Georgia's Broker Rule for Out-of-State Landlords (HB 399)

This article is general information about Georgia law, not legal advice. It reflects the enrolled text of HB 399 and the related code sections as we read them in August 2026. Statutes get amended and courts interpret them; confirm how any of this applies to your property and your ownership structure with a Georgia attorney before you act on it.

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If you own a rental house in metro Atlanta and you live somewhere else, a 2025 change to Georgia law is worth twenty minutes of your attention. House Bill 399 created a new code section, O.C.G.A. § 44-7-25, that tells non-resident owners of single-family and duplex rentals to put a licensed Georgia broker over the property.

Much of what has been written about it online is close but not exact, and several widely repeated summaries say things the statute does not. What follows comes from the signed text, with the surrounding code sections checked separately and anything we could not verify flagged as such.

What HB 399 Actually Did

The Act is six pages long and has three operative pieces.

Piece	Where it landed	What it does
The broker requirement	New O.C.G.A. § 44-7-25(a)	Non-resident owners of single-family or duplex Georgia rentals shall employ a broker licensed under Chapter 40 of Title 43
The exemption switch-off	New O.C.G.A. § 44-7-25(b)	Two self-management exemptions in § 43-40-29(a) stop applying to those owners
The code-enforcement disclosure	Revised O.C.G.A. § 36-74-30(b)	On probable cause, a tenant must give a code officer the property manager’s name, license number, and contact details

Source: Signed text of HB 399, Office of the Governor of Georgia

Who Is Actually Covered

The operative sentence is narrow and specific:

“Any landlord that is not a resident of this state that owns or operates single-family or duplex residential rental properties in this state shall employ a broker licensed pursuant to Chapter 40 of Title 43, that may or may not reside within this state.”

Three details decide whether it reaches you.

Residency, not portfolio size. The trigger is that the landlord is not a Georgia resident. There is no unit threshold anywhere in the section, so one rental house counts the same as fifty — unlike Georgia’s security-deposit rules, which do turn on unit counts.

Single-family or duplex. The section names those two property types. It does not say triplex, fourplex, or apartment community.

“Owns or operates.” Both verbs are in the text, which is broader than ownership alone, though the statute does not elaborate on what operating means for someone not on title.

The biggest gap: the section never defines residency for a non-human landlord. Many Georgia rentals sit in an LLC, trust, or partnership, and whether such an entity is “a resident of this state” — and whether that turns on formation state, registration to do business, or member residency — is not addressed in the text we read. If an entity holds your property, that is the first question for a Georgia attorney.

What “Employ a Broker” Means in Practice

The statute says employ a licensed broker. It does not define employ, prescribe a written agreement, set a fee, or create any filing or registration with the state — there is no form to submit and no registry to appear on.

The practical reading among Georgia property managers is the ordinary one: a written management agreement placing a Georgia-licensed brokerage over the property, so there is a licensee of record responsible for the management relationship. That is what the industry has settled into, but the statute does not spell it out, and we did not find a reported Georgia decision interpreting the section.

If the Broker Is Not in Georgia, Someone Still Has to Be

The second half of subsection (a) is the part with real operational teeth:

“If the broker does not reside within this state, the broker shall employ at least one person, to be located within this state, who shall be responsible for receiving, coordinating, managing, and responding to communications from tenants of such landlord related to maintenance and other issues related to such properties.”

Two corrections to the summaries circulating online. First, this obligation is the broker’s, not the owner’s — the owner’s duty in the sentence before is simply to employ a licensed broker. Second, the enrolled text requires a person located within this state, and says located rather than resident. It does not say that person must personally hold a real estate license, though several secondary write-ups claim it requires a Georgia resident meeting the licensing standards of Chapter 40. The licensure language is attached to the broker, not to the in-state person.

What the sentence does demand is substantive: someone in Georgia who receives, coordinates, manages, and responds to tenant maintenance communications. That is a description of a functioning local operation, not a mailbox or an answering service.

The Self-Management Exemption Is Switched Off — For Two Specific Paragraphs

Georgia’s real estate license chapter contains a list of people the chapter does not apply to. Two of them have long been the route by which owners manage their own property without a license:

• § 43-40-29(a)(7) — a person who, as owner, or through someone the owner engages full time, or as owner of a management company whose principals control the property, provides property management services for property owned by that person.
• § 43-40-29(a)(8) — a person employed full time by the owner of property to provide property management services for that property.

Subsection (b) of the new section says those two paragraphs “shall not apply” to non-resident owners of single-family or duplex Georgia rentals. In plain terms, the do-it-yourself route that many out-of-state owners relied on is closed for this group.

Be precise about the scope, though. Subsection (b) names paragraphs (7) and (8) only. The rest of the exemption list stands, including a dozen paragraphs covering attorneys, fiduciaries, government employees, and referral agents. How those surviving paragraphs interact with the new duty in subsection (a) for any particular structure is a question for a lawyer, not a blog.

Short-Term Rentals Sit Under a Different Regime

Short-term lodging management has its own exemption from the license chapter, at § 43-40-29(a)(11). It covers property management on properties available for less than 90 days’ occupancy, and applies only if ten conditions are all met — among them a written management agreement covering terms, reporting, and remittance; a guest agreement that is not a lease; zoning that permits short-term occupancy; lodging taxes paid and any required local business licenses held; and the unit not being the guest’s permanent residence.

HB 399 left paragraph (11) available. The Act’s third section reprints the whole exemption list, paragraph (11) included, and the operative change for out-of-state owners is made in § 44-7-25(b) — which names only paragraphs (7) and (8).

Whether § 44-7-25 reaches a property operated purely as short-term lodging is genuinely unsettled on the face of the text. The section lives in Georgia’s landlord and tenant article and speaks of landlords, tenants, and residential rental property, while paragraph (11) expressly contemplates that a short-term guest agreement is not a lease or rental agreement. Those framings point in different directions and the statute does not reconcile them. If you own a Georgia short-term rental from out of state, ask a Georgia attorney rather than settle it from a summary — including this one. Our Georgia short-term rental regulations guide covers the separate permitting and tax layers on those properties.

What Happens If an Owner Ignores It

Here is where accuracy matters most, because this is the claim most often overstated.

Section 44-7-25 contains no penalty clause of its own. In the enrolled Act, Section 2 adds subsections (a) and (b) and nothing else, and the Act’s final section is a routine repealer. No fine, no criminal classification, no enforcement agency named.

The consequences that do exist come from the surrounding law:

• O.C.G.A. § 43-40-30 makes it unlawful to act in the capacity of a licensee without a license, unless exempt under § 43-40-29, and a single act counts. The Georgia Real Estate Commission can issue a cease and desist order; violating one carries a fine of up to $1,000 per transaction. Note the direction of that exposure — it runs against whoever performs the unlicensed acts.
• O.C.G.A. § 43-40-24(a) provides that no person shall bring or maintain an action in Georgia courts to collect compensation for acts mentioned in the chapter without alleging and proving they were a licensed broker when the cause of action arose. Be careful about who that penalizes: it bites an unlicensed manager suing for an unpaid management or leasing fee. It does not stop a landlord collecting rent from their own tenant, and it is not a defense to rent.

So the practical risk of ignoring § 44-7-25 is mostly indirect: the licensing exposure of whoever does the management work, and the position an owner would be in if the requirement were raised in a dispute. Anyone who tells you the statute itself carries a specific fine is reading in something that is not there.

How It Fits With the Local Registration Rule

HB 399 also revised § 36-74-30(b), and the coverage of this part has been muddled.

The prohibition on local rental registries is not new. The sentence saying local governments may not require registration of residential rental property, and may only investigate or inspect on probable cause, already appears in the code text as it stood before 2025.

What HB 399 added is the sentence at the end: where there is probable cause to believe there is or has been a code violation on a property managed by someone licensed under Chapter 40 of Title 43, then on a code enforcement officer’s request, the tenant shall provide the property manager’s name, license number, and contact information.

The operational implication is small but real. A tenant may one day be asked for a license number belonging to whoever manages the property — easier to answer when the management relationship is documented and the licensee of record is identifiable.

Effective Date: What We Can and Cannot Confirm

July 1, 2025 is the date the documents support. Here is the reasoning rather than an assertion.

The enrolled Act contains no effective-date section — we checked, and its last section is only the standard repealer. Under O.C.G.A. § 1-3-4(a)(1), an Act approved on or after January 1 and before July 1 of a calendar year takes effect on July 1 of that year. Since HB 399 appears in the Governor’s 2025 signed legislation library, the default rule points to July 1, 2025 whichever spring day the signature happened.

On the signature date itself, independent legislative trackers record May 14, 2025, and Atlanta television coverage the next day reported the Governor signing a large batch of bills at the deadline, HB 399 among them. We could not confirm that date on a Georgia state government page: the Governor’s library publishes the enrolled text without a signature date beside it, and the legislature’s own data endpoint was not publicly readable when we checked. So we present May 14, 2025 as well supported rather than officially confirmed.

Sources: BillTrack50 — GA HB 399; FastDemocracy — GA HB 399 history; FOX 5 Atlanta, May 15, 2025; Atlanta Civic Circle, April 7, 2025

What an Out-of-State Owner Should Actually Do Next

1. Establish where you stand. Are you a Georgia resident? Is the property single-family or duplex? Is title held personally or in an entity? Those three answers determine whether the section describes you at all.
2. If an entity holds title, ask a Georgia attorney about residency. This is the genuine open question in the statute and it is not one to guess at.
3. Look at who manages the property today. If it is you, a management company you control, or someone you employ full time, those are the arrangements paragraphs (7) and (8) covered — and they no longer apply to this group.
4. If you already use a manager, confirm the licensing is documented. Ask for the licensee of record and keep the written management agreement somewhere you can find it. If the brokerage sits outside Georgia, ask who their in-state person is.
5. Keep short-term and long-term questions separate. They run under different parts of the code, and an answer about one is not an answer about the other.
6. Re-check periodically. This section is new, we found no reported Georgia decision interpreting it, and the General Assembly returns every January.

Where We Fit

We manage residential property across metro Atlanta and work through a licensed Georgia brokerage, which is the arrangement most out-of-state owners of single-family and duplex rentals end up needing once they have worked through the questions above. We also manage short-term rentals, which sit under the separate regime described earlier. Owners often arrive holding one property type and find the other suits them better, and we would rather walk through both honestly than steer you toward the one that pays us more.

In practice that is ordinary and unglamorous: a written management agreement, a documented licensee of record, real people in Atlanta answering maintenance calls, and a fee structure quoted up front and in writing before you sign anything. If you are weighing which way to run the property, our comparison of short-term versus long-term returns in Atlanta and our exit-strategy guide are the useful places to start. You can see the service itself on our long-term rental management page, or tenant placement if you only need the tenant found.

We are not attorneys and nothing here is legal advice. On a question about your own liability under § 44-7-25, talk to a Georgia lawyer.

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Own a Georgia rental from out of state and want a straight answer about what it should be earning? Get a free rental projection, or see where we manage. Prefer to talk it through? Call (678) 938-6413.