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The prevalence of rent control ordinances varies dramatically among the seven counties. While in the aggregate, less than five percent of the transactions in Orange county were in rent- controlled parks, 83 percent of the transactions in Ventura county were in rent -controlled parks. As noted earlier, there is significant variation in these percentages between 1983 and 2003 with an increasing number and share of mobile home units being regulated by rent control policies over time. Of the 34.8 percent of mobile home transactions in our data set that are within rent controlled jurisdictions, 16.5 percent are in jurisdictions with flexible rent control regimes and 18.3 percent are in jurisdictions with rigid rent control regimes.lo An additional dummy variable was created to capture the change in the legal environment arising from the April 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding mobile home park rent control ordinances. We assumed that some time would be required for the court decision to influence prices so, in the analysis, we used January 1993 as the `event' date." ANALYSIS AND RESULTS 10 Rent control regimes may become less rigid or more rigid through time as policies evolve due to the economic and political environment. We were able to identify regimes which are currently rigid (no vacancy decontrol permitted) or flexible (vacancy decontrol permitted). In order to ascertain whether today's regime accurately reflected the nature of the regime since 1983, we surveyed every city in our data set (201). We received 55 responses in total with 20 of them from cities with rent control in place. The results of the survey supported the approach taken. " We employed alternative `event' dates in our analysis but found the 1993 date to corroborate our hypothesized result and allow for a reasonable period of time for dissemination of information to market participants. Further tests of the importance of event dates involved the use of multiple regression analysis to predict the annual mobile home sales volumes in our sample. As the regression results show, sales volume peaked in the year immediately following a city's adoption of rent control. Plausibly, sellers saw that the imposition of rent control gave them a windfall and they moved to cash in by putting their mobile home on the market. Here are the OLS regression results: Annual number of transactions — 1994.78 - 0.78*BeforelYr + 2.05*AfterlYr + 1.24*After2Yr (t-values) (-9.03) (5.64) (3.68) + 0.96*After3To7Yr + 0.93 *After8YrUp — 83.71 *CAUnemp (11.32) (20.25) (4.08) R-square — 0.985 Whereas, BeforelYr: indicator variable for 1 year before the adoption of rent control ordinance; AfterlYr: indicator variable for 1 year after the adoption of rent control ordinance; After2Yr: indicator variable for 2 years after the adoption of rent control ordinance; After3To7Yr: indicator variable for 3 to 7 years after the adoption of rent control ordinance; After8YrUp: indicator variable for 8 and above years after the adoption of rent control ordinance; CAUnemp: California state unemployment rate (percentage; economic conditions control variable); data source: www.dofca.gov.