This past week, New York City enacted a new short-term rental registration law that is not very friendly toward platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. Here are some of the new rules:

• All hosts must register with the city
• No more than 2 paying guests can stay in a short-term rental at one time, regardless of the size of the home (does this mean families are excluded?)
• Hosts and visitors must leave all doors inside the dwelling unlocked (presumably this is to stop people from creating self-contained suites within a larger home)
• And the host must be physically present while the dwelling is being rented

So in a way, this takes us back to the original use case of Airbnb: “Hey, I have extra space in my home. Would you like to rent this mostly clean air mattress in my living room and be my roommate for a bit?” Of course, this is not how most people like to Airbnb today. And so this is also a kind of ban on short-term rentals in New York City.

It’s certainly stricter than the regulations we have in Toronto. Here, it must be your principal residence. Meaning you’re only legally allowed to operate one short-term rental at a time. But you don’t need to be physically present while the home is being rented. If you want to earn some extra cash while you’re away in Rio de Janeiro for New Year’s Eve, you can do that.

However, the rules are still fairly strict. For instance, if you have a basement apartment or a laneway suite on your property, you are not technically permitted to short-term rent these dwellings, even if you live in the main portion of the home. It has to be your exact principal residence.

Presumably the intent behind this is to not remove any housing from the long-term rental market. And if it’s your principal residence, then yeah, there’s no net loss. Though this feels like an overreach to me. It’s the same property and a homeowner could very easily decide to not even do a long-term rental in these secondary suites.

But overall, I guess it’s still slightly more flexible than forcing hostel-like short-term rentals. Long live the hotel?