Short-Term Vacation Rentals: What State Governments Need to Know

The short-term rental industry, best represented by the types of rentals found on Airbnb, VRBO, and Flipkey, has grown from a cottage industry to a multi-billion-dollar market. For many states and provinces, this has allowed more tourism in non-touristy areas and ultimately has helped boost their economies.

Unfortunately, there are downsides to the explosion of home-sharing. Many departments of revenue struggle to identify and ensure they’re collecting taxes from the thousands of short-term rentals in their states.

With US states facing a projected $555 billion in budgetary shortfall due to COVID-19 through FY2020-2022 (CBPP, 2020), every tax dollar that should be collected, needs to be collected in a cost-effective way to help offset these shortfalls and add back to key services.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Key proprietary data that will help you understand the STR market in your state today
• The difficulties of tracking short-term vacation rental activity, and why they’re not like hotels
• How tax collection is affected, and where your department could be missing out
• Tools to ensure effective tax collection from this booming industry