Carmel cracks down on short-term rentals

Carmel city officials said they’re cracking down on people renting out rooms for less than 30 days.

The city hired a Bay Area company to track down rule-breakers. The city said it’s been trying to track down short-term rental hosts, but it’s time-consuming. A San Francisco company called Host Compliance would charge Carmel $11,000 a year to do.

Car Week normally floods the street of Carmel with people from near and far. Many hotels get booked up months in advance. Rooms and homes on websites like Airbnb and VRBO are high demand.

Rentals that are short of 30 days are not allowed in the city, a rule that goes back to 1989.

City officials said they’re doing more than waving their fingers at neighbors who turn into hospitality entrepreneurs.

“We recently brought on a firm named Host Compliance, and what they are going to do is they are going to go on the individual websites and actually identify the illegal listings in our jurisdiction. And they cover over 20 websites,” said Marc Wiener, the city’s community planning and building director.

Host Compliance is helping 70 cities across the country to track and regulate short-term rentals.

The Host Compliance founder, Ulrik Binzer, said, “It’s a little bit of a secret sauce. I won’t give you too much detail, but at the end of the day, we look at publicly available information and do a lot of cross-referencing. A lot of online detective work, you know, to identify those properties.”

The city will follow up with code compliance letters, and if people continue to rent there will be real detective work.

“We may book the space and do a sting operation,” Wiener said.

Hotel owners said they are liking this move.

“I don’t think it’s fair for unlicensed properties to be able to compete with us at a lower price, if for nothing (other) than the 10 percent bed tax,” said Binzer.

Barbara Livingston, president of the Carmel Residents Association said sticking to the rule is important for the small town that’s big on charm.

“We used to have a wide democraphic in the village and we no longer have that. And that was a really nice thing to have year-round people living here,” Livingston said.

The city of Carmel is suing a VRBO host for breaking the law. Monterey County also is looking to work with Host Compliance. It’s unclear how many short term rentals are out there but the county and cities like Carmel hope to get a better picture once they get the data.