Airbnb and other short-term rental sites have become a fixture of the tourism economy all over the world, but it continues to be an uncomfortable fit for cities that both want tourists and fear, or have, housing shortages.
While few cities (New York, for one) bar short-term lets of an entire apartment, a growing trend is to set a limit on how many days out of the year an apartment can be rented, and to ban apartments from being completely set aside for vacation rental.
This week, San Francisco's new registration system comes into full force, with a 120-day cap; if unregistered apartments are listed on websites, the website operator will be liable for sizable fines. Because of registration costs, and because some apartments can't be listed under the new rules, there will be fewer apartments available in San Francisco.
Amsterdam, which has lived for a while with a 60-day limit, is about to cut that back to 30 days, and also to limit rentals to 4 people per apartment. In Amsterdam and London, Airbnb has said it would block listings that covered too many days, and announced a few weeks ago that it would do the same in Paris, but only in four central neighborhoods (1e through 4e arrondissements). The city is demanding the company comply with the law in the other 16 districts.
In Portugal, where nearly a quarter of all home purchases last year were by foreigners, mostly from Britain, France and Brazil, another issue is front-and-center, with real estate and vacation rental companies fighting moves that would give condominiums and home-owner associations more of a say in whether apartments could be rented to vacationers.
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