St. Louis hopes new rules—and software—will crack down on short-term rentals

The city of St. Louis rolled out its permitting process last week for short-term rentals, and officials vow it’s not just an exercise in paperwork. 

Beginning May 6, people who want to rent out a home in the city under platforms including Airbnb or VRBO will have to get a business license, show they’re current on taxes, and have a designated emergency contact to deal with any problems on site in real time. They’re also capped at four short-term, non-owner-occupied units per person.

Spokesman Conner Kerrigan says the city used the lag between the regulations’ May 2023 passage and the rollout this month to set up a system that allows for real-time monitoring. The city has contracted with a company called Granicus that promises to move swiftly when neighbors complain. “Using the Host Compliance technology, if a resident reports a complaint on a short-term rental the system will automatically text the registered agent and prompt them to address the concern as well as create a log in our system that will allow us to ensure compliance,” he says. 

And if hosts don’t have proper permits by next May, Kerrigan says the city will shut them down. He adds, “We will absolutely not be relying on the honor system.”

Some of the neighbors who pushed the city to take action in 2022 and 2023 are skeptical, saying the bill delineating the permitting process fell far short of what the city needs. Says attorney Marvin Nodiff, “I couldn’t have written something better for the industry if I worked for Airbnb. It allows short-term rentals anywhere in the city, any time, including residential neighborhoods.”

Southwest Garden resident Steve Pona agrees, calling the new rules “a Band-Aid on top of a Band-Aid on top of a Band-Aid.” Even beyond his concern about the new regulations’ shortcomings, he knows enough to know the city is understaffed. He says, “There’s no infrastructure and not a mechanism to enforce it.” 

But the city insists that, whatever the concerns about the bill, they are hard at work building a strong mechanism—and dead set on enforcement. City assessor Michael Dauphin says his office has been training on Granicus, which touts its compliance software for cities grappling with short-term rentals, and he feels hopeful. 

About six years ago, Dauphin’s office quietly began working to reclassify non-owner-occupied homes doing business on short-term rental websites as commercial, not residential—a change that increases property taxes on a $100,000 home from $1,590 to $2,678. He says they found several hundred, and that Granicus has made that work infinitely more efficient: “We don’t have to do the Internet sleuthing we once did, and we’re already identifying several hundred we didn’t have on the books already.” Once all city departments have the new system up and running, sending the property owners a letter to inform them of their new classification could be as simple as clicking a box. 

But what might be even more hopeful for neighborhoods that have felt besieged by short-term rentals is that Dauphin says his sense is that the Airbnb boom may slowly be becoming a bust. In the past two years, he’s seen some of the home owners his office once painstakingly identified as short-term rental hosts make the case that they’ve gotten out of the business and are ready to have their property classified as residences again (and yes, they have ways of verifying that before they acquiesce). 

“Everybody’s got different reasons for that,” Dauphin says, making clear that movement wasn’t necessarily triggered by the city’s new regulations. “There have definitely been folks who did the cost/benefit analysis and said, ‘This isn’t worth it.’” (Airbnb declined comment, but shared information showing that the median St. Louis host earned $12,000 in 2023.)

Pona, for one, is hoping that trend accelerates into his South City neighborhood, and soon. “We are still surrounded by short-term rentals—six within 500 feet of my house,” he says, noting that a recent wedding booked up multiple units and took over the neighborhood. “It’s basically a small hotel operating in a residential neighborhood, with no parking, no commercial ordinances to follow, no handicapped access, and they’re just free and clear.”