The Denver City Council should keep the rules simple in the Airbnb era.

Denver residents have about 2,000 short- term rentals listed on websites like Airbnb and VRBO, but every one of them located in a residential area without a license is illegal.

Clearly the law needs to catch up with this common practice in the “sharing economy,” so the City Council has been working on a regulatory framework for people who want to rent their property for fewer than 30 days.

A plan that is likely to be acted upon in coming weeks appears to keep rules to a minimum, which is vital. The short- term rental system has flourished around the globe precisely because it has little bureaucratic entanglement.

It is a simple process that won’t abide complication. People visit websites like Airbnb to find places to stay. The owners offer their homes or rooms for short visits and collect rent.

The city now wants the owners to get a $ 25 annual license, agree to simple rules such as having smoke alarms, and collect the same lodger’s tax that hotels and motels charge— which in Denver is 10.75 percent. Those ideas seem reasonable, as well as reprivate quiring units be the owner’s primary residence. The purpose of that is to keep neighborhoods from becoming enclaves of absentee landlords, as well as to protect the inventory of affordable housing.

Boulder voters in November approved applying that city’s 7.5 percent lodger’s tax to short- term rentals. But Boulder goes further than Denver, forbidding renters from offering their units and limiting the renting of accessory units to 120 days. Denver shouldn’t limit renters in that way.

Admittedly, even Denver’s fairly modest rules will ruffle some feathers, and it’s not clear how many people who offer short- term rentals will bother to comply once licenses become available, possibly by June. The city should go easy for a time before attempting to ramp up enforcement.

Regulating short- term rentals provides the city with a way to respond to neighbor complaints, makes the activity legal and helps even the playing field with the hospitality industry.

But to be successful, it needs to involve as little red tape as possible.