Does Airbnb provide support for Cities banning Short Term Rentals / Airbnbs?

[Devin4]

We have some major tourist destinations around me in California that are banning short term rentals outright mostly Airbnbs due to partying or illegal llistings. Some of these are major tourist destinations. Does Airbnb provide any support when speaking to city councils as they move and discuss these bans? I'd like to have a contact or two at Airbnb to reach out to help with some of these issues.

[Sally221]

I'm not sure having airbnb support would actually be helpful.  If you are a remote host, as I'm guessing from your profile, you would need to convince people in the community where your listing is that your business is a net asset to that community. Neighborhoods saturated with listings will have push back from people impacted by issues with badly behaved guests or just too many guests in general. Local small time hosts who  engage with municipalities in their areas are in a better position to  persuade local officials that banning SROs is not the answer. They are voters too & elected officials will listen to them, airbnb not so much. I'd recommend finding out why communities are banning SROs and try to mitigate those concerns-trying to keep up an unregulated it's my property I can do as I please appoach is going to lose if a town is fed up with the down side of airbnb.

[Nanxing0]

Airbnb cannot operate above local regulations. If there's a local regulation banning Airbnb then you need to obey it. If you are not happy about the regulation or think it's unreasonable, try to file petitions or movements to abolish the regulation. As a matter of fact Airbnb has been fighting in several cities including NYC that have such regulations in the past years.

[Devin4]

Of course they operate within regulations but I'm sure they have quite a few staff members who monitor and help lobby for these type of things even before the regulations go into place and after. Could do a petition sure but it would help a lot of there was staff at Airbnb who can talk at city council meetings , speak to how they are trying to eliminate party homes which is one of the big issues why some of these cities want to ban them. I know its one of their mandates for airbnb going as a public company

[Nanxing0]

Party homes are actually not the main reason Airbnb got banned in some cities TBH. Guests throwing parties are rare and LTR tenants also throw parties not just STR. The real reason is about housing shortage and hotel business. In a lot of cities since hosts found that doing Airbnb has many more advantages over long term rental (we also found that), so a lot of hosts converted their long term rental units into Airbnb units, which in turn makes the LTR supply less and drive the local rental market up and at the same time we are essentially taking some business away from the hotels, which made the hotel owners not quite happy about that.

[Michael5362]

@Devin4 

Did you ever get a response from or contact someone at Airbnb? We just had our City Council pass a crazy Ordinance (Ban) this week.