On this page
Written for owners selling with tenants in place
This guide is for owners of apartment buildings in Los Angeles County who plan to sell with the tenants still at home, and for the heirs, trustees and partners who end up making that call. It is written landlord to landlord. It assumes you know your building and your tenants, and it spends its time on what a sale adds to running them: notice for each entry, the records a buyer tests, and the rules on what you may say to a tenant, and when.
The pages run in the order a sale does. Access comes first, in showings and entry and in buyer inspections. The records come next, in estoppel certificates and in rent increases before a sale. Some tenancies need extra steps, and they have their own pages on buyouts, Section 8 tenants and a tenant's right to buy. The handoff itself is in deposits and leases at closing.
State law applies across the county. The local rules on these pages are mostly the City of Los Angeles's, meaning the RSO, LAHD's filings and the City's anti-harassment ordinance, so outside the City, check whether your own city or the County has its own version before you rely on a City rule.
Where each rule comes from
Each rule on these pages carries a link to where it is written down, whether that is a statute, a court opinion or an agency's own page, such as LAHD, HACLA or LACDA. The notes behind the site list every claim separately, next to the address of the source it came from, so any claim can be traced back. A law firm's summary or a news story can describe how something works in practice, or report what a government body has done, but it is never the only support for what the law requires. Where research could not confirm something, the page does not say it.
Numbers that change carry the period they apply to. The RSO's allowable increase appears as the figure for July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027, because LAHD sets it for each July-to-June year. You will find no prices, cap rates or market averages here. None of them can be checked against a public source, and a figure nobody can check has no business next to a statute.
When a law changes
When a statute or ordinance a page relies on is amended, that page is read again against the new text. Each page shows the date its content last changed, and that date moves only when what the page says moves, so a corrected typo leaves it alone. Where a proposal is still in motion, such as the County's July 2026 motion on a local purchase ordinance, the page says where it stood when it was checked and tells you to confirm the current status before you rely on it.
The agent who writes it
The guide is written by Shaya Lowenstein, a Multifamily Real Estate Advisor who holds California Department of Real Estate license #01942326. Anyone can confirm that license on the DRE's public lookup. His responsible broker is Lyon Stahl Investment Real Estate, and his office is at 830 S Pacific Coast Hwy, Suite D-200, El Segundo.
He started in real estate in 2011 and has worked on the brokerage side, in operations and in development since then. His focus is apartment buildings and land in Southern California, including value-add and repositioning projects, analysis of land use and zoning, and long-range planning of portfolios for owners, investors and developers.
Where his part starts and stops
Shaya is a listing agent who sells buildings for their owners, on the open market or quietly to buyers he finds. With an occupied building, that work runs through the rent roll, the showing schedule and the tenant records a buyer will ask to see. He does not buy buildings, so calling him is never the start of an offer from him.
He is not an attorney, a CPA or a tax advisor, and nothing here is legal or tax advice. Notices to tenants, buyout agreements, a disputed estoppel and anything that could end a tenancy belong with a landlord-tenant attorney, and the tax side of a sale belongs with a CPA. Each page says so at the point where its subject reaches one of those questions.