Palm Beach County Florida Delisted!

[Christopher961]

Airbnb delisted all of my properties by accident and will not then them back on. I'm bleeding money everyday, yet no help. Unbelievable I can't even get someone on the phone that has any info. They keel escalating it, yet no one calls back. 

[Michael4626]

Christopher,
The same thing happened to me on Tuesday. My account numbers have been in the listing since day 1. I have been inquiring since December why my numbers are not visible in my listing. No one responded after countless contacts. Then the delisting email arrive. Emails, calls, and escalation seem to do nothing. The process is terrible and needs a method to resolve these issues..quickly. 

[William-and-Carlos0]

I had the same problem. I have had active short term rental licenses with city but I accidentally input wrong number. I was delisted but I was told that it was a glitch in system. I waited for 2-3 weeks and after multiple calls to agents, one finally recognized my error. I corrected error and was eventually told that the re-listing will be done but they could not provide a timeline for when that would be done. It has been a total of over 6 weeks since de-listed and I have had no further response to my queries, even to assure whether in fact they have recognized my corrections. Fortunately, VRBO has continued to give me sufficient reservations, but I am concerned about the long term. I'm actively looking to list with other third party listings. I am demoralized by AirBNB's apparent disregard.

[Brian1613]

I have been down for almost 30 days as well. It’s not affecting everybody uniformly. I went through 10 days where they wouldn’t even tell me what the heck was going on. Here is what I know, and what you can do:

One of the principle problems is that Airbnb tells you to file for a Tourist Development Tax Number,  and a Business Tax Receipt (BTR) number.  BDT is a CITY tax. In my case, West Palm Beach.  If you filed that BDT number you were screwed up, in part, for having the wrong information.  Airbnb wanted the LBTR (County Business Tax Receipt) number.  

Their Tax department is like OZ, and won’t speak to you, other than at  arm’s length. I found out about this when I was trying to figure out what Airbnb could be having a problem with, since the Tax people did not ever get back to me. I contacted City, and needed a zoning inspection AND that the transfer of my Florida DBPR license, from the prior owners, had not gone through. So I fixed that, and figured I’m done.  I put in the BTR to a link that they offer to correct the file. They then say that they will fix it within fourteen days. 

At 12,  a woman from the Tax Department emails me, and says that the County doesn’t show my BTR as active. I went to the Tourist Development Tax office, downtown, and asked. There I found out that they do not get the BTRs from the city. As we were trying to sort it out, the woman asked what my county LBTR was. I said I didn’t know that there was one.  I filed for a TDT. 

“You don’t need an LBTR to get a TDT number.”  

Oh, joy.  So I paid the $58 and got an LBTR number.

I went back, and amended my record  on my Airbnb to show the TDT,LBTR combo. Hit save. 

That is not enough. 

The bigger problem, I found out when I got a more sympathetic operator today, is that they have some “glitch” that they have to manually override, to get past that 180 day minimum thing.  Why? Who knows. Best guess would be that, since Airbnb is suing the County Tax Assessor, and Gannon is suing them, that someone built the doomsday 180 day calc to deal with the County potentially changing the law (They HAVE NOT), and then somehow it activated for anyone whose tax number wasn’t correct.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

I will write up another post that spells out everything that you should do to get right with this. Even with that, it looks to be a giant clusterf*** that requires them to do more. 

If you search for Palm Beach, you’ll find the other post after about 1:30p on 02/25/20