FOUL AIRBNB
City turns to rival to get dirt on room-rent biz
WHEN CITY HALL didn’t get data it wanted from Airbnb, it turned instead to the company’s competition for intel on potentially rule-breaking hosts, the Daily News has learned.
The mayor’s office of special enforcement, tasked with cracking down on illegal hotels and enforcing rules against shortterm rentals, reached out to a representative of the advocacy group Share Better and the Hotel Trade Council in search of a list of hosts who had been scrubbed from the site only to return, according to emails obtained by The News.
The emails are the latest twist in a back-and-forth between the city and Airbnb over data sharing — a conversation that began cordially but fell apart not long after a $200,000 donation from UniteHere, a national hotel and motel union, to the mayor’s now-defunct nonprofit the Campaign for One New York.
“Do you guys have a spreadsheet of the scrubbed listings that have come back?” Christian Klossner, head of the office of special enforcement, wrote in an email to Austin Shafran on Feb. 26, 2016.
Shafran, often quoted as a spokesman for both Share Better and the hotel council, sent along a spreadsheet three days later, noting it contained “all of the cohort’s listings month-tomonth” from September 2015 to February 2016.
The listings were “a pretty clear sign they’re not being proactive about removing the worst commercial activity from their site even though they could easily do this,” he wrote.
The emails were sent a few weeks after watchdog group Inside Airbnb released information showing that the company had dropped about 1,000 listings that appeared to break New York laws just before they gave the city data on their hosts. It appears the information Shafran sent was compiled using publicly available data scraped from the Airbnb site by the researchers who reported that purge.
Share Better — a coalition of housing groups, politicians and others that is funded in part by
the hotel council — said the group would continue to share data with the city on “illegal tourist rentals.”
“Airbnb has consistently hidden their inventory of illegal tourist rentals from enforcement officials, and when they did share data it turned out to be a fraud,” a spokesperson said.
It’s unclear whether the city used the information to write tickets or take other action against Airbnb hosts — but the city argued there was no issue with going to such “stakeholders” for enforcement information. “In the absence of cooperation from the company, we gather data ourselves and from a wide range of stakeholders and use it for enforcement and to better understand the illegal rental landscape and its impact on New York City’s housing,” said City Hall spokeswoman Melissa Grace.