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My family often uses short-term rentals listed on Airbnb or VRBO rather than hotels when traveling. The experience allows us to live more like locals. When we travel in the company of our adult children, we save a lot of money by not reserving multiple hotel rooms.

Yet I remain wary of the short-term rental industry. Its infected with property owners skilled at misrepresenting their offerings. Some obscure property defects like worn-out mattresses or poor water pressure, or they fib about the convenience of their location to area attractions in a given city or outdoor recreational area.

Many property owners, of course, offer detailed information about their rentals and happen to be wonderful people who want their tenants to enjoy a memorable stay. I repeatedly return to the same Airbnb rental in Brownsville when I visit my godson Philip True. Its clean, affordable, centrally located and the hosts respond quickly to my communications.

Still, there is plenty of space for people who hype their sites and leave visitors disappointed. Renters can leave a negative review, but if they do, the property owner could retaliate in kind, which can affect future access to other properties unwilling to rent to anyone with a low rating.

All of this comes to mind after reading San Antonio Report Business Reporter Tracy Idell Hamiltons article published Wednesday revealing that as many as two-thirds of short-term rental property owners in San Antonio are not registered and are not paying the hotel occupancy tax they owe the City of San Antonio. They are shortchanging the city of millions of dollars in annual revenue and undercutting others in the competitive hospitality industry.

San Antonio passed an ordinance governing short-term rentals in 2018. It was first put forward by then-City Councilman Mike Gallagher (D10). Hosts are required to register with the city, show proof of property insurance, acquire a permit for $100 that must be renewed every three years and conform to local standards. Properties need to have a working smoke and carbon monoxide detector and meet other basic indoor and outdoor safety standards that apply to any homeowner. Party and wedding rentals are prohibited, and violators are subject to fines of $200-$500 a day for failing to maintain a permit or abide by the ordinance.

Most importantly, the city permit number must be listed in all advertisements or online advertising. Try a random neighborhood search on a short-term rental site, and good luck finding registered properties that list their permit number. The citys short-term rentals page does include a map displaying the nearly 3,500 registered properties, but it takes many steps to reach it, more than I can detail here.

I doubt any of the short-term operators in San Antonio are violating the ordinance out of ignorance, but if they are, the Short Term Rental Association of San Antonio is a user-friendly guide for responsible operators to stay current on local regulations and obtain a permit. For example, the city changed vendors contracted to collect taxes and is using Virginia-based Avenu Insights as of July 1.

One valuable data mining job Avenu Insights can do for the city is to identify the estimated 6,500 unregistered short-term rental operators in San Antonio. The city can take that report and announce a brief grace period to allow offenders to register or face enforcement and fines. The city also could inform short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and VRBO that if they do not begin to require operators to post their permit numbers, the companies will be prohibited from operating in the city. That latter suggestion might be wishful thinking on my part.

People operating in the tech industry are fond of pointing out how new applications offer solutions to old problems. There is less talk about the new problems they create. Look at the scooter industry and all the fanfare about the usefulness of getting people out of their polluting vehicles or offering mass transit users that last mile solution to come and go. Unregulated scooter companies littered city streets and sidewalks with toppled scooters, while some individuals angered by their presence vandalized them, even throwing scooters into the San Antonio River. Scooters are regulated now, and there are far fewer of them, but teenagers and children are regularly seen riding the scooters, dangerously weaving in and out of traffic, on and off sidewalks, despite the ordinance prohibiting underage use.

Short-term rentals at their best offer an experience few hotels can match: making visitors feel like they are living like locals. But they also have taken thousands of residences off the market, either for rent or sale, and this is contributing to the citys acute housing shortage. The least city officials can do is redouble efforts to make operators register and pay for the privilege.

Continue reading here:

Time for short-term rental operators to pay up in San Antonio - San Antonio Report