Thursday, 4:40 PM, and you are pricing the fall increases. The spreadsheet has a column your predecessor added years ago: EXEMPT, a Y or an N per building, keyed in once at acquisition and inherited ever since. The 2012 building is a Y. It has always been a Y.
Oregon's cap carves out new construction, and the carve-out feels permanent because nothing about it ever moves. But the statute does not ask when the building was new. It asks whether the first certificate of occupancy is less than fifteen years old on the date of the notice, this notice, the one you are about to serve. The window is measured fresh against every notice you write, which means it closes in the middle of an ordinary year, between two increases, on a date that appears in no calendar, no renewal file, and no inbox.
Nobody announces the crossing. The state publishes its maximum every September; cities publish their ordinances; nothing anywhere publishes the morning your building stops being new, because that date belongs to a certificate filed away when the crane came down. Across a portfolio the crossings stagger by construction vintage, one building this year, another in two, each on its own quiet anniversary. The Y in the spreadsheet outlives the truth.
The cost arrives with interest. An Oregon notice that claims more than the year's maximum has to state the facts supporting the exemption, so an increase over the cap on a building that quietly crossed the line is not a rounding error; it is a signed claim with a wrong fact in it, and the statute prices it at three months' rent plus damages. And because rent moves at most once in any twelve-month period, with ninety days of notice in front of the slot, the gentler failure still costs a year: pull the notice, re-run the number under the cap, and the window you were aiming for is gone.
The exemption does not expire on a date anyone announces. It expires on the date of your next notice.
Here is the line that moves when the calendar side of this runs as a system. Every lease's slot is arithmetic: the first-year freeze, the twelve months since the last increase, the ninety days of notice, the serve-by date that lands in a worklist while it is still actionable. The published maximum arrives into the schedule when the state announces it, instead of into a sticky note in September. What is left on your desk is the part that was always judgment: which buildings are still exempt, what facts you can put your name to, and what number each lease carries this year.
That split is how Scaalr runs an Oregon increase: each schedule validated against the first-year freeze, the twelve-month window, and the ninety-day floor, the written notice composed with its dates and rents and signed before it serves, service recorded as a task with proof, and the exemption call left deliberately with you, because no system should certify a building's age on your behalf. The full rulebook, every number tied to its official source, is here: Oregon Rent Increases: Annual Maximum and 90 Days' Notice.
For the complete guide to the cap, the exemptions, the clocks, and the notice, see: Oregon Rent Increases: Annual Maximum and 90 Days' Notice.
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