Airbnb bans hosts with multiple listings in SF
Airbnb is making a new effort to play nice with San Francisco, despite a fractious relationship that has heated up in recent months with the vacation-rental company suing its hometown and lawmakers considering new restrictions on rentals in private homes.
The company said it is building into its website a way to automatically bar San Francisco hosts who control multiple listings, sometimes a sign of landlords running illegal hotels.
Hosts with legitimate reasons for multiple listings, such as property-management companies, legal hotels or people with two or more rooms to rent in their homes, can request exceptions.
The feature will take effect Nov. 1, but Airbnb said it already has jettisoned hundreds of San Francisco listings since April, when it promised to crack down on illegal commercial operators.
San Francisco law allows homeowners to rent out only their own home.
Since no one can reside in more than one home, having more than one listing on the site is a red flag.
Informal hacker hostels, which cram temporary renters into bunk beds, often six or more to a room, are a phenomenon of the recent housing crunch and may violate planning, zoning and building codes.
(Hosts who had registered with the city by Oct. 11 would observe the current limitations: 90 days for unhosted rentals, and 365 for hosted ones.) That is even stricter than the 75-day-a-year cap that voters rejected as part of last year’s Proposition F, a San Francisco ballot initiative that Airbnb spent $8 million to battle.
San Francisco regulators frequently ask why the company won’t pull the plug on whole-home listings once they exceed the city’s 90-day annual cap and why it doesn’t create a separate field in the online listings for San Francisco registration numbers, something it briefly offered but removed several months ago.
Jennifer Fieber, political campaign director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, said she was dubious about Airbnb’s self-policing, noting that while it temporarily removed illegal listings in New York, some later popped back again.