Monthly short-term rental news roundup – May 2019
This month in short-term rental news – Party like the neighbours can’t stop you! (because they can’t)
Here’s the scoop:
- This month in crazy short-term rentals – a shooting, a birthday ‘riot’ with 200 students, a ‘graduation party’ with 300 students, and a meth lab in Adelaide.
- Some good laws this month out of Denver, USA, where the council now has broad powers to deny short-term rental licenses and stop party houses quickly. Some mild ones out of Arizona, forcing registration of rentals but not much else. Meanwhile, Airbnb successfully blocks Boston’s attempt to find out occupancy data, where only 2% of its hosts actually follow the rules.
- Worried about touristification of your community? Just be thankful you’re not in Barcelona, Madrid or Edinburgh, where chunks of the city are being hollowed out thanks to short-term rentals. Can it happen in Australia? It already is in places like Hobart, Margaret River and Byron Bay. States need to act to give local communities effective policy tools to control them before it’s too late.
STR Site of the Month
VacationRentals.com and Tripping.com are two of a new breed of short-term rental sites that just collect results from other platforms – think Skyscanner for flights or Trivago for hotels. Lots of smart money is betting that this is where the short-term rental market is going too (eg Google recently jumped in). This would be bad news for regulators, because it makes it much easier to dodge regulations by listing across multiple smaller sites.
