If you own a rowhouse that was carved into three rental units sometime in the 1980s, or a twelve-unit walk-up your family has held since the Ford administration, you have probably heard that Washington finally fixed the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. The Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants, and Landlords Act took effect on December 31, 2025, and the coverage since then has been full of words like relief and modernization.
Read the actual bill text and a different picture shows up. The RENTAL Act didn't shorten TOPA's clock for most of the buildings that make up Washington's rental housing stock. It built two new off-ramps: one for construction younger than 15 years, one for small buildings held by an individual owner who doesn't own anything else in the District. If your property doesn't fit either lane, you are working through nearly the same process, on nearly the same calendar, that sellers worked through before anyone called it reformed.
What the RENTAL Act Actually Exempts
Council Chairman Phil Mendelson introduced the RENTAL Act at Mayor Muriel Bowser's request in March 2025. Housing Committee Chairman Robert White introduced amendments that summer, and the version they produced passed the Council on September 17, 2025, by a vote of 10 to 3. After that vote, the title insurance industry raised concerns about how the small-building exemption was worded, which sent the bill back for a third reading and additional changes before it reached the mayor's desk. Ward 1's Brianne Nadeau had pushed her own narrower alternative alongside it throughout the process. Bowser signed the final version on November 13, 2025, Congress let its review period lapse without acting, and the law took effect at the close of that year.
Two carve-outs matter to anyone selling occupied rental property in the District today.
The first is a 15-year exemption for newer construction. Any building that received its certificate of occupancy within the 15 years before the date of sale is no longer required to issue a full Offer of Sale to tenants. This exemption is retroactive, so a building that got its CO ten years before the law took effect already qualifies. Owners in this category still have to send tenants a Notice of Transfer, a simpler filing that informs them the sale is happening without conferring any purchase rights, but they skip the negotiation and financing gauntlet entirely.
The second carve-out covers buildings with two to four units, and only if the owner is an individual, not a corporation, and doesn't own another property in the District. That last condition matters more than it sounds. A person who owns their triplex and nothing else in DC is exempt. The same person who owns that triplex plus a condo they rent out three blocks away is not.
Single-family homes have been exempt from TOPA since 2018, with an exception preserved for elderly or disabled tenants. That exemption predates the RENTAL Act and hasn't changed.
What's Still Running the Old Calendar
Everything else in Washington's rental housing stock is still fully subject to TOPA, and that "everything else" describes most of it. Buildings with five or more units don't qualify for the small-building exemption regardless of ownership. Two-to-four-unit buildings held in an LLC, or owned by someone with more than one DC property, don't qualify either. And any building older than 15 years at the time of sale, which covers the overwhelming majority of DC's prewar rowhouse conversions and mid-century apartment stock, gets no relief from the new-construction carve-out.
For all of these sellers, the process still starts with a full Offer of Sale, and the timeline that follows is the one that made TOPA infamous among DC investors in the first place.
The Timeline That Reform Didn't Touch
The mechanics haven't moved much from what existed before December 2025:
- After receiving an Offer of Sale, tenants have 45 days to form a tenant association and file a Statement of Interest, or 30 days if an association already exists in the building.
- If they organize, the tenants and owner then have 120 days to negotiate purchase terms.
- If tenants decide to proceed, securing financing typically takes another 120 to 240 days, depending on the lender.
Stack those windows together and the process can run past a year from the first notice to closing, according to a transactional overview from the law firm Nixon Peabody. That estimate lines up with what Councilmember Nadeau's office cited while pushing its own TOPA bill: in practice, the process can delay a sale by up to 420 days. A separate analysis circulated during the legislative debate focused on larger buildings specifically, finding that for properties with more than 25 units, TOPA extends the average sale timeline by 5.3 months and can make deals close to a full year longer than comparable transactions in Maryland or Virginia, neither of which has anything resembling TOPA.
The RENTAL Act actually added one new delay of its own. Tenant associations now face a mandatory 45-day cooling-off period after receiving an Offer of Sale before they're allowed to assign their purchase rights to a third-party buyer. The provision is meant to slow down snap assignments to opportunistic flippers, but it means even a tenant group with zero interest in buying still has to sit for a month and a half before handing the deal to someone else.
Reform Added Paperwork Too
Alongside the exemptions, the RENTAL Act layered in new administrative requirements that apply to every TOPA transaction, exempt or not. Any purchase contract negotiated under TOPA now has to be filed with the DC Department of Housing and Community Development within 30 days of signing, or it becomes unenforceable. DHCD is also standing up a certification process for "Qualified Purchasers," the developers and organizations approved to acquire TOPA properties, and building a public, searchable database of TOPA filings.
The part sellers should sit with longest is DHCD's own timeline for finishing the job. According to a client alert from Ballard Spahr, the agency told the firm in a meeting in early January 2026 that promulgating the regulations needed to interpret the RENTAL Act's ambiguous provisions could take at least two years from that point. Reform is law, but the fine print that determines how some of it gets applied in practice is still being written, and won't be finished until sometime in 2028 at the earliest.
What This Means If You're Selling Occupied Rental Property in DC
If your building was completed within the past 15 years, or you individually own a two-to-four-unit property and nothing else in the District, you're now closer to a conventional sale timeline. You still owe tenants a Notice of Transfer, but you're not staring down months of negotiation and financing contingencies you don't control.
If your building falls outside those lines, and for most owners of older DC rowhouses and small apartment buildings it does, the honest planning assumption is still a process that can stretch past a year once a tenant association organizes and decides to negotiate. That has direct pricing consequences. Carrying costs, financing terms on any bridge or acquisition loan a buyer needs, and the marketing timeline for the listing all need to account for a TOPA process that hasn't gotten meaningfully shorter, only better documented.
A few things are worth confirming before you list. Know your building's certificate of occupancy date and check whether it falls inside the 15-year window. Know how title to the property is actually held, since the individual-owner exemption depends on ownership structure, not just unit count. And bring in a title company and an attorney with direct TOPA experience before you sign a listing agreement, not after an offer comes in, since the filing deadlines and cooling-off periods built into the new law leave little room to catch mistakes after the fact.
FAQ
Does the 15-year new construction exemption apply to buildings I already own, or only future construction? It applies retroactively. A building that received its certificate of occupancy ten years before the law's effective date already qualifies, even though the exemption itself only took effect on December 31, 2025.
I'm selling a single-family home with a tenant. Does TOPA still apply? Generally no. Single-family homes have been exempt from TOPA since 2018, with an exception preserved for tenants who are elderly or have disabilities. The RENTAL Act didn't change this.
If my tenants decline to buy, does the city ever step in? The District Opportunity to Purchase Act allows the DC government to purchase a property when tenants decline to exercise their TOPA rights, usually to preserve affordable housing. Historically, the city has used this option infrequently.
When will the remaining ambiguities in the RENTAL Act be resolved? DHCD told legal counsel in early January 2026 that finalizing interpretive regulations could take at least two years from that point, so some open questions around the law's application likely won't be settled until 2028 at the earliest.
TOPA is one of the few pieces of DC transaction mechanics with no equivalent across the river or up in Montgomery County, which makes it easy to misjudge if you're comparing notes with someone who last sold rental property in Arlington or Bethesda. If you're weighing when to list a tenant-occupied property in the District, or trying to figure out which side of the new exemption lines your building falls on, Matthew Windsor can walk through the specifics with you. Schedule a complimentary consultation to talk through your timeline before you put a sign in the yard.
