The smell of sewage was pungent in Teresa Ralls’ Oklahoma City apartment. In the two weeks that Ralls had lived at Solare, the sewage system had backed up twice, spitting dirty water out from the washer line. She complained the first time it happened and was told it was fixed, but the proble m persisted. Ralls informed the property manager, but said she was dismissed. Ralls had only spent 10 days in the apartment and hadn’t begun unpacking her things. The only thing she did unpack were standing fans, which she scattered throughout the apartment to alleviate some of the sewage stench. “I don’t know if I want to unpack everything if I don’t want to stay,” she said. She went on to describe the apartment complex as purposefully deceptive. After the sewage incidents, Ralls decided to research who owned the property she was renting. That’s a process that can be difficult in Oklahoma, due to House Bill 2620, passed in 2014, which prohibits municipalities from implementing mandatory property registration programs. Tenants Left In Squalor Ralls research led her to Eucalyptus Real Estate, owned by Oklahoma City-based real estate developer Lew McGinnis. Ralls was astonished to find media coverage of employees and residents’ complaints in Kansas, multiple complaints to the Better Business Bureau and stories of the city of Topeka stepping in to clean up overflowing dumpsters at his properties. Ralls is not the only tenant who’s encountered a landlord with a problematic history. For months, tenants living in Vesta Realty-owned properties have flooded Oklahoma television news station KFOR-TV with complaints about a lack of hot water, nonworking electricity and going through the winter months without heat. Kim Walsh, a tenant at one Vesta property, Drexel Flats apartments in Oklahoma City, said her roof was leaking, water was getting shut off and that trash wasn’t being emptied. Like Ralls, once Walsh began researching who owned the property, she was surprised to find that Vesta Realty was engaged in multiple lawsuits, and that there was media coverage of other tenants facing similar problems. More recently, a Vesta Realty-owned property in Stillwater, Remington Ranch, was declared a public nuisance by the city. “I would hope that the city would at least stand up for us,” Walsh said. Ralls said that if she had known the property owner’s history, she would not have moved into the apartment. Tenant advocates said that if municipalities were allowed to keep a rental registry, the research burden would be lifted from renters and cities could hold bad landlords accountable. Rental Registries Rental registries are on the rise. As more people struggle to afford housing and tenant populations grow, cities across the United States are turning to registries to monitor their rental markets. The National League of Cities provides model legislation on rental registries. The organization defines it as a key tool for cities to understand their housing landscape and use that information to promote healthy and safe housing via proactive inspections for housing quality. “When I first stumbled across this a few years ago, from very much the same point, it was just like, ‘what do you mean we don’t have these,’ ‘wait what do you mean we don’t have these because the legislature said we couldn’t,’” said Katie Dilks, executive director of Oklahoma Access to Justice. “When you look at peer states like Arkansas or Kansas or Texas, none of them have preemption laws like this, and most of them, especially in their larger cities, regularly maintain rental registries just like you would any other common service.” Last fall, CityHealth reported that 17 of the nation’s 75 largest cities had some form of rental registry. The organization developed an action guide on how that can be helpful to tenants, landlords and cities. By shifting from a complaint-based to a proactive inspection process, it is no longer the tenant’s full responsibility to report code violations, according to CityHealth. That would assist renters who might not understand the code-violation process or fear retaliation from a landlord. The Healthy Rental Housing policies help landlords by establishing a clear standard of practice for all landlords so all are held equally accountable for maintaining their rental properties, according to CityHealth. Finally, CityHealth reported it can also help municipalities by being a revenue-neutral initiative; the registration, renewal, inspection and code violation fees can cover the cost of administering the program. Dilks recalled an interim study a few years back that likened a rental registry to the health and safety standards of a restaurant. “A republican member analogized it to restaurants,” Dilks said. “If you want to have a restaurant, you have to register it with the state and you have to go through basic health and safety checks.” How It Can Help Oakland, California, launched a rent registry in 2023, and, according to Stateline reporting, the registry has filled long-standing gaps in data on who owns what and where. The city’s rental registry requires landlords to annually report rent, tenancy and ownership information. Landlords who fail to register risk losing the right to raise rent or proceed with evictions. “Knowing very clearly who owns your property when you are a renter is really critical in order to be able to hold those owners accountable for the health and safety standards that we have in the law,” Dilks said. When rental properties change hands as frequently as they do, especially with large commercial transactions, you should get an update about who owns the property, and when something goes wrong and a tenant needs to follow the steps that are laid out in the law for repair requests it is often impossible to do that because you don’t know who owns your property, Dilks said. “Particularly if things escalate to a level where a lawsuit needs to be filed or action needs to be taken by a city for code enforcement that’s where you’re moving beyond what maybe the property management company could handle and you do need to be addressing the owner,” Dilks said. Attempts To Fix In 2025, Sen. Julia Kirt, D-Oklahoma City, proposed Senate Bill 166, which, though never heard, would have removed the prohibition and updated the statutory language. Kirt said that was in response to a constituent who was concerned about squatters in an abandoned property. If the property was registered, the city could contact the owners and work out a plan, but it could not track down the property’s owner. “They don’t have the capacity to handle it,” Kirt said. She said cities could use rental registries not only to hold bad landlords accountable but also to locate the owners of abandoned properties. The prohibition bill was meant to avoid a financial burden on property owners, but the final version was written much more broadly to prohibit registries even if there is no cost associated with it, Dilks said. “This was from 2014, and Oklahoma has 12-year term limits, and it’s now 2026, which means no one is left in the legislature who was there at the time this was passed, so maybe fresh eyes could take a look at it,” Dilks said. Tenants Breaking Leases Teresa Ralls moved out. “Moving is expensive,” she said. Ralls is now staying with a friend, which she said is not ideal, but she hopes to find something soon. Walsh left her apartment, too. “I broke my lease because I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. Jake Ramsey covers evictions, housing and homelessness. Contact him at (405) 370-3798 or [email protected]. The post Bad Landlords, No Registry: How a 2014 Oklahoma Law Protects Problem Property Owners appeared first on Oklahoma Watch. ...read more read less