Business
Is your Airbnb legal?
Your Airbnb is operating illegally. Maybe. The uncomfortable truth is that you don’t really know. For many hosts, this is how the story unfolds. In
Your listing was removed from the Airbnb platform.
Which means that your steady stream of new bookings evaporated overnight. Sound spooky? Unfortunately, this is the reality for nearly half of the short term rental hosts in our hometown of Kansas City, Missouri.
After years of local residential complaints, the City Council passed new legislation that went into effect this summer regulating short term rentals. One component of this new legislation explicitly requires all short term rentals to be properly licensed with the city, and the three month grace period for getting properly licensed ended halfway through this month.
The city estimates that roughly half of the approximately 1,000 listings are still not registered, and city officials are actively working with platforms like Airbnb to have them removed. What’s more, if a host is caught illegally operating an unlicensed short term rental, the fine is $1,000 per day.
Take local Airbnb regulations seriously even when enforcement is lax.
Here’s the wrinkle to the story. Kansas City has actually had a process for registering short term rentals for years. But only an estimated third of local hosts had ever properly licensed their place. The enforcement was notoriously lax, and so the majority of hosts just didn’t do it. But while, yes, navigating bureaucratic red tape can be its own uniquely infuriating form of torture, it still matters, especially now that the enforcement tables have now completely flipped.
The gut punch for many unregistered hosts is this. Hosts who were properly registered before the new legislation went into effect are now exempt from the legislation’s most extreme stipulation: going forward, only hosts who also live on the registered property will be allowed to operate an Airbnb in Kansas City’s residential neighborhoods.
This means that all the standalone properties where the host does not reside are now illegal. Except for hosts who were already properly registered. Those properties are being grandfathered in under their previously approved licenses.
Get to know your local Airbnb regulations.
If you’re a weekly Big Heart Hosting reader, this conversation might sound familiar to you. At the beginning of this year, we wrote a post called Is Your Airbnb Legal? that encourages hosts to play by the local rules, even when you might very well wish they didn’t exist.
Our advice here will be the same as our advice in that post: get clear on what your own local regulation actually is. That’s the first step.
Start by going to Airbnb’s Help Center and searching your location. You may well find an article like the one the company wrote for Kansas City, laying out the requirements. You’ll find similar ones for places with more complicated regulations, like New York, New Orleans, or London.
This is such an easy can to kick down the road, but the consequences for procrastinating might go far beyond inconvenience; they might completely cut the legs out from under your business. Hopefully a little tough love from us now can save you a bunch of regulatory heartbreak later.
Your Airbnb is operating illegally. Maybe. The uncomfortable truth is that you don’t really know. For many hosts, this is how the story unfolds. In
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You’re an ambitious Airbnb host with a big heart. But on some days, hosting isn’t exactly what you had imagined. Maybe it’s overwhelming. Or isolating. Or just not making the kind of money you had envisioned. At Big Heart Hosting, we’re on a mission to help hosts like you thrive, not just get by. We create step-by-step resources that bring together the best hosting strategies from around the world. We’ll give you the knowledge and community you need to create the joyful, prosperous Airbnb you deserve.
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At Big Heart Hosting, we’re on a mission to help hosts like you thrive, not just get by. We create step-by-step resources that bring together the best hosting strategies from around the world. We’ll give you the knowledge and community you need to create the joyful, prosperous Airbnb you deserve.
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