A recent inventory count of Short Term Rentals (STRs) in Toronto has yielded astonishing results. Almost 11,000 STR listings were found, mostly on AirBnB with 9682. This coincides with new condominium inventory that has appeared in 2017. After reviewing the Heat Map below, the most inventory appears between the bounding box of East of Royal
any municipalities have partnered with at least one of the Short Term Rental (STR) websites to ensure that STR hosts are paying their fair share of lodging taxes in their jurisdiction. The STR website taxes the guests at source, and remits the taxes to the municipality (whether city or county). Now some of those municipalities
Harmari Search was again critical in evidence presented in court related to odometer tampering in Montgomery County, Ohio. The victim reported purchasing a vehicle for $2300 which the seller claimed had 140,000 miles on it, but in fact had been rolled back from 180,000 due to service records obtained by the victim. The vehicle was
Many reasons exist why a short term vacation rental (STR) property may be considered illegal. From a municipal government standpoint, it could be against ordinance to operate a short term rental in a particular zoning area. Even if a short term rental operator has a permit, by having more people over than the maximum occupancy,
Previous Page Second Experiment The follow on experiment was to eliminate the possibility that Irwin, the fake profile, was the cause why PYMK wasn’t triggering. So I asked Vicky to visit some of my friends that were not her friends to see whether that would trigger PYMK. She visited them each a different number of
Previous Page Anecdotes from the Blogosphere I have heard some anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon, both from word of mouth and from internet sources outlined below in screenshots: The Experiment But how can we confirm this phenomenon exists? I set up a little experiment. I had a friend name Vicky use my fake Facebook profile
Hundreds of municipalities are working on identifying and monitoring short term vacation rentals (STRs) to make sure they are in compliance with ordinances, properly licensed and permitted, and collecting lodging taxes. In fact some have selected a vendor to outsource this work. However, that vendor may not be delivering on all the leads that can
When municipalities seek to regulate short term rentals, often something that is overlooked is the permitting system. In fact the permit number has significant value to Code Compliance departments that have to make sure everyone’s on the same level playing field. Here are some suggestions on how to design permit numbers: Always put the year
The advent of sharing economy B2C services has spawned new B2B services for businesses that have a significant e-commerce operation. For example, Darkstore is a company that offers a mobile app containing shipping and logistics providers in a database. In fact their website advocates “same day service fulfillment” for e-commerce sites. This has obvious implications
Harmari recently released a 20-minute training video on the technical challenges associated with detecting short term rentals (STRs, also known as STVRs) that are non-registered or under-reporting for lodging tax (also known as TOT, transient lodging tax, transient occupancy tax, bed tax, accommodations tax, etc). Key metrics are discussed that help estimate identification and monitoring