By Lance Lambert | Realtor.com
For more than a decade, short-term home rental websites such as Airbnb, HomeAway, and VRBO have helped everyday Americans squeeze some serious cash out of their homes—whether families renting out empty bedrooms or investors offering up multiple properties in prime tourist neighborhoods, leasable by the night. Easy-peasy! But those carefree good times may be coming to an end.
The motto of Silicon Valley may be to move fast and break things—but sooner or later the bureaucrats catch up. That’s the current reality for the short-term rental industry, now weathering an unprecedented storm of restrictive new regulations from city councils across the country.