Sex Offender Notice Required in California Rental Agreements

When was this law enacted.  Is it new or has it always been around.  Are there standard forms you use?

I knew about the requirement, but did not know about the update so thanks!  I did not know about the $25,000 fine.  Wow!  Also, when you say HUD Housing is an exception, do you mean Section 8 Housing?

Interesting that HUD is exempted from denying someone based on the sex offender status. So the government is saying you have to play by this rule -but we don't?  I have never even considered that scenario in Illinois - i wonder if there is a law here?

Robert, I don't think thats a bad thing to include it. The only thing, here in Michigan if a person takes a leak (for better use of words, LOL) in public and gets caught they can end up on the sex offenders list. There is no description of what the offender did to make the list, so the "leaker" is looked at the same way as the child molester.

Robert, that would be nice if Michigan would follow suit in posting the reason. I have a friend who paid a ton of legal to keep his son off the list for taking a leak along the side of a road in the middle of the night. Unfortunately the only car that came around the corner was he was standing behind the car was a police. Tough luck...

Some history - although the law is named after a girl in NJ - Megan Kafka; CA also had a similar situation with Polly Klaas of Petaluma where sex offender murdered her....her father founded the Klass Foundation and he has partnered with John Walsh and others to champion laws for registration of sex offenders including the national Amber Alert (Amber was a girl taken from her home in Tahoe).  The federal law does not require any notification to would-be tenants, only that the information be available.  The real estate industry went overboard for several years and brokerage firms put links to state sex offender registry websites on their firm sites and then quickly found that their agents were spending more time answering questions on the state websites  so those links have been mostly  removed unless they are state-mandated.

Unfortunately, if you MURDER a child, you are not required to register....so some pretty bad dudes are not listed and many who are required to register are now objecting to their not being able to live in a close proximity to schools.

Thanks for the update on this notification requirement for CA - hopefully, it will stop there and not migrate to other states.

We do require buyers and sellers sign this for everything. Fortunately, for real property sales, Property ID has it now built in to its documents.