A year ago, Airbnb launched city portala platform for the city and local governments provide data, tools and resources to take action on short-term rentals in their jurisdictions. Since, 100 city partners, including Sacramento, California; Miami-Dade County, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; and other cities have started using the platform.
The way it works is that cities can access the city portal dashboard to receive information on the characteristics of the short-term rental market and the receipts of the tourist tax paid where tax agreements have been established.
From this information, city governments can see where customers are coming from, adjust tourism marketing, and develop and manage short-term rental policies and regulations.
Governments with applicable short-term rental laws may also use City Portal to display Airbnb listings in their registration systems.
“Since November 2020, we have responded to over 1,000 application requests from City Portal compliance tools partners,” Chris Lehane, Airbnb’s global policy and communications manager, said via email. mail.
For example, in Sacramento, City Portal was used to implement the city’s short-term rental registration requirement. Additionally, city officials were able to enforce laws by taking action against listings violating city regulations through the platform.
“Airbnb has worked with us to integrate its city portal into our short-term rental registration requirement,” the mayor of Sacramento said. Darrell Steinberg, in a report. “I wish other platforms would do whatever Airbnb needs to do to make sure we have what we need to enforce our short-term rental laws.”
Kauai County, Hawaii also used the platform in the same way. “City Portal works a bit like a backdoor pass to Airbnb’s platform that our application team can use to query listings and directly access ads and other relevant data,” according to Kaaina Hull, director of the Kauai County Planning Department.
Regarding the changes the platform has seen over the past year, Lehane said that after starting with 18 pilot partners last September, the platform has grown to include 100 partner cities in the world.
“The city portal was born at the height of the pandemic last September, but the product was built on years of feedback from working with local governments,” he said. “Since 2015, Airbnb has sought to work to develop and support regulatory frameworks.”
During that time, he added, Airbnb has helped advance more than 1,000 regulatory frameworks for short-term rentals, including in 70% of their top 200 geographies, and has collected and remitted over $3.4 billion in tourism taxes.
As for what’s next, Lehane said, the goal is to have more than 250 global City Portal partners by September 2022.
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