By Carolyn Said

Updated 4:27 pm, Monday, April 25, 2016

San Francisco’s struggles to regulate vacation rentals in private homes aren’t over.

Short-term-rental sites like Airbnb and HomeAway/VRBO would be on the hook to ensure that their hosts follow the city’s registration requirements under amendments to an existing law that Supervisors David Campos and Aaron Peskin plan to propose on Tuesday, The Chronicle has learned. Platforms that flout the mandate would face fines of up to $1,000 a day per listing and misdemeanor charges.

San Francisco made vacation rentals legal with a February 2015 law that requires all hosts to register with the city. As of March, only 1,647 hosts had complied. Airbnb alone has about 7,000 hosts, while HomeAway/VRBO has about 1,700; FlipKey has about 900, and numerous hosts list on sites such as Craigslist. “You have to ask yourself, how do you make compliance happen when so many people are ignoring the law?” Campos said.

Registration numbers

The supervisors’ proposal would require companies to verify that all listings have a valid San Francisco registration number before posting them online. When the city flags rentals that seem illegitimate, the listing services would be required to respond with details about those properties within one business day or face big fines. Funds generated from the new plan would go to an affordable housing fund.

Campos and Peskin agree with housing activists who say that lucrative vacation rentals siphon units from the market, driving up prices and tightening availability. The existing law’s attempts to prevent this, such as limiting rentals to people’s own homes and capping whole-home rentals at 90 days a year, have been difficult to enforce. Compelling the companies to police themselves is the best way to identify offenders, they said.

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