NYC only has 405 legal Airbnb and other short-term rentals available after crackdown

New York City approved just over 400 short-term rentals amid a crackdown on unauthorized listings across Airbnb and other booking platforms, according to new data released on Wednesday.

The city’s Office of Special Enforcement said it OK’d just 405 of the 4,624 applications it received from landlords and tenants, who attempted to legally register their units on Airbnb, Vrbo and other sites in the months since the city launched a registration portal in March. The agency rejected 214 submissions and sent another 758 back to applicants to make corrections or add information, agency officials told Gothamist. The vast majority of applications are still awaiting review, according to the agency.

More than 10,000 short-term rentals existed in New York City as recently as last month, despite state and city laws prohibiting listings for stays under 30 days, unless the “host” is present in the unit.

OSE shared the up-to-date information along with a more detailed report on applications received through the end of the most recent fiscal year on June 30. That report offers a window into the approval and application process in the months immediately after the registration portal opened, but before a state judge dismissed the lawsuits challenging the legality of the new rules in August. OSE received 71% of its applications since the end of June.

New laws that took effect earlier this month prohibit companies like Airbnb from processing payments for those short-term listings, unless the host received authorization from the city through the registration portal.

With the new laws looming, New Yorkers with short-term rental listings have complained about long wait times for a decision on their applications — a problem potentially worsened by sizable staff shortages at OSE, as Gothamist has reported.

The fiscal year report issued on Wednesday shows that the agency took an average of 50 days to make its decisions, though the wait period rose to 87 days when the agency asked applicants to provide more information or make corrections, according to the data.

Airbnb and a group of property owners sued to block the new restrictions, but a state judge dismissed their cases last month in a ruling that also knocked the city for the “glacial pace” of registrations.

The OSE report says most of the applications were incomplete or had other problems. It added that the agency informs applicants of the issues and give them a chance to send in a new form.

City Hall spokesperson Jonah Allon said the report “shows the city went above and beyond the law’s mandate to assist hosts with identifying deficiencies in their applications so they could come into compliance with the longstanding short-term rental regulations.”

Airbnb said it began informing hosts about the registration process in March, and pinned the delays on the city.

“Unfortunately, we continue to hear from hosts who are frustrated with the overly complicated registration process which has made it not only difficult for New Yorkers to register, but also for the city to manage,” said Nathan Rotman, Airbnb's regional lead.

OSE breaks down the application, registration and denial data by each of the city’s 51 council districts in its fiscal year report, which shows they did not approve a single short-term listing in 11 districts as of the end of June.

The agency approved just 12 of 120 applications in a Bed-Stuy council district home to blocks with the highest concentration of Airbnb listings in the five boroughs last fiscal year. Another 91 applications were still pending as of June 30, according to the data.

The city denied 24 applications, including 18 for rent-regulated apartments that did not qualify as short-term listings last fiscal year. Four of the rejected units were located in complexes added to the city’s Prohibited Buildings List, which allows landlords and property managers to notify the city that they ban listings on Airbnb and other platforms.

Advocates and city lawmakers said the new rules will force property owners to put apartments back on the rental market during a severe housing shortage instead of using them to host tourists and temporary guests.

But the small number of approvals and a growing pool of applications have property owners worried about the future of short-term listings in the city.

East New York property owner Tony Lindsay, head of the group New York Homeowners Alliance Corp., said both the city and the booking companies share the blame for the paltry number of registrations.

Lindsay said Airbnb did not adequately encourage hosts to apply for legal registration because the company thought it would topple the restrictions in court. The company, he said, began more actively informing users about the registration rules only after the lawsuits failed on Aug. 8, causing a “panicked rush by all the hosts to register."

“Unfortunately, people thought they could wait it out,” Lindsay added.

But Lindsay also criticized the city for imposing the rules in the first place. He said he relied on the income he made listing a unit in his two-family home on Airbnb but is now banned from hosting guests for less than a month. He doesn’t want a permanent tenant because he and his family use the East New York apartment when they visit from Florida.

Lindsay said the city is approving applications far too slowly. He said he worries the delays are only worsening as more hosts scramble to legally register their homes to comply with the law and not enough staffers are available to process their requests.

“The pace they’re moving at is extremely slow because they can’t keep up with the applications,” he said. “It’s totally unreasonable.”

This story was updated to include a comment from a City Hall spokesperson.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the number of rent-regulated apartments that were included in the denial pool. It's 18.