Orange, NJ — landlord and rental rules

The City of Orange Township caps an annual increase at 5% a year, or 4% where the tenant supplies their own heat, and at 2% for a qualified senior tenant. Chapter 166 exempts housing of three units or fewer, and four-family houses where the owner occupies one of the units.

Housing of three units or fewer is exempt, and so is a four-family where the owner occupies a unit — so the chapter starts at an absentee-owned four-family.

The municipality's legal name is the City of Orange Township, which is why it appears under three different names across the public records this report draws on — and why it must not be confused with East Orange, West Orange or South Orange Village, each of which has its own regime. An exemption is not automatic: it requires an application to the Office of Rent Leveling and an inspection, and when it expires the exempted rent becomes the revised base rent.

Annual cap

5%

Vacancy decontrol

Yes — rent resets on vacancy

Unit counts

4+ units

Owner-occupied exemption

Yes

New Jersey has no statewide rent control. Roughly 100 municipalities impose their own, with caps, exemptions and vacancy rules that differ town by town.

This municipality has not been researched. Read the municipal code — or call the clerk — before assuming rents can be reset on purchase or turnover.

On the voluntary, uncoerced vacation of a unit the landlord may fix the new rent in accordance with the HUD Fair Market Rent guidelines in effect for the year in which the increase occurs.

This is the most unusual decontrol in the tranche and it has a hard ceiling that is public: HUD publishes the Fair Market Rent for this county every year, and it is a 40th-percentile gross rent including a utility allowance — meaningfully below what a renovated unit asks in a healthy submarket. A turnover here is not a reset to market. The conditions are strict: a non-coercion certification signed by the vacating tenant within 30 days, a filing certifying the prior rent, the FMR maximum and the new lease, a current certificate of habitability annexed, and a new tenant who is not a family member of the previous one. Every document must reach the Office of Rent Leveling before the unit is let at the decontrolled rate, or the application is rejected in its entirety.

Vacancy decontrol

Yes — rent resets on vacancy

The New Jersey Anti-Eviction Act requires good cause for every residential eviction statewide, with no small-landlord exemption. A month-to-month tenant cannot be removed simply by ending the term.

Practical effect for a buyer: an occupied unit conveys with its tenant, and a business plan that depends on delivering the building vacant needs a lawful cause for each unit before it is a plan.

A sworn rent roll of every rental unit and its rent is filed with the Office of Rent Leveling by 1 March each year, and no increase may be demanded without it. A separate multi-family registration is filed with Code Enforcement each 1 September, at $100, and satisfies the statewide registration under N.J.S.A. 46:8-27 as well.

Two deadlines, two departments, and one of them gates every rent increase for the year. The annual licence/registration is $100 for a multifamily property and $50 for a single-family rental; compliance also satisfies the state landlord registration and Chapter 166 registration. Half the yearly registration fee is chargeable to the tenant. Separate rent-board application fees remain in Chapter 88 and are not represented as this annual charge.

Pre-1978 one- and two-family rentals must be inspected for lead-based paint hazards at tenant turnover or every three years, whichever comes first. The certificate is valid for two years.

Budget the inspection and any remediation into the turnover cost of every pre-1978 unit, not into a one-off line at closing.

Construction

Built before 1978

In effect since 2022-07-22.