Home sharing helps bolster our family friendly tourist brand

Each year, Regina Champlin Igoe provides Christmas gifts to hundreds of underprivileged kids via her non-profit, Make a Miracle. Through her foundation, Tarte’s Hearts, Aimee Tarte fosters compassion within children through acts of service, such as visiting veterans nursing homes.

Aside from their shared commitment to community service, Regina and Aimee have another quality in common. By their own admissions, they were never comfortable with soliciting donations. Rather, they fund these incredible charities largely through income earned by sharing their Fort Lauderdale homes to visitors through Airbnb.

Regina and Aimee reflect a growing trend. In Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Miramar Beach alone, over 1,800 Airbnb hosts share an extra room — or their entire home when they’re away on business or leisure. In 2016, they welcomed over 96,000 visitors to Broward’s three largest home sharing cities, while earning $20.6 million. This is valuable supplemental income often used to pay mortgages, settle student debt or fund passion projects such as Make a Miracle or Tarte’s Hearts.

Home sharing helps our community cast a wider net to prospective travelers whose budgets simply cannot accommodate higher hotel rates. It also allows visitors to authentically experience Broward as we locals do, while driving tourist dollars and activating economies in neighborhoods that lack hotels.

Take Fort Lauderdale’s Flagler Village, which in just ten years’ time has morphed from an abandoned warehouse to an increasingly in-demand neighborhood known for its trendy restaurants and thriving FATVillage arts district. Hotels are nonexistent in Flagler, but its dozens of Airbnb listings drive revenue from this newfound infusion of local tourism to its merchant community.

Of course, short-term rentals in Florida pre-date the 2008 founding of Airbnb by several decades. Some who recall Broward’s former Spring Break notoriety have raised understandable concerns about potential “party houses.” This is a concern that we at Airbnb share and are committed to addressing head on. We’ve instituted a neighbor tool that provides community members a direct line of communication to Airbnb to address noisy listings, and we do not hesitate to remove hosts who fail to uphold our strict community standards.

Ultimately, the power of the Airbnb platform is that it motivates guests to blend into neighborhoods, belong anywhere and live like locals. Our mission is to welcome visitors while maintaining the fabric of what makes these communities so special. Our Airbnb hosts want to serve as steadfast partners to bolster Broward’s family friendly tourist brand.

The county and its municipalities can pursue several fair practices to better regulate the home sharing trend. To improve compliance, Fort Lauderdale should consider substantially reducing its excessive $750 short-term rental registration fee. While well-intended, this measure was first introduced with professional and full-time vacation rental owners in mind. In practice, it sweeps in part-time Airbnb hosts who typically share their homes once a week and may not even earn $750 a year.

Additionally, we have been engaged in ongoing and productive conversations with Broward County towards an agreement that would allow Airbnb to collect and remit the 5 percent bed tax on behalf of our hosts. This would make the process seamless and easy for both our hosts and the County, while effectively unlocking millions in new annual tax revenue. Airbnb has secured such agreements with 32 Florida counties, and we hope to help bring this new revenue to all of South Florida — including Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach.

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 Broward’s brand and values.

The county and its municipalities can pursue several fair practices to better regulate the home sharing trend.