By:  Hellen Zaboulani

Hundreds of New York City landlords have banned short-term rental listings in their buildings, just days after the city opened the registration portal in a bid to regulate short-term rentals on platforms such as Airbnb.

s reported by Crain’s NY, the city portal was opened last Monday, allowing hosts to register units listed on short-term rental sites, and also allowing property owners to sign up to ban short-term hosting at their properties.  Some 1,474 applications were already cast, as of midnight on Thursday, by landlords to ban the short term listings at their buildings, said Christian Klossner, executive director of the Office of Special Enforcement, which is managing the portal.  By contrast, there were only about 52 hosts who completed their applications for registration, Klossner said. Dozens more hosts began but have yet to complete their applications.

The online registration portal is the city’s first step towards stopping Airbnb and similar sites from using city housing as temporary vacation rentals.  Once the registrations are complete, the city will actually have the capacity to enforce and stop short term bookings on platforms like Airbnb. On the one hand, there will be a banned building list, which based on the quick five-minute landlord application, the government can use to stop a booking.   Also, any host who fails to complete the registration will be subject to enforcement later this year.  Additionally, not all applications will be approved, as many listings for buildings in certain zoning designations will be denied, due to the city’s housing law which prohibits rentals shorter than 30 days in certain zoning areas.  Subsequently, Airbnb and similar platforms won’t be able to process bookings for units which aren’t registered.

As per Crain’s, currently there are some 7,200 short-term rental listings for entire rooms or apartments in New York city that have been booked recently and often, as per data from Inside Airbnb, which tracks the booking company.  There are also 4,656 listings for private rooms, as per Inside Airbnb. In total there are still about 41,533 Airbnb listings in NYC, probably already down substantially since efforts to regulate were initiated. In the fourth quarter of 2022, Airbnb said that 51 percent of gross nights booked were located in urban areas, though specific data for NY is not available. In 2022, Airbnb finally reported its first full-year of profits, with $1.9 billion in income, off of $8.4 billion in total revenue.

As per Crain’s, the short-term rental registration portal was started when the city council passed Local Law 18 in late 2021.  Enforcement of the rules will officially start on May 9, but as per an announcement posted on (and later taken down from) the Office of Special Enforcement’s website last month, hosts will likely have till later in the summer before crackdowns begin.  Once it starts, platforms like Airbnb and Homeaway will not be able to process payment for an unregistered unit.

“We’re pleased to support the implementation of Local Law 18, which will help improve enforcement of illegal short-term rental activity,” the Real Estate Board of New York wrote in a statement. “REBNY has already begun encouraging members to access and utilize the city’s new registration portal as part of this important effort.” The group explained that prior to the law, building owners and managers could still be held accountable for the short-term rentals at their buildings even if they had reported it.