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Owners of secondary suites and investment properties would not be eligible for licences. Those same homeowners have already been told that any short-term rentals would make them subject to Vancouver’s proposed empty homes tax, another measure devised to ease the city’s rental crunch.

The vast majority of the 5,353 short-term rentals in the city (85 per cent, to be exact) are listed on Airbnb, according to staff. Toma said that the Silicon Valley giant has been very cooperative with the city and it is the only short-term rental website that has participated in meetings with staff to discuss regulations.

Airbnb spokeswoman Alex Dagg wrote in an emailed statement that the company plans to continue collaborating with the city.

“We are reviewing the city’s report in detail and remain hopeful that Vancouver will become the first major Canadian city to develop fair, easy-to-follow regulations that support home sharing,” she said.

But Airbnb does not allow cities access to information about its hosts’ identities or addresses, which means that even if Vancouver bylaw officers see an unlicensed property on the company’s website, they only get the host’s first name — or a pseudonym — and a circle outlining the general neighbourhood of the home.

That has made enforcement tricky for many cities that tax and license short-term rentals, including Portland.

“That’s the problem with enforcement,” Portland’s Mike Liefeld said in an interview earlier this year. “What you see on that platform is the same thing that we see. We don’t see a lot … unless we want to go through and book a room for every one. That would be tedious, time-consuming, and really not a good use of resources.”