Airbnb fights back as pending laws seek to curtail home stays

Supervisor Mark Farrell is among those proposing a change in how the vacation rentals are handled. Supervisor Mark Farrell is among those proposing a change in how the vacation rentals are handled. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Airbnb fights back as pending laws seek to curtail home stays 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Airbnb is working aggressively to combat laws proposed for San Francisco and California that seek to rein in the controversial practice of turning homes into hotels. The company is marshaling its hosts to contact lawmakers, preparing to mount a vigorous defense in Sacramento, and assembling research to support its contention that Airbnb’s services benefit local economies.

At the state level, Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, has proposed SB593, which would compel vacation-rental companies to disclose detailed information such as host addresses, number of guest nights and amounts paid, to cities and counties where the practice is legal. The goal is to ensure that local hotel taxes are paid. SB593 would also prohibit online vacation-rental companies from doing business in areas where the practice is banned, as a way of reinforcing local controls. It would authorize cities and counties to impose penalties of up to $5,000 a day on hosting companies that fail to comply after being given written notice of violations.

“This is no longer couch surfing; this is a multibillion-dollar business,” McGuire said. “Our bill is simple: All it does is make online vacation rental businesses follow local laws.”

Airbnb sees it quite differently.

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The bill would make it “incredibly difficult for Californians to share their homes,” Airbnb said in an e-mail to hosts, urging them to contact state lawmakers before the bill is heard in the Senate Housing and Transportation Committee on Tuesday. It also set up a website to fight the proposed law.

Airbnb recently started collecting hotel taxes in San Francisco and San Jose, and soon will do so in Malibu, but it does not identify the names and addresses of its hosts. Tax collectors say that makes their job harder because they can’t catch scofflaw hosts.

Airbnb fears that releasing personal information about hosts could cause them to flee to other platforms that don’t release the information, the company said when the idea was floated in San Francisco. For instance, rival site HomeAway/VRBO acts as more of a classified listing service, so that company does not know how often guests stay at homes and thus can’t provide that information to regulators.

“These corporations have the means and the tools necessary to collect the tax and give the information to the tax collector,” McGuire said.

In San Francisco, Airbnb supported the measure known as the “Airbnb law,” enacted in February after more than two years of debate that included input from Airbnb and its local hosts. But almost immediately, critics — and even the city department charged with enforcing it — said the law was toothless, and the city now has two competing proposals to toughen it. The more draconian, from Supervisor David Campos, would so severely curtail home stays as to eliminate them, Airbnb says. A set of amendments, proposed last week by Supervisor Mark Farrell and Mayor Ed Lee, would limit all hosts to offering 120 days a year of vacation rentals, while streamlining enforcement and registration.

While Airbnb is unenthusiastic about the amendments, it downright abhors the Campos suggestion, as well as a forthcoming ballot initiative in November that would ask voters to clamp down on rentals.

On Sunday, Airbnb plans to send an e-mail blast to hundreds of business owners and dozens of community and merchant organizations in San Francisco trying to show how its services benefit their bottom lines.

A study it commissioned showed that Airbnb contributed $469 million to the city’s economy last year — up from $56 million three years earlier.

Of that, $355 million was guest spending on rooms, meals, travel and other items, while the rest was indirect spending — economic activity generated from the direct spending. Hosts earn an average of $13,000 a year, it said — “money they use to pay the bills and stay in San Francisco and shop at businesses like yours.” Typical properties are booked just 6½ nights a month, Airbnb said. Guests stay an average of five nights, spending $1,223 per trip.

Airbnb separately has said it is remitting almost $1 million a month to San Francisco for the city’s 14 percent hotel tax. That implies its receipts are $7 million a month. At an average rent of $180 a night, that means San Francisco has 38,900 Airbnb guest-nights per month, or about 1,300 a day — equivalent to more than three hotels the size of the Union Square Marriott, albeit with guests dispersed widely around the city.

Many cities prohibit residential rentals of less than 30 days, but only loosely enforce that ban. Still, Airbnb’s phenomenal success at turning thousands of homeowners into impromptu innkeepers has inspired feverish debate about the impact on affordable housing and neighborhood character, which in turn spurred San Francisco to enact its vacation-rental law.

Founded six years ago, the company is now worth an estimated $20 billion, has more than 1 million listings worldwide and has raised more than $680 million.

McGuire said a state law would help empower local controls over short-term rentals. As a member of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, he supported legislation that actually increased vacation rentals, he said.

“I support folks having the ability to rent their homes for short-term vacation rentals,” he said. “But big corporations can’t choose the laws they want to abide by and the laws they don’t.”

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid