person who puts the image in the ad; no unit count, owner type or lease length is named. Outside it: “only lighting, sharpening, white balance, color correction, angle, straightening, cropping, exposure, or other common photo editing adjustments” ((a)(2)(B)).
- The trigger
- The ad goes up with the image in it, from Jan 1.
- The price tag
- None of its own. For a licensed agent or broker, a violation counts against the license (Bus. & Prof. Code 10185: a willful one is a misdemeanor, fine up to $10,000).
- Starts
- Jan 1, 2027 signed Sep 27, 2026, no date clause (Cal. Const. art. IV, sec. 8(c)(1)).
- Before it starts
- Dec 31: find every listing photo that was staged, edited or generated, and note where a label and a link to the original would sit.
- The signed text
- AB 2025 (Stats. 2026, ch. 572), new Civ. Code 1940.11; chaptered text (the signed bill, numbered in the 2026 statutes), read Nov 3, 2026. No code page yet.
AB 2025 is a bill number, not a year: signed in 2026, it starts in 2027.
The old rule
Each issue also carries one rule that is already law and still costs owners, quoted from the statute, usually with a court case told in roles. In the sample issue: a $19,500 deposit, no itemized statement inside 21 days, a $61,801.67 judgment. Your state’s rule gets the full story, with the quote and the case where there is one; the other seven states get a line each.
The dates
Every other week, and a wave issue before Jan 1 and before Jul 1, with every law starting that day on its own Card or line. Near a wave the issue opens with the count: days left, laws starting. When nothing was signed in your state, the issue says so, names what we checked and through what date, and carries the old rule anyway.
Who it is not for
An owner with a rental outside these eight states, for now. Anyone with a question about their own lease or tenant: we are not lawyers, and we do not answer those. And anyone whose rules come from the city: we cover state law only, and say so rather than guess.
