The Smart Apartment Advisor Show for Wed. Nov 16th

#AirBnB

Is AirBnB contributing to San Francisco's housing crisis? Are you breaking the law in how you use AirBnB?

Board of Supervisors passed legislation limiting AirBnB rentals to 60 days in ALL circumstances at their meeting yesterday. What does this mean?

Definition - short-term rentals as less than 30 days at a time.
All short-term rentals must be registered with the City’s Office of Short Term Rentals 

Several situations where AirBnB is problematic. First, there are two kinds of rentals: hosted and unhosted rentals.

Hosted rentals are using a part of someone's home (spare bedroom) as a short-term rental. 
Unhosted rentals are where an entire home is rented on a short-term basis. Typically people rent their homes to make money while they go on vacation or on a long trip. 

Three categories: homeowners, landlords, and tenants.

Homeowners - single-family homes are different than condos.

Landlords/property managers - this is almost always against the rules. It's a blatant attempt to circumvent Rent Control and is a misuse of property to use a rental of this kind as a hotel. Some owners of larger buildings use their units as medium-term rentals (30-90 days per stay) and furnish the rentals to allow their prices to stay at market. They're priced above what a vacant year-to-year rental would charge but below the cost of a hotel room for the similar period of time. For example, a studio apartment might rent for $2,000 per month as a vacant unit with a one-year lease. An international traveler coming for 30-90 days cannot be considered to rent this unit. A hotel room would likely cost $250-500 per night so
Tenants - Rent Control makes the short-term rental business very complicated for tenants. Your artificially reduced rent is intended to keep you safe in your home not give you an opportunity to go into business using someone else's property to make an unfair profit.

This is done without any oversight or approval from the landlord. A single short-term rental with landlord approval might not be problematic especially if the landlord has the right to oversee the process including sub tenant qualifications and having their contact information.

Apartment buildings aren't equipped to handle the steady flow of guests that typically arrive for hosted rentals. Hotels are more appropriate for these stays. Security and access issues include:

Hotels typically have a lobby with a staffed front desk and security. Apartment buildings do not.

Keys are secure - in apartments the common area keys and unit keys can be duplicated. Landlords bear responsibility to change locks and distribute new keys to all residents when the keys go missing. Tenants can profit from their short-term rental but cannot be held responsible for these costs and responsibilities. 

If the landlord is not aware of who is staying at the building then security of the other residents is compromised.

Synopsis of short-term rental legislation - hosts of all kinds (homeowners and tenants) are required to register with the City's Office of Short Term Rentals (yes, this exists) and must abide by the limits.

Limit of 60 days per year

Planning Code requires that all whole-home unhosted rentals be for a minimum of 30 days.

Short Term Rental platforms need to share the names and data of users to make the enforcement feasible.

Are you kidding me? Opposition to building more housing - Forest Hill neighbors object to 150 units of senior housing in their neighborhood (Chronicle/Examiner) as well as 1515 S. Van Ness project to build 57 units with 25% affordable housing