Somewhere in Altadena or Pacific Palisades right now, a homeowner who lost everything in January's fires is getting a text.
"I noticed your property. I buy houses fast, as-is, no repairs needed. Cash offer, quick close."
That text used to be just tasteless. As of November 2025, in specific ZIP codes, sending it is a misdemeanor. If you're the agent who sent it on a client's behalf, you've also just violated your real estate license. Automatically. No investigation required to establish that part.
Welcome to AB 851.
What AB 851 Actually Bans
Start with the basics, since the details matter more than usual here. AB 851 prohibits unsolicited offers to purchase residential property in a specific list of ZIP codes across Los Angeles and Ventura counties, the areas hit by the Palisades and Eaton fires. The affected codes include 90049, 90263, 90265, 90272, 90290, 90402, 91001, 91024, 91103, 91104, 91106, 91107, 91301, 91302, and 91320.
The ban runs until January 1, 2027. It isn't permanent, but it's not a short window either.
"Unsolicited" has a specific legal meaning here, and it's worth being precise about it. It covers any offer made by text, email, phone call, mail, or other direct outreach, unless the property is already listed on an MLS or public marketing platform, has a for-sale sign up, or was advertised in print or a public flyer. In plain terms, if a seller didn't put their home on the market and you reach out anyway with an offer, that's unsolicited. If they listed it and you respond, that's normal business.
This grew directly out of emergency executive orders issued right after the January 2025 fires. The California DRE issued its own consumer notice warning homeowners about predatory outreach almost immediately after the fires started. AB 851 took that emergency protection and turned it into standing law.
The original executive orders had a hard expiration date, and once they lapsed there was a real gap where nothing stopped the practice from resuming. That's the specific problem AB 851 was written to close. It's why the bill moved through Sacramento as an urgency statute, meaning it took effect immediately upon signing rather than waiting for the standard January 1 start date most new California real estate law follows. If you've gotten used to tracking new disclosure requirements that land every January 1, this one broke that pattern entirely, it was already live months before this year's more typical batch of new laws arrived.
Why This Law Exists
Disaster zones attract a specific kind of buyer. Not every investor working a fire-affected area is predatory. Plenty are legitimate. But the pattern of lowball, high-pressure outreach to grieving, displaced homeowners is well documented after nearly every major California wildfire, and the 2025 LA fires were no exception.
The bill's own legislative analysis describes the target directly, offers made for less than a property's fair market value as of January 6, 2025, sent to homeowners who never asked to be contacted. Someone who just lost a house to a fire is not in a strong negotiating position. They may be staying in a hotel, dealing with an insurance claim, and getting a same-day cash offer that sounds like relief instead of exploitation.
AB 851 doesn't ban buying property in these areas. It bans the specific tactic of cold-soliciting people who haven't indicated they're selling. Coverage from the Senate Judiciary Committee's analysis frames it as closing a gap that existed the moment the original executive orders expired. The full statutory language sits in Civil Code Section 2079.26, added specifically for this purpose, if you want the exact wording your compliance team should be working from.
The Part That Should Actually Worry You
Here's the sentence that separates this law from a typical consumer protection statute. If a licensed real estate agent makes a written unsolicited offer on a client's behalf in violation of this law, that conduct is automatically deemed a violation of their real estate license.
Not "may result in." Deemed. That's a direct trigger, not a discretionary finding the DRE has to build a separate case around. If you cold-texted a fire zone homeowner an offer and that offer meets the statute's definition of unsolicited, you've handed the DRE a violation on a plate.
Stack the penalties on top of that. Civil penalties run up to $25,000 per violation, and each individual offer counts separately, this isn't a one-time fine for the practice. It's also a misdemeanor. The Attorney General, a county counsel, a city attorney, or a district attorney can all bring a civil enforcement action.
And the seller gets a remedy too. If a home sale happened because of an unsolicited offer that violated this law, the seller can cancel the contract for up to four months after closing, with reimbursement for the purchase price and any improvements made. That's not a typical cancellation window. Four months post-close is long enough for a transaction to feel completely settled before it unravels.
That cancellation right runs through the same mechanism as any other contract cancellation in California, meaning a proper Cancellation of Contract needs to get filed correctly if a seller actually exercises it. The difference here is the timeline. Most cancellation scenarios play out during an active escrow, while contingencies are still open. This one can surface months after everyone involved thought the file was closed and archived.
The Attestation Requirement Nobody's Talking About
This is the part that actually affects your paperwork on every deal in these ZIP codes, not just the predatory ones.
Before title transfers on any residential sale in an affected ZIP code, the buyer and seller both have to sign a written attestation confirming the offer was not unsolicited, meaning it came through a listing, a for-sale sign, or public marketing, not cold outreach. That signed attestation creates a legal presumption the offer was properly solicited. It has to be recorded before the deal closes.
This applies to every sale in these ZIP codes right now, not just the ones involving a fire-damaged property. If you're closing a completely unrelated, unaffected transaction that happens to sit in one of those ZIP codes, you still need this attestation on file. Skipping it isn't just sloppy paperwork. It removes your legal presumption of compliance and leaves the transaction more exposed if anyone ever questions how the deal originated.
Add this to your intake checklist immediately if you work any of these areas. It's a new line item, not an optional extra, and it needs to sit alongside your Natural Hazard Disclosure Statement ordering process for any property in a fire-affected zone.
Escrow and title companies operating in these counties are still catching up on this requirement, and it's not something every office has fully built into their standard closing packet yet. That's a gap worth checking for directly rather than assuming someone else in the transaction is handling it. If you're the one tracking deadlines and required documents across a file, this attestation belongs on that list the same way a signed Transfer Disclosure Statement does.
Where TCs and Agents Actually Get Tripped Up
The predatory cold-caller scenario is the obvious one, and it's not really who this section is for. Most agents reading this aren't running a wholesale investor operation. The more common failure mode is subtler.
An agent working a completely legitimate deal in Altadena reaches out to a homeowner they know personally, maybe a past client, maybe someone from a networking group, to ask if they've thought about selling. No malice, no lowball number, just a normal relationship-based conversation an agent has all the time in any other ZIP code in the state. In one of these specific fire-affected areas, that conversation can technically qualify as an unsolicited offer if it crosses into an actual offer to purchase before the property is listed.
The safest posture right now, in these specific ZIP codes only, is to treat any offer-adjacent conversation as something that needs to happen after a listing exists, not before. If a client wants to explore selling, get the property listed first, even informally through an MLS entry, before any specific purchase number gets discussed. That single sequencing change is the difference between a normal real estate conversation and a technical violation.
This is exactly the kind of nuance that's easy to miss when you're managing five files at once and one of them happens to sit in an affected ZIP code you didn't think twice about. It's also exactly the kind of gap transaction compliance work exists to catch before it becomes a DRE letter instead of after.
The broader lesson tracks with something we've written about before. A lot of the compliance failures that actually cost agents money aren't dramatic. They're small procedural gaps that compound because nobody's job is specifically to catch them. AB 851 just raises the stakes on one very specific gap, in one very specific set of ZIP codes, for the next year and change.
How Long This Actually Lasts
AB 851 sunsets January 1, 2027, which sounds distant right now but isn't as far off as it feels. The law was structured as an urgency statute specifically because the original executive order protections had already expired once and left a gap, so lawmakers built in a defined end date rather than making it permanent. Whether it gets extended, made permanent, or allowed to lapse depends on what happens between now and then, and on how the affected communities are doing with rebuilding.
For now, treat the ZIP code list as fixed and the enforcement risk as real. The California Association of Realtors has been tracking post-fire real estate practice closely since the disaster, and this law reflects exactly the kind of regulatory response that tends to stick around longer than its original sunset date once it's on the books.
If you're not actively working in the Palisades or Eaton fire footprint, this law doesn't touch your day to day. But agents statewide should know it exists, because the next California wildfire, and there will be one, could trigger a similar law with a different set of ZIP codes attached to it. This is very likely the template going forward, not a one-off. It sits in the same family as other post-disaster consumer protections California has leaned on before, and NAR's own guidance on disclosure and consumer protection obligations generally trends toward more of this, not less, whenever a major disaster reshapes a local market fast.
What to Actually Do About It
If you have a listing or a buyer client anywhere in the affected ZIP codes, confirm the attestation is part of your closing checklist before you get anywhere near title transfer. Don't assume your title company is automatically catching this since it's new enough that not every office has fully operationalized it yet.
If you're a buyer's agent working these areas, especially anyone doing volume with investor clients, audit how leads are being generated before any offer goes out. A lead list scraped from public records and cold-texted to non-listed properties is exactly the fact pattern this law was built to catch.
If you're a listing agent with a client who owns property in one of these ZIP codes, whether or not it burned, loop them in on this protection specifically. A lot of homeowners in these areas have no idea this law exists, and knowing it does gives them real leverage if the unsolicited offers keep coming, which reporting on the aftermath of the fires suggests they still are, months later.
If your team is active in these ZIP codes regularly enough that this feels like an ongoing compliance question rather than a one-time read, it's worth having someone dedicated to tracking what's required at each stage of a file instead of relying on memory across a busy pipeline. New requirements like this one tend to slip through exactly when volume is highest, which in a rebuilding market is likely to be soon.
None of this requires new software or a new vendor relationship. It requires one new form in the closing package and a genuine mental note about where your listing outreach crosses a line that didn't exist a year ago. Miss it, and the DRE isn't the only party with a claim against you. The seller has four months to unwind the whole deal.
Check your active files right now. If anything sits in those fifteen ZIP codes, that attestation needs to be on your radar today, not at your next file review.
