Opinion: Airbnb is Hotel Alternative for UM Families

By Tom Martinelli

CORAL GABLES, FL — This coming May, tens of thousands of friends of family members of University of Miami students will make the pilgrimage to Coral Gables for Spring Commencement. As recently as a couple years ago, those family members would have had to scramble at least a year in advance to nab one of a very limited inventory of expensive hotel rooms.

Editor's note: Airbnb filed suit against the city of Miami on Friday seeking to block a 'purported' vacation rental ban. See related story.

Fortunately for UM families, this dynamic has changed as a result of the introduction of the sharing economy to South Florida. Home sharing in particular has allowed Coral Gables to expand lodging capacity for graduation weekend and provide affordable options to parents and guests. (Sign up for our free Daily Newsletters and Breaking News Alerts for the Coral Gables-Coconut Grove Patch.)

Home sharing in South Florida has become increasingly popular with the growth of Airbnb — the peer-to-peer short-term rental platform. Through Airbnb, over 200 Coral Gables residents share their homes for supplemental income. In 2016, they welcomed about 6,000 guests to Coral Gables, often in connection with the university. The typical Coral Gables “host” earns about $7,400 annually through Airbnb. That’s modest but valuable income that can be used to pay the bills, take care of the mortgage and even fund vacations of their own.

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Importantly, these hosts are mostly middle-class folks who share their homes on a part-time basis. 33 percent of Coral Gables hosts simply share an extra, unused room in their homes — empty nesters whose kids have left the home, for example.

While the growth of home sharing among Coral Gables residents continues to bring economic benefits to the community, it also necessitates regulations to ensure that all hosts are compliant with local law. At Airbnb Florida, we welcome and embrace thoughtful regulations. To that end, we have been engaged in conversations with the City of Coral Gables towards a structure to create clear and reasonable rules to regulate home sharing, and we think there are a few things we can do to address some of the city’s concerns:

• Host registration: For cities like Coral Gables, it’s valuable to know who is sharing their home and where they’re doing it. That’s why we support collaborating on a simple host registration system that allows hosts to sign up with the city quickly and easily.
• Addressing nuisance properties: The vast majority of Coral Gables residents on Airbnb host responsibly and value their neighbors, but we still want to act proactively to address the occasional bad actors. We hope to work with the city on a regulatory process that would allow Airbnb to quickly and seamlessly remove listings from our platform once it is shown that they’re causing nuisances and disturbances to the neighborhood.
• Coral Gables-Specific Rules: While the popularity of home sharing continues to grow around the world, we recognize that communities like Coral Gables may want to enact sensible limits that meet the city’s specific needs. We’ve worked with other cities to create specific rules that regulate the density, frequency or size of home share rentals, in each case addressing the specific need of the respective city. In Coral Gables, we can imagine working with the city too on specific fixes to mitigate local issues, just as we’ve done in so many other places.

The home sharing movement has already instilled community economic development while offering visitors a genuine — if temporary — home away from home. A collaborative partnership between Airbnb, our hosts and policymakers will promote responsible tourism consistent with Coral Gables’ brand and values.

Tom Martinelli is the director of public policy for Airbnb Florida.

Photo of Tom Martinelli courtesy of Airbnb