Miami-Dade has hundreds of illegal Airbnbs. Now county wants to water down rules.
Miami-Dade County is considering loosening restrictions on short-term rental companies even as hundreds of home hotels operate within its limits illegally.
On Wednesday, the board of county commissioners will weigh amendments to a 2017 ordinance that will strip down the regulations for short-term rentals in unincorporated Miami-Dade by letting companies off the hook for allowing unregistered rentals to persist on their sites. The ordinance is the result of a two-year negotiation between the most prominent short-term rental company, Airbnb, and Miami-Dade County about how best to regulate the booming home hospitality business.
“We want everyone to be registered, compliant and educated,” said Lourdes Gomez, deputy director of the county’s Regulatory and Economic Resources Department, which oversees zoning and permitting. “We are happy to have the cooperation of these platforms.”
The proposal would eliminate an existing regulation that requires home-sharing platforms to prevent unregistered hosts from operating rentals on their sites. The county has not enforced the provision because, says Gomez, federal law prevents platforms from policing the content on their sites.
The county began requiring anyone who rents out a home or part of a home for less than 30 days to get a license, called a “certificate of use,” when it passed its first ordinance in 2017. It prevented Airbnb from processing payments for unlicensed rentals and said the county would not hold Airbnb responsible as long as the company provided the county all certificate of use numbers, associated addresses and host contact information on a weekly basis, and removed listings with invalid or expired license numbers after notification from the county.
Only a small fraction of owners with listings on Airbnb have registered. As of this summer, there were 725 entire homes listed on Airbnb in the county’s unincorporated areas, according to data scraped from Airbnb on the real estate site BNBVestor. Airbnb declined to provide the total number of listings. Gomez said only 69 short-term rentals in Miami-Dade have licenses today.
While the county would prefer that everyone operating a short-term rental be registered, Gomez said the main goal is to ensure short-term rentals operate “invisibly,” so as not to bother neighbors. The county’s code enforcement team will investigate a short-term rental if a complaint is made, but most complaints are unrelated to short-term rentals, said Gomez.
Miami-Dade’s lax regulations make it a target for real estate investors who buy up multiple properties, take them out of the local rental market, and rent them to tourists full time, shrinking the pool of affordable housing, a Herald investigation from June 2019 found.
The new ordinance commissioners will consider Wednesday removes responsibility for unregistered listings from Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms. It will require Airbnb to inform hosts of the county’s rules for short-term rentals and link to the county’s certificate of use application website, provide Miami-Dade with the total number of Airbnbs and total number of nights rented on a quarterly basis, and respond to subpoenas from the county for information about listed properties. It will also require the company to work with the county to ensure that properties with three adjudicated violations in a 12-month period aren’t able to continue to operate.
Commissioners gave the amended ordinance the initial go-ahead in October. On Wednesday the Infrastructure and Capital Improvements Committee will vote on it before it goes back to the full board for final approval.
Airbnb called the new ordinance a “win-win.”
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“No two communities are the same and that’s why Airbnb worked with Miami-Dade County for nearly two years to create regulations tailored to the county’s specific needs,” said a spokesperson for Airbnb.
Miami-Dade’s collaborative approach contrasts with Miami Beach’s long history of litigation with Airbnb. Just last month a judge struck down Miami Beach’s steep fine structure starting at $20,000 per violation for hosts who operate illegally.
To Miami Beach’s never-ending frustration, Airbnb has long claimed to be merely a platform irresponsible for policing the content on its site. But a recent shooting at an Airbnb party house in California and Vice’s investigation of a web of dozens of phony listings have pushed the company to pledge to crack down on bad actors, a change Miami Beach welcomes. The city recently succeeded in requiring hosts to input a license number in order to list their properties on Airbnb. The city said it will prosecute hosts who enter bogus numbers.
Instead of looking to Miami Beach for inspiration, Miami-Dade County views the Miami Beach approach as legally fraught. Instead, it is looking to Denver, a city Gomez said has similar rules in place for short-term rentals and enjoys a high compliance rate.
One key difference: Florida law prohibits municipalities from regulating the duration and frequency of short-term rentals.
In reality, Denver approaches short-term rentals very differently.
Denver only grants short-term rental licenses to people who rent their primary residences, preventing the proliferation of big real estate businesses on Airbnb that Miami-Dade sees. According to BNBVestor, more than two-thirds of entire home listings on Airbnb in Miami-Dade are managed by hosts with more than one property on the site.
Miami-Dade’s 2017 ordinance has a similar rule for low-density zoning ares, requiring the person renting a short-term unit to also live there for at least six months out of the year. That zoning area holds about 250,000 residences, accounting for about 60 percent of all units in the unincorporated area.
In July, Denver began prosecuting hosts who have lied on required affidavits confirming their Aribnbs are primary residences. As of September, the Denver Post found four people faced felony charges, 154 people had surrendered their licenses and another 126 had withdrawn applications.
Eric Escudero, a spokesperson for Denver’s licensing department, said compliance measured in the rate of short-term rentals registered with the city has skyrocketed since Denver began enforcing the primary residence requirement this year from 50 percent a year ago to 77 percent today.
Gomez said she will measure the success of the new ordinance by the compliance rate.
“I think this can work and I hope it does,” she said. “If it doesn’t, I’ll be asking a year from now to tweak it.”
This story has been updated to clarify the county’s legal position regarding regulating home-sharing platforms.
This story was originally published November 12, 2019 at 11:03 AM.
