New York City Expands Short-Term Rental Ban by 2,300 More Buildings

25.08.2023 - 13:57 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal

New York City is in the process of getting all the pieces in place to clamp down on illegal short-term rentals pending a July deadline when fines against both hosts and platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com for any non-compliance would begin.

The law is a tough one. Unlike cities like San Diego that cap the number of permissible vacation rental properties or Lucerne, Switzerland, which bars hosts from renting out their units for more than 90 days annually, the Big Apple requires hosts to be present in the same unit during the stay, and prohibits internal door locks within the unit.

Depending on how stringently the law winds up getting enforced — and hosts and platforms have dodged such mandates in the past — this would mean that a host who took a weekend getaway, week-long vacation or owned a second or third home, couldn’t put their properties on the short-term rental market under these circumstances. Big real estate interests and property managers will undoubtably attempt to find loopholes to do business in what Transparent said was the 13th largest U.S. short-term rental market at the end of 2022 as measured by the number of two-bedroom apartments listed as short-term rentals.

Panama City Beach, Florida, was the number 1 market with 3,658 two-bedroom apartments on the short-term rental market at the end of 2022 compared with 1,855 in New York City, according to Transparent estimates.

New York City opened the host application process March 6, and also gave landlords and apartment managers the ability to apply to place their properties on a Prohibited Buildings List, meaning any rental in the building would be barred.

2,362 Prohibited Buildings in the First 9 Days

A spokesperson for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice told Skift Tuesday that its Office of Special Enforcement “has received approximately 81 host registration applications and 2,362 buildings have been added to the Prohibited Buildings List.”

While the applications to designate a building as barred from short-term rentals is ample, the number of host registration applications to date — about nine per day — is paltry.

While the City is adding to its list of buildings where short-term rentals would be barred, based on building manager applications, Airbnb is attempting to sign up multifamily buildings in a variety of geographies, and is building tools for property managers to handle short-term rentals in their buildings.

Owners and other hosts need to prove to the City that their lease or building doesn’t bar short-term rentals to get registered with they city, and they are subject to as much $5,000 fines per infraction for flouting the law. Starting at an unspecified date in July, the City would levy $1,500