San Francisco restaurant owner Ben Bleiman has been making good use of a city program that allows business operators to make property fillings online — a process that previously was done in person or via snail mail.
"Five years in, the SMART portal has saved small businesses a lot of time and hassle. No printing forms, no mailing documents, no waiting in line. You submit what you need online and get back to doing literally anything else," Bleiman, owner of Harrington’s Bar & Grill, said in a statement.
The city has now expanded that portal — a version of which launched in 2021 for business owners to complete annual filings related to business personal property online — to make the service available to most property owners. The online tool allows owners to file paperwork and look up records without stamps or dreaded trips to government offices.
The city’s quietly powerful assessor-recorder’s office unveiled the new System for Managing Records, Assessments and Transactions, or SMART, portal. The office handles San Francisco’s property taxes, a crucial source of public revenue and therefore one of the city’s most vital, if unglamorous, departments.
“As a San Franciscan, I want and expect the option of doing business with our city online," city Assessor-Recorder Joaquín Torres said in a press release announcing the new system. “Government should be welcoming, easy to understand, fast, and affordable.”
It's the latest attempt from San Francisco officials to rid City Hall of red tape to help simplify operations for businesses and encourage new development.
'Common-sense reforms'
Torres said the new portal enables people to search properties by address or parcel number to easily pull up basic data and fill out forms via the internet, from address changes to requesting tax exemptions. Historically, such tasks often required making an in-person visit or filling out and snail-mailing paperwork.
It is part of a larger effort to streamline city services in San Francisco, which has long been notorious for its slow, bloated layers of bureaucracy that sometimes forced business owners and developers to jump through multiple hoops to obtain permits or carry out other routine tasks.
Torres himself has pushed forward several initiatives to modernize the assessor-recorder’s public-facing systems, including making San Francisco the first county in California to make more than 7 million documents dating back to 1990 — such as deeds, reconveyances, notices of default and liens — available for free online. Prior to that change in late 2024, accessing such documents meant a trip to City Hall or paying for them up front without knowing what was in them.
“Whether it’s a resident looking for information about their family home or watching out for title fraud, a journalist conducting research, or any other member of the public, thousands of constituents seek access to our recorded documents each year, most of them online,” Torres said in a statement at the time.
Last month, Mayor Daniel Lurie launched an online permitting portal called PermitSF. Starting with just a few types of permits, the software rollout builds on a sweeping initiative the mayor announced last year to overhaul what has become one of San Francisco’s most infamous bureaucratic headaches. The portal is part of a multi-departmental effort to implement “common-sense reforms” that make city government more efficient and less of an impediment to business.
After housing construction hit a historic low in 2024 in the nation’s tech capital, one of the most expensive cities in the nation, officials sought to accelerate efforts to address some of the barriers that have long been criticized as hampering development and discouraging businesses from operating here.
“In a city known for innovation, interacting with City Hall should feel just as modern,” Lurie said in a statement.
Officials have been trying for years to streamline the city’s most onerous government systems. Lurie's predecessor as mayor, London Breed, sought repeatedly to make it easier to build housing but was thwarted at times by other officials. She also tried to speed up the approvals process for small businesses by removing some requirements and making zoning more flexible, efforts Lurie has also picked up.
In recent years, the state has stepped in, enacting a slew of bills that make it harder to block or delay new housing, though factors such as high construction costs and difficulty in obtaining financing have stymied projects just the same.