Four California laws land on the disclosure package this year

Legislative roundups are usually written for agents, which means they explain what the law prohibits and stop. A coordinator needs the next sentence: what now has to be collected, attached, linked or recorded, and at what point in the file.

Altered photographs need a route back to the original

AB 723 adds section 10140.8 to the Business and Professions Code. Where a broker, salesperson or somebody acting on their behalf uses a digitally altered image in an advertisement or promotional material for the sale of real property, the material must carry a statement that the image has been altered, together with a link, URL or QR code leading to the original unaltered image. The statement has to be conspicuous and adjacent to the image, and it must say that the unaltered version can be reached through the link. Where the advertisement sits on a website the broker controls, they may instead include the unaltered image itself.

The definition is broad and deliberately covers both photo editing software and artificial intelligence. It reaches adding, removing or changing fixtures, furniture, appliances, flooring, walls, paint, hardscape, landscape, facade, floor plans, and elements outside the property or visible from it, including streetlights, utility poles, views through windows and neighbouring properties.

What it does not reach is ordinary processing. Lighting, sharpening, white balance, colour correction, angle, straightening, cropping and exposure are excluded, provided they do not change the representation of the property. Virtual staging is in scope. Making a dark room look correctly exposed is not.

Thirdhand smoke becomes a disclosure with a cancellation right

AB 455 makes it the sole responsibility of a seller of residential one to four property, including mobilehomes and manufactured homes held as personal property, who has actual knowledge of residue from smoking tobacco or nicotine products, or of a history of occupants smoking on the property, to disclose that in writing.

The definition treats electronic cigarettes and vape devices as smoking tobacco, and describes residue that accumulates in carpets, walls and furniture, becomes embedded in building materials and persists for years after smoking stops.

The part that matters operationally is the machinery it borrows. The disclosure carries the same application, exemptions and statutory cancellation rights as the Transfer Disclosure Statement, which means a buyer may cancel within three days of personal delivery or five days of electronic delivery. It is codified at Business and Professions Code section 10084.2, Civil Code section 1102.6k and Health and Safety Code section 25417.2, and C.A.R. anticipates updating the Seller Property Questionnaire.

The balcony report joins the HOA package

SB 410 adds the most recent balcony inspection report to the standard package of disclosures an HOA must provide on request from a seller, and makes all such reports available for member inspection. It also requires the report to carry a summary page on the first page, including the inspection date, unit counts, the number of exterior elevated elements inspected, and how many were identified as posing an immediate threat to occupant safety.

C.A.R.'s own account of the problem is the useful part for a coordinator. Lenders have been requiring compliance with the inspection mandates as a condition of loan approval, and transactions had been breaking down where HOA managers failed to provide the reports or had not conducted the inspections. This is a law aimed squarely at a document that was already stopping closings.

An attestation that gets recorded

AB 851 prohibits unsolicited offers to purchase residential property in fifteen named fire-affected zip codes: 90049, 90263, 90265, 90272, 90290, 90402, 91001, 91024, 91103, 91104, 91106, 91107, 91301, 91302 and 91320.

Before transfer of title in those zip codes, buyer and seller must execute a written attestation affirming that the contract did not result from an unsolicited offer, and that attestation is recorded along with the deed. It creates a presumption that the offer was solicited unless there is clear and convincing evidence otherwise. A seller may cancel a purchase agreement entered into in violation of the law for four months from execution.

An offer is not unsolicited where there was public indication the owner was willing to sell, which the law describes as an MLS or public marketing platform listing, a for sale sign, or an advertisement in a print publication or a flyer in a public place. Penalties include Department of Real Estate discipline, a misdemeanour carrying fines up to $1,000 and up to six months imprisonment, and civil penalties up to $25,000. The provision sunsets on 1 January 2027.

The through-line

Three of these four add something to the file: a link, a disclosure, a report, an attestation. None of them changes what a coordinator is permitted to do, and all of them change what has to be present before a file is complete. That is the pattern worth watching in state legislation generally, because it rarely announces itself as a coordination change and almost always is one.

Also enacted, and worth knowing the citation for

• SB 774 makes a licensee's email address not a public record under the California Public Records Act, at Business and Professions Code section 10162, effective 1 January 2026.
• AB 493 requires a mortgage lender holding insurance proceeds after property damage to pay 2% interest on funds held in a loss draft account, at Civil Code section 2954.85 and Financial Code section 50202, urgency legislation effective 29 August 2025.
• AB 238 requires mortgage servicers to offer up to twelve months of forbearance, in ninety-day increments, to borrowers in financial hardship from the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfire disaster, at Civil Code section 3273.20 and following, urgency legislation effective 22 September 2025.
• AB 253 allows a privately hired licensed reviewer to plan check where the local building department estimates more than thirty days or fails to finish in thirty, at Health and Safety Code sections 17951 and 17960.1, urgency legislation effective 11 October 2025.
• SB 79 designates housing adjacent to major transit stops an allowable use in eight urban transit counties, at Government Code section 65912.155 and following, effective 1 January 2026.
• AB 130 also caps HOA fines at $100 per violation unless the board makes a written finding at an open meeting that the violation affects health or safety, at Civil Code sections 5850 and 5855.

None of these six rewrites a coordinator's checklist on its own. AB 493 and AB 238 are the two most likely to surface on a file, because both attach to property that has been damaged and to sellers who are carrying a loss.