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San Diego · guides

For anyone reading a San Diego block

Two registers San Diego keeps that most cities do not

Who is trading on the block, and how much of the street is let by the night.

Businesses, from the tax certificate

Every business trading in San Diego holds a certificate from the City Treasurer, and the city publishes the active ones with a coordinate, a start date and a federal industry code. The report counts them within your radius and names the longest established and the most recently arrived. Fifty-three thousand of them are on the file.

Registration is not occupancy. A business that closed without surrendering its certificate is still counted, and one trading without a certificate is not on the list at all. Read the number as claims on a register rather than as lit windows.

The register also records the owner's name, and this report does not read that column. Its trading names are sometimes a person's — “Mike Petosa” is a trading name on this file — so a name shaped like a person is counted and never listed. That is the same filter the founding city uses, applied to a different register.

Short-term rentals, by tier

San Diego licenses whole-home short-term letting under a tiered ordinance, caps the number citywide, and publishes every licence with a coordinate and an expiry date. No other city in this product publishes anything like it.

The report counts the licences in force today within your radius, and how many are within sixty feet, which is the difference between a short-let street and a short-let house next door. Around Mission Beach the count runs to ninety and change, nearly all Tier 4; downtown it is a couple of dozen, mostly Tier 3.

A licence is not a listing. A licensed home may sit empty all year, and a home let without a licence does not appear here at all. The file names a host and a local contact and gives a telephone number; this report reads none of the three.

Counts run 5 September 2026.

More San Diego guides

How to read a San Diego reportWhat the city publishes, what the region publishes, and why this city's counts carry a date the others do not.Why this city's numbers say when they were takenSan Diego publishes its whole transactional record as files with no way to query them. So this report holds a copy, and tells you how old it is.What a San Diego assessment actually isAnchored to the last sale, capped at about two per cent a year, and published as one roll rather than a run of years. Why a seller's bill says nothing about a buyer's.