How are cities monitoring short-term rentals? Many turn to tech
NORTH TEXAS (CBSNewsTexas.com) - As the battle over short-term rentals continues in communities across the country, more cities are adopting regulations.
But there are thousands of short-term rental sites out there with hundreds, if not thousands of listings operated by various homeowners in each city. So how are cities going to enforce these new regulations?
Turns out, a lot of them are turning to tech.
Nine cities and one county in Texas are working with a company called Deckard Technologies, including Fort Worth, Plano and Grapevine.
Here's how it works: a team of data scientists scrubs through different data sets with the help of computers and software that a lot of cities don't have access to.
First, Deckard gathers listings on short-term rental sites. They obviously monitor the big ones like Airbnb and Vrbo, but they also mine through listings on thousands of other, smaller platforms.
Then, they collect a lot of publicly available information, like parcel data from local governments, long-term rental sites and Google Street View images.
Once Deckard has all of this information, they use it to paint a picture of where a listing is, who owns it, and where they can contact the owner. When a city signs a contract with Deckard, they have access to a dashboard they can monitor 24/7.
"If you're a field officer and you have a tablet in front of you, you can drive around and go write it on the map," Deckard CEO Nick Del Pego said.
Del Pego said cities can see a property's activity in real time. They can also see which hosts are the most active and how much revenue they're bringing in.
Not everyone is a fan of this technology. In a news release announcing a lawsuit against the city, the Fort Worth Short Term Rental Alliance accused Fort Worth of spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to have Deckard Technologies surveil citizens.
In response to that criticism, Del Pego said his company is only looking at data that's available to the public:
"If you're going to put things out there publicly, people are going to crawl through them and look at them. They're going to index them."
Del Pego said the goal isn't to get rid of these kinds of rental properties, it's just to regulate them.
Obviously, the technology isn't free. The cost depends on volume. The more short-term rentals a city has, the more they pay. For context, Fort Worth initially signed a $35,000 one-year contract with Deckard, while Grapevine's contract was $3,000 for a year. Meanwhile, the City of Plano told CBS News Texas they've paid Deckard $46,000 to date: the original one-year contract was for $24,500, but the city recently paid for more features and services.