Municipal host compliance company experience?

Regulations/Tax Issues
1

There are some horror stories about people being harassed by companies hired by their municipalities to ensure that hosts are properly licensed and paying taxes. Our little town is considering hiring Host Compliance to rout out illegal hosts and it sounds like they may be over zealous. Does anyone have any experience with anything like this?

2

If you are legal and have done what is required in your area…why worry?

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3

if you’re licensed and legal, no worries. So essentially a non issue to the majority of members on here.

It beggars the question, are you licensed and legal?

JF

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4

I worry about them coming after back taxes of hosts who were not always legal.

5

My friend in a neighboring town does. She obtained the record her city had of her. It showed every airbnb guest that had stayed at her house and dates. In other words all of the airbnb public record. She is legal but it showed Host Compliance is very thorough. Regards, Curt

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6

If hosts aren’t legal, I have no idea how they sleep at night. There are so many people who are risking it, without proper licences, documentation and insurance. It’s scary.

The thing is, they will get caught. ‘It won’t happen to me’ doesn’t really work well in a hosting situation these days.

7

Curtpete, do you know this for sure? It is not possible for a third party like HostCompliance to obtain a complete list of guest names and dates without using illegal tactics. They can get public information, periodically scrape listing webpages including hosts’ calendars, use cheap workers on Amazon MTurk to do borderline illegal spying around the area to dig out the exact address and so on. But unless they hack into the host’s or Airbnb’s system or Airbnb explicitly shares information with them (which I really doubt it would), they can not assemble a complete list. They may be able to piece together an approximate guessed list based on guests that left a public review.

8

In NSW Australia, our state rules will mean you will have to be registered and booking sites are required to share booking info with the state government. This starts November this year. We have to supply the rules and regulations to every guest and have them printed and locatable on site.