Airbnb is launching a marketing campaign underscoring an image of its Toronto hosts as regular people supplementing their income from the occasional rental of their homes.

Radio ads on three stations start Tuesday, featuring the voices of Airbnb hosts, who cite the need for help with their mortgages in Toronto’s pricey housing market.

“Airbnb helps Toronto residents earn a few extra thousand dollars a year to cover expenses. . . We’re glad we can help Toronto families make a little extra money,” concludes the ad’s voiceover.

TV, transit and digital promotions will follow in the run-up to the city’s anticipated discussion of short-term rental regulations this spring or summer, said Alex Dagg, the company’s Canadian policy lead.

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The hosts in the ads are real and their stories about how Airbnb helps them make ends meet should be heard, she said.

“Our host community is who we are,” said Dagg.

The pitch counters criticism that Airbnb is less about hosts sharing their primary residences than it is about business for a few individuals behind a disproportionate number of rental listings.

A Friday report from Fairbnb, a group organized by the hotel workers union that is pushing for the regulation of home sharing, says Airbnb accounts for 85 per cent of listings in the city, most of which are downtown. More than half of Airbnb revenue is collected by only 16 per cent of its hosts, said the report.

It says Airbnb is effectively turning condo buildings into unaccountable hotels and cutting into the city’s supply of traditional rentals.

Fairbnb uses “scraped data which is not reliable. It’s based on available listings only and really doesn’t tell the true story,” said Dagg.

“We have just under 10,000 hosts in Toronto. Eighty-one per cent are sharing their primary residence only. The typical host is earning slightly under $5,000 a year,” she said, adding that the company shares its data regularly with the city.

“Sometimes it can look like multiple listings in their primary residence because they may share one bedroom, which will be one listing, a second bedroom which would be another listing,” said Dagg.

Hosts set the rate for their own listings. Airbnb takes 3 per cent of the rental fee.

“Typically, it’s people like teachers who may not work in the summer, who travel and share their home when they’re away. We have a number of flight attendants who share their home when they’re not there,” said Dagg. “It just provides modest and supplemental income for thousands of families in Toronto.”

Mable Chu, who will be featured in one of Airbnb’s TV spots, rents out rooms in her five-bedroom home near Bathurst and Bloor streets.

The income she charges — about $49 a night or about $1,100 a month — is helping pay for a pricey renovation, she said on Monday. An accountant, Chu says she looks at the expense as an investment, but nevertheless found that, “at the end of the day, we were a little strapped.”

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She said she only rents about half the time. Sometimes her children need the space and sometimes she wants a break. But Chu describes her Airbnb guests as friends, who join her family for meals and activities.

“We’re sharing a common space. I’m not their mother but it’s nice to know what their agenda is. Is there anything I can do? Do they want to go sightseeing? I can show them how to get to Niagara Falls. Do they want to get downtown?” she said.

She has taken guests from Spain to look at college programs, a longer-term renter from the Netherlands, who was working in Toronto on a PhD, tutored her daughter.

“I’m not a business and I don’t want to be in business. I’m just doing this to earn a little bit of extra income,” she said.