AirBnB

A recent news article on this sites' news feed said "The Brawl Over Airbnb Is Back On"
Since there have been more then a few discussions on this issue, it's inevitable that if you are on the Board of an Association, you may need to address this issue at some point in time.

Having short term rentals within your development may or may not create problems.
This is simply a place to discuss them.

I have done very little research on the topic, as I have not had to personally deal with the issue.
Many of the research available is negative. Some is positive but most of those were advertising books or pamphlets about making it rich. Therefore, I didn't include them.

However, here is some of what I have found:

The Brawl Over Airbnb Is Back On the 2017 article in Habitat Magazine (linked to from the news feed).

Airbnb and Your Building: Prevention, Detection, and Remedies for Landlords pdf file from a NY attorney

Legal Restrictions to Renting Your Home on Airbnb or Other Rental Services from Nolo

How should I talk to my neighbors, homeowners association, or landlord about Airbnb? Airbnb help file

Adam Ruins Everything - Why Your Airbnb May Be ILLEGAL YouTube Video (segment from a tv show I happened to see last night)

As I said, I've personally never dealt with this situation either as a neighbor, customer, host or board member. Therefore, I don't feel I really have enough information to make a good decision. I expect this may be the case for others who utilize this forum. Hence, the reason for this thread is simply to try and group information from those who may have found an article or two or have first hand experience.

Some HOAs are concerned about wear and tear on the common area, as well as noise from all the in and out and not really knowing whothehell lives in the house. Face it, some people really don't know how to behave or figure just because they're paying to stay somewhere, they can treat the place any way they damn well please!

Recently, the city council in Carmel, IN put forth a proposal to ban Airbnb, which has raised a considerable amount of stink - here's a link to that story: http://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/hamilton-county/2017/01/23/carmel-put-airbnb-homeowners-bind/96775766/

I believe somebody in the state legislature has now proposed a bill to ban such bans. We're halfway through the session, and I really haven't kept up with the issue, so who knows what'll happen (the fight's currently brewing over the state budget anyway)

We have this issue in my high rise in NYC (Manhattan).

People are constantly renting our their apartments and the vacationers treat the building as a hotel. My building has an outdoor swimming pool.
The "guest" run around the lobby in their bathing suits, getting everything wet during the day in the summer, then get drunk at night and try to pet our dogs.. lol. It would almost be comical if it wasn't so annoying. Like elevator wait time has gone up from just a a minute or two, to upwards of 6 minutes (35 story building) because of the tourists. That's a lot when trying to get to work.

This can also be a huge issue in HOA's where most of the members are second home owners, and are generally only there in the summers/weekends. That's the case with my HOA- it's a lake community with less than 40 homes, one of which was constantly being rented every summer. Sometimes you didn't even realize anyone was there, other times the "guests" were sooo loud, you could hear them up the road. You can't fault them either, it's their vacation.

We had one family who lived next door to that house and would call the police if there was any noise after 10. I was told there was an ongoing battle between these neighbors.
But, the rental owner finally put the house up for sale a few months ago. I know many people are hoping the next owner won't rent.

My board still won't put anything in the by-laws about rentals though since it's never been a huge problem.

Tim cited: "...short-term renters cause more problems than owners or their guests. The problems include parking, lack of awareness of the rules, noise and use and abuse of the facilities. Expert James Smith testified that, unlike guests who are typically present with the owners, short-term renters are never present with the owner....Short-term renters require greater supervision and increase administrative expenses."

If we had a lot of short termers in our 200+ condos, our elevator, custodial expenses certainly would increase as well as wear & tear on our corridor carpeting, lobby furniture, poolside furniture, etc.

Those are the main reasons our board approved a rule change limiting rentals to 30 days a few years ago. Our urban twin high rises are very near many attractive event venues and convention hotels & a facility. Our CC&Rs already prohibited condo use for transient purposes. We decided less than 30 days was "transient."

Our fine for violation is $2,000 per incident with the probability of being doubled for repeat offenses. It originally had been only $500, but a condo here can easily get $2,000 for 3 nights, so we upped it.

No, the rental property does not become commercial property. Renting a property also does not constitute “running a business within the property”.


The people staying at/renting the property are subject to the same rules the owners are/were when they stayed there. The Board needs to enforce the rules. In most cases, a rental doesn’t require any additional parking simply because it’s a rental.

Short term residents can be unruly. That I will have to agree with. But if the owner of the property is held accountable for the actions of the renters, the problem will solve itself. Usually.
This is a good discussion. I may talk to the Board about this to see if we should add some verbiage to CC&R’s.

I have had this happen to an association a couple of years ago. It was a 14 unit complex, close to the airport and a Board member was using AirBnB everytime they went to Europe, which was once a month. The other two Board members did nothing and a couple of other residents decided to follow suit. They didn't have the money to take legal action.

If you don't live in an association I don't have a problem. If you don't pay the proper income taxes that is on you.

On the other-hand, people doing it in an association many times are taxing the assets of the association running a business that is visible to others. The rules that you can have a business in your home is old. If you have consulting business where you visit client versus them visiting you is perfectly fine and acceptable. Running a tax business out of your home handling 3000 returns does pose a problem. If you live in a gated community or a high rise with a locked and coded door, you/they are taxing the systems. If you have a community pool and your paying guest have an accident, who is at fault. This is a HOA, not a hotel. Most CCRs prohibit short term or transient rentals. People argue that the rules shouldn't apply to them

In sequence is a series of different single family usages at one time, any different from the SAME single family using a unit all year long ? In highrises many think so big time. They may be correct.

If your jurisdiction has not legislated banning such AiBnB type sequences, the opponents would be well advised to look hard within the Declaration for enough to work with.

In mine, de-constructing a Declaration that prohibits all usage but laconic "single family usage only", a judge recently ruled expansively that short term sequences of single family users in a hotel-like operation, DO NOT constitute 'SINGLE FAMILY'. But enforcing such is another matter.

Wrong, according to the Internal Revenue Service

The property ITSELF becomes commercial - albeit in a residential 'zone' - therefore against the code(s)

In NYC, rentals less than 30 days aren't allowed. But no one enforced it here.

However, there's a new way to get around it now. If you're "hosting" a traveler, it's perfectly legal. So these days, the new thing here
is to be a host. Even though, the reality is you're only there to "host" when they first arrive. The host then disappears for the length of the tourists stay.

Impossible to enforce in rentals, and very difficult to enforce in condo's here.

LindaK5 -

What if a guest of a condo owner gets hurt in one of the common areas? Does your insurance cover them? Because that's what people are doing now, they're calling them guests, and they're hosting.
Since it's perfectly legal, the less than 30 day rental rule wouldn't apply.
New York city has that same rule, but it can't be legally enforced when someone is a guest in your home.

You would have to prove they're paying, and that particular owner is running a business. That's not easy.

I was inspired to look for units in our building the other night given articles related to that and a surprising uptick in noise complaints and fighting (?!) in our building; found about 5% of our units available on AirBnB. It's all mostly mid 20-somethings who bought the places for the express purpose of renting them out. This is very clearly against our CC&Rs, and it's a bad idea since it's an access-controlled building. Personally, I prefer to let people do what they want as long as it doesn't significantly intrude on others' enjoyment of their units or cause a health / safety issue, but we've clearly crossed that line at this point. You want to screw up your own house, that's lovely; but one of the AirBnb tenants got in a fight with someone in the building.

We sent this to the association's lawyer who will send cease and desist letters. Failing that, we'll just ask for the lawyer to pursue some sort of court order requiring them to remove the ad from AirBnB (which should be enough to kill the business) and then bill back all legal fees and court costs back to the unit owners. I imagine this will be far more effective than wasting time with piddly fines and fees. I guess we'll find out if we can do that. All documentation, pictures, notes, profiles, etc. have been saved for future reference. Unless they do a gut renovation and change the views from the building, they'll be found out very quickly if they repost the ad.

How do you enforce it when the tenant says they're not a paying guest?

In my neighborhood (NYC), the ads these days do not give an an exact address. Just a few pics and a general description with a price and an email. These people know their neighbors are checking up on them and are doing everything they can to circumvent the issue. Going after the owner is nearly impossible without proof.
All they have to say is it's a friend, a relative, a friend of a friend or whatever. The condo would have to prove it's a business. Neighbors can claim people come and go until they're blue in the face, they still don't have proof it's a business.

It's a huge issue here, and so far, it's nearly impossible to do anything about it.

But, if anyone has actually caught someone doing it, and fines have worked, I'd be very interested in hearing about it.

Fines' amounts are in your bylaws, JH? So there'a an actual fine a mount for rentals fewer than x days?? What is it?

I would say that the CC&R regs that prohibit commercial business from being run in the community would cover at least one aspect of this problem.
I can tell you that here in Las Vegas this has become an issue. The City of Las Vegas and Clark County have adopted "party house" ordnances
that limit a rental to a minimum of 90 days. Residents in both HOA and non HOA communities have complained about new people every weekend from drunken and disorderly conduct, fights with shots fired and the daily renters destroying neighboring properties.

AirBnb's infringe on the rights of people that live in their homes, raise their families and don't want to live in a commercial or rental community.
These are had to enforce and you need 24-7 properly trained security to both spot it report it to the governing bodies.

This topic has generated good comments. A not-infrequent accusation in the AirBnB debate here is that only NIMBY's are beefing about AirBnB usage ( that is if such is illegal or in violation of covenants etc ).

Or that most activity is intermittent and merely "gets the mortgage paid".

Unfortunately that's not the end of the story. Credible research is beginning to indicate that conventional rental housing is being removed from the market to tap into more profitable AirBnB demand ( we have a form of rent control ).

Hotel/motel industry sources are beginning to beef about having to charge travel-related levies & observe fair wage practices , make deductions etc. This might be fair or not , but

Whatever it is AirBnB is not without some victims. Those victims aren't just within condos & HOAs.

Read your documents. If you want to amend the CCRs, they probably require a certain percentage of homeowners to approve the change. You could hold a special homeowner’s meeting to vote or do so at the annual meeting, although I’d recommend a special meeting (the annual meeting has enough going on with people presenting annual reports and board elections).

In the meantime, if this homeowner’s guests are causing problems like lots of noise, trash, parking etc., your board needs to enforce the rules relating to those issues – it’s not about picking on him, but the rules are there for a reason. In fact, bad behavior by some Airbnb guests is a big reason why so many communities are wrestling over Airbnb rentals. Since Airbnb is probably here to stay, every community will have to think about how they want to address it – what works for your community may not work for mine, so this guy’s rentals is a good opportunity for your community to discuss the issue in details and come out with some ground rules everyone can live with.

See the headline article about AirBnB kicking back part of the rental to the HOA.