City of Portland Implementing New Short-Term Rental Law

We’ve been waiting to hear the verdict of Portland City Council’s new Ordinance and find out whether Airbnb is going to comply with the new rules, and it looks like they are! The information below is from a press release that was just sent out today. You can read the full document here: https://strpermit.com/documents

On June 12, 2019, Portland City Council passed Ordinance 189557 which requires short term rental platforms such as Airbnb and HomeAway to do one of the following:

  • Enter into a pass-through registration data-sharing agreement with the Bureau of Revenue and Financial Services’ Revenue Division; or

  • Remove all listings unless they are published on the City’s Short-Term Rental Registry of legal listing locations.

Airbnb has chosen the pass-through registration data sharing agreement option. Effective November 1, 2019, Airbnb will launch an online registration system requiring new hosts to share their data with the City of Portland and asking existing hosts to allow their data to be shared with the City. Hosts that do not consent to having their data shared will be removed from the Airbnb website by January 1, 2020.

The pass-through registration system will include the following information sent to the Revenue Division each month beginning December 1, 2019:

  • Name of the person listing the property and the property owner (or resident if different from the person listing the property)

  • Host, resident or property owner’s mailing address, e-mail address and telephone number • Address of the rental location

  • Number of rooms and number of guests advertised for rent

  • Description of the listing

  • Listing number and URL

  • Attestation that the host understands and agrees to abide by the City’s regulations

  • Booking and transactional by listing and host including the number of guests, the date(s) booked, and the transaction amount.

The Revenue Division and the Bureau of Development Services will use this information to enforce the City’s regulatory and tax codes.

HomeAway has chosen to use the City’s short-term rental registry. The registry is a listing of Portland locations that have already secured required permits or are otherwise deemed legal because of pending renewals or zoning. HomeAway has agreed to remove all unregistered listings from its HomeAway, VRBO, and related websites by September 30, 2019. This is the first city government interface HomeAway has launched in the U.S.