Three quarters of Austin short-term rentals appear to be operating illegally, according to a contractor the city hired to study the issue. That study will give the city information to take action against thousands of illegal renters over the next year, city staff members said in a recent memo. Over 10,000 properties in Austin advertise as short-term rentals, but only about 2,500 of them are licensed, the memo said. The findings confirm the reporting of the American-Statesman last year. Statesman searches in August 2018 returned more than 8,000 Austin listings on listing site Airbnb alone and Inside Airbnb, a website that scrapes data from the site, showed some 11,300 active or inactive listings. Austin Code Director Cora Wright, in a memo to City Council members last week, said the city recently hired short-term rental monitoring company Host Compliance. Under a pilot contract, Host will give the city location on advertising data on 3,500 of the illegal listings by February. “The department expects to initiate enforcement action against all 3,500 properties identified by Host by February 2020,” Wright wrote. Wright’s memo came in response to a November resolution from council members citing the Statesman’s reporting and instructing staff members to take a closer look at how many short-term rentals are in the city and what it costs to enforce them. The rise of such rentals, booked like hotel rooms on sites like Airbnb and HomeAway, have shifted the tourism and neighborhood environments in Austin and other cities, and starkly divided residents. Renting homes or rooms within them is popular with travelers and property owners trying to earn extra income. Neighbors, however, complain of party houses and transience in areas of the city that used to be quiet, tight-knit neighborhoods. Austin leaders cracked down on rentals in 2015, passing an ordinance to phase out all full-time short-term rentals and to allow only those where the owner lives onsite and rents only partially or occasionally. But the rules have not put in a dent in a booming industry, where nightly rentals often far exceed the cost of citations. Code enforcement officers also must catch renters in person in order to prove a violation. Since Oct. 1, Austin code officers have received 1,312 complaints related to short-term rentals and issued citations to 581 properties. Of those, 93 percent were unlicensed, according to the memo. Only 36 of the 581 properties had received four or more violations or citations in the past — seeming to disprove a popular narrative that only a handful of problem properties drive complaints and enforcement. Enforcement of short-term rentals employs 17 people and is expected to cost $2.9 million this fiscal year. Most of that is funded from the Clean Community Fee Austinites pay alongside their trash service. Citations, which run $300 to $1,000 each, cover about 3% of enforcement costs, the memo said.

Source: Austin American Statesman