If your lease requires tenants to name you as an additional insured on their renters policy, you have a problem in Oregon. ORS 90.222 lets a landlord require interested-party status but not additional insured. So the clause asks for something you cannot require, which can make it unenforceable, and worse, if you thought additional insured was getting you lapse notifications, it was not. The right ask is interested party, and the fix is simple once you know.
Why the clause is on shaky ground
Oregon’s statute is specific: a landlord may require the tenant to name the landlord as an interested party, and may not require additional insured or any status beyond interested party. A lease clause demanding additional insured is therefore requiring something the law does not permit you to require. That does not automatically void your whole lease, but it puts that clause in a weak spot, and it signals the requirement was never checked against Oregon law.
The quieter problem: no notifications
Landlords often demand additional insured because they believe it keeps them informed or protected. On a renters policy it usually does neither the way they imagine. The status that actually generates notice of lapse, cancellation, non-renewal, or removal is interested party. So a landlord asking for the wrong status can end up with a clause that is both unrequirable and not doing the notification job they wanted. Two failures in one line.
The fix takes one edit
Change the requirement from additional insured to interested party, confirm the tenant actually adds it, and keep your own comparable coverage documented. That single edit moves the clause from unenforceable-and-uninformative to compliant-and-useful. If you manage a portfolio on a shared lease template, it is one change that fixes every unit at once, which is worth doing before it ever comes up in a dispute.
The one-line edit that fixes every unit
Because this error almost always lives in a shared lease template, the fix scales the same way the mistake did. Change the requirement from additional insured to interested party in the master template, confirm it carries to new and renewing leases, and require that the tenant provide documentation that the status was actually added rather than just promised. That single edit moves the clause from unrequirable and uninformative to compliant and useful across your whole portfolio at once. If you run many doors off one lease, this is a fifteen-minute change that closes an ORS 90.222 exposure on every unit before it ever surfaces in a dispute. Have your attorney confirm the final language, but the direction is simple: ask for the status the law lets you require, and verify it stuck.
Questions to ask your advisor
- Does my lease require additional insured on the tenant renters policy?
- Did I assume additional insured gets me lapse notifications?
- Is my requirement asking for something Oregon does not allow?
- Have I confirmed tenants actually add interested-party status?
- Do I use one lease template that I could fix across all units at once?
If you own or manage rental property, we can review how you require, place, and track tenant insurance across the portfolio and show you exactly where the gaps sit. Book a portfolio compliance review.