Tuesday 28 June 2016

More Than Half of NYC’s Airbnb Listings In 2015 Were Illegal, Report Finds

New York City’s crusade to bring down illegal Airbnb apartment shares continues

As Governor Cuomo mulls over signing into law another ban on full-apartment Airbnb rentals for less than 30 days, new statistics that show how rampant the room share website’s abuse is in New York City have been revealed. Stats pulled by MFY Legal Service and Housing Conservation Coordinators (who, judging by their names, most certainly don’t have an interest in kicking Airbnb to the curb, right?) say that over half of the Airbnb listings in NYC last year were illegal, the Post reports.

According to the report, 28,765 of the site’s 51,397 listings in NYC in 2015 offered to book an entire apartment for less than 30 days—which is already illegal under current laws. The same report found that 8,058 of those were "impact listings" that virtually served as hotels, and are the kind of listing that the new legislation against Airbnb is aimed at bringing down.

The report claims that 30-percent of the listings are controlled by operators who are essentially using the listings as hotels. These hosts, who rent more than one unit ( places they do not live) for at least three months a year or had a single listing up for more than six months a year (places they probably don’t call their primary residence), netted $317.5 million in revenue in 2015.

A spokesman for Airbnb accused the city’s hotel industry, which has been widely affected by Airbnb, of sponsoring a "misleading study" that "[protects] the interests of the well-connected hotel industry."



from
http://ny.curbed.com/2016/6/28/12050662/airbnb-illegal-nyc-study

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