The Miami region was listed as the platform's eighth most popular city for 2018. Miami Beach ranked 18 on the list, and had 1.9 percent share of the total visits for that grouping. "What it is, it's really important to those hosts, it's important to their economic model."Īirbnb provided a list of 52 metropolitan areas ranked by the number of guest arrivals. "So Miami Beach is certainly not part of our economic model in terms of its impact on us," he said. Lehane said about 1,000 of the 5,000 hosts in Miami Beach are doing short-rentals on a full-time basis. The city's zoning map, publicly available, shows the areas in Miami Beach where short-term rentals are clearly allowed and prohibited. He disagreed with city officials who blame Airbnb, saying "Miami Beach hasn't been willing to sit down and actually engage in a conversation." Right? We don't have a lot of the information." In order to block the existing illegal properties on Airbnb, Lehane said, "that requires having to work with the city. Twenty thousand dollar fines on someone making their home available a few times a year to actually help make ends meet?" Allow the activity to be able to take place in the 65 percent of the city that's actually explicitly zoned for this type of activity."Īsked multiple times about the ongoing illegal Miami Beach listings on Airbnb, Lehane said, "the city council members themselves have talked about the fact that their law doesn't actually work particularly well, as you probably know. "I think what seems to me that would be a common sense solution for Miami Beach - happy to do this if they actually really want to sit down and have a constructive conversation - is you could take that 35 percent of the city that's a residential area, make that an exclusionary zone. Miami Beach has a long history with short-term rentals, he said, suggesting the practice should be allowed in the part of the city zoned for commercial use. We've saved landlords from bankruptcy, from foreclosure." "Ultimately, our whole mission is to help landlords," Berney said.
Hosts like Perrea, who work on behalf of Vacayo, are independent contractors, Berney said. "I mean, she probably was just put on the spot and she was probably scared, and I wasn't aware of what she says." CNBC reached Perrea who said, "I'm really sorry but I can't take this call right now." The call was disconnected and she did not respond to a follow-up call.
Berney said she was not aware that Vacayo host Perrea had falsely told code compliance that she was renting the unit to friends. "Right now, we are not entering any additional units in Miami Beach that are not fully compliant," she said. They're the ones who do it and they claim they have no responsibility because, 'oh, we're just an internet platform.' But they're not." In an interview with CNBC, Isabel Berney, co-founder and COO of Vacayo, said the company has exited leases in the prohibited zones. "The easiest way to stop all of this is if the home-sharing platforms simply didn't send people into these neighborhoods," Gelber said.
So far this year, $2.4 million in fines have been issued, records show, but only about $183,000 has been collected. The city expects it will investigate more than 1,000 complaints of illegal rentals this year, up from more than 800 in 2017. "It's people taking very nice properties, buying them and turning them into essentially a flophouse for as many people as they can put in there to extract as much income as they can in the middle of a neighborhood that wasn't zoned for that kind of behavior," the former prosecutor and state representative and senator said.