VANCOUVER—City of Vancouver staff say they have made headway enforcing new rules intended to crack down on short-term rentals the city believes takes apartments and homes out of the long-term rental pool.

But one resident who has complained to the city for four years about illegal Airbnbs in her building said she has yet to receive any information about the status of her long-standing complaints or see the listings removed.

“There was a news story ... in 2014, where I spoke up about an owner-realtor in my condo building who, at that time, had turned three affordable rental suites into Airbnbs,” said Ulrike Rodrigues, who also brought her concerns to city councillors and spoke in favour of the new bylaws.

“It’s now 2018, and the same person is still running Airbnb-type hotel rooms in my building, and it’s increased to 11.”

Since the new bylaw came into effect on April 19, the city has started prosecution against commercial operators who were running 89 listings, and plans to start the enforcement process on over 400 listings. Short-term rental operators who violate the city’s new bylaw can face fines of up to $1,000 a day, and the 89 listings that are headed to court could yield $890,000 in fines for the city.

The new city bylaw allows people to list only their primary residence on platforms such as Airbnb for a less than 30-day rental period. If they want to list multiple rooms in their primary residence, they must get two city business licences.

Kathryn Holme, chief licence inspector for the city, said she and her enforcement team have also seen around 400 listings taken off short term rental platforms like Airbnb, or changed to bookings that require a minimum 30-day stay.

The purpose of the new bylaw is to increase Vancouver’s long-term rental supply, and the city considers those over-30-days listings to have been converted to long-term rental.

The 11 listings in Rodrigues’s building have all now been changed to “extended stay” (longer than 30 days), meaning the short-term rental bylaw limiting listings to the owners’ primary residence, and requiring a short-term rental business licence, no longer applies. But the owner would still have to apply for a long-term rental property business licence, according to the city.

The city’s licensing department is now trying to get ahead of commercial operators who appear to have been able to get a short-term rental licence from the city but have been able to enter “duplicate or incorrect” licence numbers for multiple listings in a new business licence field that now appears on all short-term Airbnb listings for Vancouver.

Some operators have also entered the word “exempt” in the field, and have still been able to list their property.

Airbnb did not respond to a question from StarMetro about why their platform would allow someone to list different properties with the same business licence number, or why a user would be able to enter text in a business licence field.

Instead, the company sent StarMetro a statement saying they were co-operating with city staff.

The city is currently focusing its current enforcement efforts on commercial operators, said Kaye Krishna, Vancouver’s general manager of development, buildings and licensing, and is giving people who want to legally list their primary residence until the end of August to apply for a business licence before starting to enforce the new rules.

Airbnb is giving users a similar grace period, Krishna said.

“(Airbnb has) already created the required (business licence) field,” she said, “and they’ll start kicking people off the site if they see that they’re not complying with the rules by the end of the summer.”

It’s up to the city to audit the validity of the business licence field, added Holme.

Airbnb, which represents 88 per cent of short-term rental listings in Vancouver, signed a memorandum of understanding with the city in April, agreeing to share its data with the city.

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City staff will receive the first batch of data from Airbnb this summer, said Krishna. Until then, the city will continue to rely on “scraped” data (an automated way of collecting information from sites like Airbnb or Craigslist).

City communications staff declined to say whether the city is investigating Rodrigues’ complaint, saying the city cannot comment on specific cases.

“I would love to see the city do something about it, because people like me who’ve been very patient and encouraging of the city, we need something to see that they’re going to do something fast,” Rodrigues said.

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