California Apartment Association

San Francisco will legalize short-term rentals like those offered online by AirBnB, but that greenlight comes with some stipulations – and lingering concerns among both landlord and tenant groups.

The Board of Supervisors’ approval of vacation rentals came Tuesday, with a second and final vote expected later this month.

“The status quo isn’t working; we have seen an explosion in short-term rentals,” Board President David Chiu said, according to this San Francisco Chronicle article.

The story says the ordinance, which lifts the city’s ban on residential rentals shorter than 30 days, is set to take effect in February and will:

• Only let permanent residents offer short-term rentals.
• Launch a city registry for hosts.
• Require collection of a hotel tax.
• Restrict entire-home rentals to 90 days annually.
• Mandate that each listing carry $500,000 in liability insurance.
• Set enforcement guidelines for the Planning Department.

A remaining concern: Property owners who otherwise would have rented out a unit long-term may opt instead for the AirBnB model.

Having tourists stay for a few days instead of making a home available for a tenant on a yearlong lease may be appealing to some, but it threatens to further shrink San Francisco’s already meager supply of available rental housing.

“Our fear is that we’ll lose thousands of units to Airbnb use and those are units we need desperately for San Franciscans who live and work here,” Charley Goss of the San Francisco Apartment Association, said in this story, which includes video of Goss, from KTVU.

In his column on the KCBS website, Phil Matier also points to implications for the rental market.

“In cities like San Francisco and Oakland where the rents are really tough, people are taking entire units of apartments off the market for long-term renters and are Airbnb-ing them out because there’s more money to be made and less hassle because you don’t have a tenant who can sue you,” Matier writes. “The landlord can simply get them in and out.”

Related content:

• Supes back ‘Airbnb law’ to allow short-term rentals, with limits (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Ordinance regulating AirBnB-type rentals approved (KTVU)
• Phil Matier: San Francisco Supervisors Pass Controversial Airbnb Law (KCBS)
• Airbnb Gets Off Easy in San Francisco. Hosts? Not So Much (BloombergBusinessweek)