DC's TOPA overhaul is running without the advisers it requires
DC's TOPA overhaul is running without the advisers it requires
2026-09-09 · District of Columbia · Regulation
The statute that governs how District rental buildings become cooperatives now depends on a class of certified advisers who did not exist when it took effect. The Department of Housing and Community Development's published guidance on the RENTAL Act, issued in January 2026, states the position plainly: “Currently, there are no certified providers.”1
DHCD must promulgate regulations within 180 days of the Act. Practitioners advising on the District market have put the realistic timeline for a full rulemaking at two years or more, with interim guidance in between.
What the guidance establishes
A notice deadline that has passed. Owners of accommodations of five or more units claiming one of the new exemptions — new construction built in the last 15 years, DC Housing Authority properties, congregate housing, dormitories and assisted living, or a change of ownership interest within a partnership — had to tell tenants. In DHCD's words, “This notice must be sent to tenants, by any delivery methods, by March 31, 2026.” The agency published no form for it, supplying model language instead.
Filings move to email. DHCD now accepts TOPA filings at a dedicated address, with file-review letters at another. Posting and certified-mail service to tenants are still required.
Existing forms remain sufficient. Updated Notice of Transfer forms are described as available soon; until then, “the existing forms are sufficient to claim the new exemptions.”
The cooling-off period bites hardest where there are no providers. Tenant organisations in buildings of five or more units must wait 45 days before assigning purchase rights — unless counselled by a certified tenant support provider. With none certified, the waiting period is, for now, unavoidable.
Burden of proof sits with the owner. Any claimed exemption is the owner's to establish, and a rebuttable presumption of a sale arises where a required Notice of Transfer is not given or is materially misleading.
Why this reaches community associations
Two ways, and the second is easy to miss.
The pipeline into cooperative ownership is throttled. A tenant group that wants to become a housing cooperative is, in practice, a group of people with no capital, no corporate entity and no experience of governing a building, negotiating against a seller who has all three. The certified-provider regime exists to close that gap. Until providers are certified, tenant groups are doing what they were doing before, and the mandatory 45-day wait applies to all of them.
Existing associations are on the owner side of this more often than they realise. A condominium or cooperative association that owns rental units — unsold declarant units, a superintendent's unit, units acquired through assessment-lien foreclosure and rented out — may be a housing provider when it disposes of them. So may an investor-owner the board deals with routinely. The exemption-notice obligation and the presumption that arises from a missing Notice of Transfer are the owner's problem, not the tenant's.
The passed deadline is a live exposure
March 31, 2026 is behind us. An owner who was entitled to an exemption and did not send the notice has not forfeited the exemption by operation of the guidance — but the burden of proof is theirs, and the failure to notify is the first fact a tenant association will point at. For an association that owns and rents any unit in a building of five or more units, the question of whether that notice went out is worth answering now rather than at the point of a sale.
What DHCD is doing in the meantime
The agency has been running the machinery by hand: a mandatory in-person certification training for prospective tenant support providers in September 2026, and public workshops on TOPA and the RENTAL Act through September and October 2026. It also runs recurring free workshops on condominium and cooperative registration and conversion rules, and on filing structural defect claims — the latter directly relevant to any association pursuing a developer warranty claim.
Those workshops are, for the moment, the closest thing the District has to an authoritative source on how the new regime works, because the regulations are not written.
What to watch next
The first certified providers. That is the single event that switches on the counselled route around the 45-day wait, and it is the practical test of whether the certification design works.
The proposed rulemaking. Watch the DC Register for DHCD's proposed rules implementing the RENTAL Act — certification standards, the purchase-contract template, and email service of filings. Until they appear, guidance documents are doing the work of regulations, which is workable but not durable.
The statute itself, and what it changed, is covered in our report on the RENTAL Act.
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