Oct. 07–San Diego city's 6,116 short-term rentals paid nearly $16.4 million in hotel and sales taxes in the fiscal 2015 year, a new study being released Thursday shows.
The study, commissioned by two local trade groups and carried out by the National University System Institute for Policy Research, will be released at a press conference Thursday.
Short-term rentals, defined for tax purposes as dwelling units rented for less than 30 days at a time, have drawn increasing attention in recent months as neighborhood groups complain about unruly guests. The City Council is considering legislation that could restrict their operations.
The study, authored by Erik Bruvold, president and CEO of the National University institute, found that guests generated 456,000 room-nights in the city and spent $110.3 million to rent the units. They also spent $86.4 million in on food, transportation and other retail items subject to sales tax over the same period.
Tax revenues included $11.6 million in transient- occupancy or hotel taxes and nearly $4.9 million in sales tax with an estimated $340,000 of that going to the city alone.
Bruvold said the $10,000 report, underwritten by the San Diego Vacation Rental Managers Alliance and the San Diego Short-term Rental Alliance as well as Airbnb, revealed more short-term units than previously realized.
"We knew San Diego had a significant amount of that," he said, but he called the figure "surprising."
The other surprise was the quantity of shared units — those where property owners or tenants offered bedrooms or other spaces while living there as well. Shared units are common in Europe, he noted. But the concept is growing here, largely because of the advent of Airbnb, VBRO (vacation rentals by owner) and other online reservation systems that simplify the search for such places to stay, often at cheaper rates than in standard hotels.
Bruvold found that 1,382 or 29.2 percent of the total were private rooms or shared rooms in local homes.
However, the short-term rental figures are dwarfed by what is generated by the regular hotel industry. In 2014, according to the San Diego Tourism Authority, local hotels generated 11.3 million room-nights, earned $1.65 billion in room revenue and sent more than $180 million to the city treasury in room taxes.
The impact of the growing shared-rental market has concerned some neighborhoods, especially in the beaches, where neighbors have complained about loud parties, overcrowding and other issues that lead them to lodge complaints with the police and local policymakers.
The survey showed that 54.4 percent of all short-term rented homes and 31.7 percent of shared units are located between La Jolla and Ocean Beach. Downtown was the next popular neighborhood in the snapshot look between June 30 and July 2, ahead of the July 4th holiday weekend.
Removed from the survey were properties requiring a minimum 30-day stay and "event properties" averaging $5,000 per night, which were assumed to have been used for special events, not overnight stays.
However, Bruvold said most neighborhoods outside the most popular beach communities probably will not attract much interest in renting entire units a few days at a time because owners can usually make more by renting one month at a time.
Bruvold said the people offering homes for rent typically are seeking extra income. Others are owned as second homes and owners offer them to the market to generate income rather than leave them vacant.
While guests at some rentals may annoy their neighbors, San Diego's tight summer hotel market benefits from the boost represented by the availability of short-term rentals. Many hotels run at 90 percent or more vacancy during the summer, Bruvold said, leaving few choices to visitors without reservations.
"It isn't clear if we shut down the industry that there's room at the inn for these people," he said. "There probably would be some loss of business out of San Diego. It can't be absorbed by the hotel industry when they're running at 90 percent occupancy in July."
Bruvold said he could draw no conclusions on any trends since is the first survey of its kind locally. But he hopes to take a second look and broaden out to the rest of the county.
