Skift Take
Does regulating short-term rental platforms like Airbnb really work? Well if Airbnb and its peers would cooperate instead of passing the buck to taxpayers regulation could have a fighting chance.
Even though San Francisco, the hometown of Airbnb, has gone much further than most cities to regulate short-term rental platforms, a new report issued by the city shows most short-term home rentals and hosts operating in the city are not abiding by local laws.
The policy analysis report, issued on April 7, found the following:
Most short-term rental hosts are out of compliance and have not registered with the city's Office of Short-Term Rentals (OSTR). As of November, the OSTR received 1,082 registration applications, but that suggests 4,296, or 79.9 percent of the 5,378 unique hosts listed on Airbnb for that month did not register.
Since February 2015, when the city enacted new laws regulating short-term rentals, approximately 26.1 percent of entire home listings where the host is not present appear to have been rented for more than 90 nights a year between February and November 2015, a violation of the city's 90-night cap.
To compile this report, the city analyzed data supplied by Airbnb as of March 15, 2016, and Flipkey (whose parent company is TripAdvisor), as well as webscrapes from December 2014 and November 2015, both conducted by Murray Cox, one of the founders of Inside Airbnb.
In November, Inside Airbnb discovered that Airbnb had removed some 1,500 listings from New York City prior to releasing its data on the city, and thereby skewing the numbers of operators with multiple listings, or those in violation of New York City's multiple dwelling law. The webscrapes Cox conducted apply software algorithms to publicly available data on Airbnb's listings in a particular city.
Cox's New York findings were initially rejected, then accepted by Airbnb as an accurate ref
