Finding the balance on short-term rentals

It’s fair to say the advent of Airbnb in 2008 changed the short-term rental market — it and its competitors gave hotels a run for their money, gave homeowners new ways to make an income and helped customers pay less for accommodations.

The change didn’t come without problems. No one is likely to enjoy having rowdy instant condo neighbours who are in town for a day or two to catch a concert and party the night away — nor do quiet neighbourhoods enjoy the constant churn of customers abutting their yards.

But short-term rental owners are taxpayers, too — in fact, when they’re fully compliant with municipal regulations, you can argue that they often pay more than their neighbours. They’re part of the accommodations economy and many owners have seen the rules change during the tenure of their operations, making it harder and harder to turn a profit.

Every time a municipality announces plans to change the rules, owners probably shudder.

But there are two sides to the equation.

While they may not have signed up for an increasing burden of regulation, their neighbours often didn’t sign up to be cheek-by-jowl with the most temporary of neighbours — short-stay neighbours who have no real reason to abide by the give-and-take of neighbourliness.

Almost two decades in, owners, municipalities and neighbours are still working through the problems caused by an innovative and profitable concept that lets people with extra space turn it into extra cash.

There’s still a balance to be found — and it’s not an easy one. Your profits shouldn’t be at the expense of your neighbour’s quiet enjoyment of their own property. An Airbnb owner may be the height of responsible ownership — but that doesn’t mean the clients will refrain from having parties, making late-night noise or drinking excessively.

There are condominium buildings in Winnipeg where the transient renters outnumber the full-time residents and full-time residents dread the arrival of the weekend\. There are condominium buildings where operating boards have banned short-term rentals outright because of the problems they create.

In other words, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

Some who may have gotten into the business looking for easy returns in simpler times may be finding there’s more regulatory hassle than they planned for or even that they can tolerate.

Winnipeg city council is now preparing a set of regulations to make property owners report when emergency responders are called to their properties, to have live-in owners provide more details to demonstrate proof that they live in the properties and to have co-owners and adult residents of the rentals complete criminal record checks.

It’s a way for the city to try and proactively see where problems are occurring — and are likely to continue.

“I certainly want to see us have more teeth for enforcement when it comes to identifying a short-term rental that may be a problematic property…. If it’s a property where police have to show up or firefighters have to show up, we want to know about those instances so that our enforcement team can be sure they’re doing all they can to hold the owner accountable,” Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham said about the proposed rules.

The bottom line is that the balance rests on the behaviour of customers who can stay a day or two and then leave all the problems they may have created blissfully behind. And leave them behind, some do.

And that means regulations will inevitably — and properly — continue to tighten.

No one can definitively legislate good behaviour. But there have to be ways to mitigate for the effects of properties that regularly inconvenience their neighbours.