Skift Take
There are holes in the arguments of both the City of San Francisco and HomeAway. The new short-term rental law would indeed put HomeAway in the new position of collecting taxes from renters, and HomeAway could find a way in its business model to make that happen. Still, the new law does appear to favor Airbnb, which already collects fees from guests.
HomeAway sued the City of San Francisco a month ago claiming Airbnb bought itself a favorable and anti-competitive short-term rental ordinance, and now the city is seeking to have a federal judge throw out the lawsuit, arguing that HomeAway "misread the ordinance."
In a motion to dismiss scheduled to be heard January 23, 2015 in federal court in the Northern District of California, the City of San Francisco argues that its new short-term rental law, which would go into effect on February 1, imposes no new obligations on "hosting platforms" such as HomeAway to collect transient occupancy tax from renters that short-term lodging websites wouldn't already be subject to.
The City alleges that the new short-term rental law merely incorporates existing law and does not "extend the existing obligation to hosting platforms that are not already subject to
