DC Basic Business License Verification

D.C. law requires property owners to obtain a Basic Business License (BBL) from the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) in order to legally rent their property. A condition of obtaining a BBL is the property’s satisfactory inspection by the DCRA for basic life safety requirements, such as means of egress, electrical systems, smoke detectors, and so forth. Review the checklist used by the DCRA to conduct a housing inspection, and if anything in your rental property does not meet these standards, you should contact the landlord for repairs.

To check if your landlord has a BBL to legally rent the property, proceed with the following steps:

• Go to the D.C. Property Information Verification System site
• Enter the rental property’s address.
• Towards the bottom of the page, in the left-hand menu select "Basic Business Licenses" from the dropdown menu.

There are different types of BBLs for single-family homes, apartment buildings, and rooming houses. D.C. law defines a family as “one or more persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption, or not more than six persons who are not so related…living together as a single house-keeping unit, using certain rooms and housekeeping facilities in common.” Therefore, if your roommate group is seven or more, your landlord cannot legally rent a property with a single-family BBL to your group.

Confirming the required BBL has been issued is an important step to complete in the housing process. If your property manager is caught operating without the license, there could be an assessment of significant fines to the landlord and disruption to the circumstances under which you live. If your landlord is caught without a BBL and your property fails the subsequent safety inspection, you may be evicted through no fault of your own.