I think the Assembly’s proposal to regulate short-term rentals is a bad idea. Ostensibly, this is to better understand the short-term rental market and to ensure the health and safety of the rentals.
A far less cumbersome way of learning about the shortterm rental market is to go to buy a subscription to Airdna. co and look up the data. Airdna has a comprehensive database of all short-term rentals.
Using their website (you don’t even need a subscription to find this data), we find that there are 2,052 active short-term rental listings in Anchorage. Seventy-four percent of them use Airbnb; 8% use VRBO; 18% use both. The three biggest managers are Evolve (62 listings), Vacasa (40 listings) and Redawning (14 listings). It has a map function where you can see where every short-term rental in Anchorage is. This answers all the questions that Assembly member Meg Zaletel says she wants.
According to Alaska Housing Finance Corp., in 2017 there were 115,028 housing units in Anchorage. So doing the math, that means 1.8% of those housing units are short-term rentals. I doubt that is having a big effect on the long-term rental housing situation.
As for health and safety concerns, I think the Airbnb rating system does a better job than any city licensing program could do. In effect, Airbnb has inspectors (i.e. guests) for every stay. If renters aren’t happy about their stay or the unit, believe me, they are not shy about leaving a bad review that everyone can and does read. And if you get too many low ratings about the same thing, Airbnb suspends your account.
Now that I’ve demolished Zaletel’s phony excuse for wanting to crush people who Airbnb, she’ll have to come up with some other flimsy reasoning.
— Ryan Kennedy
Anchorage
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