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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA plan in Fishers to cap the percentage of single-family rental houses in the community’s subdivisions and create a registry program for landlords is now moving through the city’s legislative process.
Members of the Fishers City Council on Monday night heard an introduction of an ordinance that would require landlords to register rental houses in Fishers and receive a permit that would remain valid until an owner decided to sell the property. The plan calls for limiting the percentage of single-family rental units per subdivision to 10%.
Fishers would become the first Indiana community to cap the percentage of single-family rental houses and townhomes per subdivision if the proposal receives approval from the council.
Fishers Chief of Staff Jordin Alexander, who worked to draft the ordinance, told council members that houses that are registered as rentals before Dec. 31 would be grandfathered in and would not subject to the 10% cap until they are sold to a new owner, who would be required to register the home.
An application would be denied if a subdivision has reached the 10% limit.
Landlords who do not register a house by Dec. 31 would be subject to a $250 fine. Operating a rental house without a permit would result in a $1,000 fine for the first violation and fines ranging from $5,000 and $7,500 for subsequent violations.
Alexander said exemptions would include people renting a house to family members or legal dependents, people renting out a house due to a job relocation, people who are on military deployments and people who are renting out a house because selling it would cause undue burden.
“We’ve certainly hit a hot button. People are very excited about this,” council member Todd Zimmerman said. “I’ve received an overwhelming amount of responses just unsolicited from people watching us during this process.”
Council member Bill Stuart asked if Fishers has the legal authority to cap rentals at 10%. Chris Greisl, an attorney for the city of Fishers, said he believes Fishers “is on solid ground” to set a cap.
“It’s the power of our home-rule statute, and so you don’t have anything expressly applied in Indiana law that says you can implement a cap, and conversely, you don’t have anything in Indiana law that prohibits you from placing a cap,” Greisl said.
Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness said the city will continue to take feedback over the next month from residents and other people interested in the ordinance.
“We don’t claim to have a monopoly on a good idea here,” Fadness said. “If there’s ways that we can improve it, we’ll certainly do that to try to affect the right outcome.”
Fishers has been studying the topic of single-family rental houses since 2022 when the city worked with Philadelphia-based Urban Partners to produce a housing survey. The survey resulted in a 117-page report on the city’s housing stock.
A trend of out-of-state investors buying single-family houses began in 2008 during the Great Recession and it has accelerated in Fishers since 2020.
Alexander presented statistics to the council last month that indicated that more than 2,500 houses in Fishers are single-family rentals. That represents 8% of all single-family houses in Fishers and 30% of all rental units in the city.
Of those 2,500-plus houses, 1,186 are owned by out-of-state landlords and 583 are owned by corporate investors. Nationally, 3.8% of all single-family rentals are owned by institutional investors.
Some homeowners’ associations have more restrictive rules regarding the percentage of rental homes. Those HOAs would be able to keep those guidelines in place if the city’s 10% cap and rental registration program go into effect.
If the single-family rental cap goes into effect in Fishers, Fishers would follow the lead of Columbia Heights, Minnesota, in suburban Minneapolis, which established a 10% limit of its own two years ago. While the Fishers proposal would be per subdivision, the Columbia Heights policy is on a per-block basis.
The Fishers Plan Commission will hold a public hearing at its meeting in March. The Fishers City Council will likely vote on the ordinance at either its March or April meeting.
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