The short-term home rental company Airbnb would really prefer to ignore hosts’ local regulations, leaving compliance up to individuals instead of the platform. However, the company has made a key concession to its hometown of San Francisco, pulling listings from hosts with multiple residences off the site, which violate current laws in San Francisco.
What’s still missing is a permit check. San Francisco only allows people to rent out either a space in their own home or te entire residence for a limited number of days each year. Since someone can, by definition, only have one home, that means the site can block users in the city from blocking multiple listings from the same person.
Shared residences like hacker hostels, which cram as many people as possible into a single bedroom, also aren’t allowed on the site.
That makes sense, critics say, but why not leave a space for users’ San Francisco registration numbers and require those too while they’re at it? If the company is enforcing part of one rule in advance of possible even stricter rules on the ballot.
This week, the city’s Board of Supervisors began looking at a proposal that would limit the total number of days that someone could rent out a space each year to 60 days, whether they’re occupying it or not.
Airbnb bans hosts with multiple listings in SF [SFGate]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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