I don’t think this is a valid argument. Airbnb specifically calls out including cleaning fees in these total, but this is something that affects small owners by default. The choice of cracking down on cleaning fees but not on resort fee? Purely on Airbnb. Moreover, when a host charges a cleaning see, it’s not the fee plus a tax on that fee, it’s just the fee. Hotels will tax you on each separate fee they add, so you really can’t trust that what you pay on Airbnb won’t balloon to 2x.
that's irrelevant with this issue though. This is not about Airbnb not paying tax for its own profit, but about Airbnb failing to withhold tax on the gross rent it collects on behalf of landlords, which is required to do legally.
AirBnb is also collecting occupancy tax in many cities [0]. I don't have a view on whether this tax is well justified, but it does seem like if hotels are required to charge it, then full time airbnb hosts should be required to charge it as well.
Fully agreed. (And for the record, I'm absolutely not rationalizing their violations - just pointing out that "we're out $33 MM USD because lost tax revenue" is the wrong way to be looking at this. I think we should have some sort of safe harbour provision for people making X dollars a year off AirBNB, personally - once you're making more than the cost of your annual rent, time to pay some taxes.)
Who would pay for all this extra enforcement? My guess is that a large portion of this short term rental income is untaxed. Can't have both sides, no regulation and no tax. I pay my share when I rent a hotel. (Apologies if airbnb renters are paying the appropriate city, state, and federal taxes).
Sales taxes are collected by the business conducting the transaction. AirBnB is that business. I see nothing unreasonable about requiring them to collect said taxes.
If they were Craigslist, where they were actually just a passthrough for transactions conducted entirely outside their platform, then asking them to collect sales taxes would be unreasonable.
I just had a reservation in SF cancelled because the host didn't want to register as a hotel. So this tax is already being imposed and seems reasonable a few other major cites might follow suit. Hope airbnb can figure out a good solution.
Your reasoning would be "ok" if Airbnb would absorb the cost of the fine. The problem here is that all the illegal part is done by the airbnb customer who offers his short term rental on the site and he is the one who has to pay the fine if any.
Airbnb is a great company but they seem unnecessarily greedy. They shouldn't allow people to rent out apartments without neighbor consent. They should limit the number of days that people can rent their homes. And they shouldn't allow companies to operate dozens of Airbnb locations as de facto hotels.
These are the kinds of reasonable regulations that will happen to them eventually, if they don't put constraints on themselves.
There seems to be some confusion about the tax issue here .. many commenters seem to think that AirBnB hosts are avoiding tax on their income via AirBnB. That's simply not true, in fact AirBnB reports this income to the IRS and you are required to fill out a tax form to continue hosting.
The issue at question is a tiny (% wise) hotel tax. In my view AirBnB is not resisting this tax for its own sake, but rather because it risks classifying hosts as hotel operators.
AirBnB is a wonderful service, and yes it has flaws, but NYC is caving to the demands of political interests who know how to play the lobbying game.
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