New York said it issued 49 notices for $1,000 each during
the first month of enforcement against property owners with illegal hotel listings.
One owner of three properties on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan had 44 of the violations, said the Mayor's Office of Special
Enforcement, because single-room occupancy units are being advertised as hotel
rooms.
They are being marketed as the Royal Park Hotel, the
Broadway Hotel and Hostel, and the Marrakech Hotel. Further, those properties
were illegally listed on Booking.com, Kayak, Hotwire and Orbitz.
Listings that are cited a second time generate a $5,000
fine, while additional citations for the same listing can boost that fine to
$7,500.
The landlord of a property in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood
received the other five violations.
While the state of New York ratified a law in October
allowing fines for illegal listings, that law's enforcement didn't begin until
Feb. 1.
After the law was ratified, Airbnb sued New York state
attorney general Eric Schneiderman, New York City and its mayor Bill de Blasio
before dropping the claim last December.
Airbnb has long disputed the claim that a substantial
percentage of New York City hosts are multi-dwelling landlords operating
de-facto hotels, and has vowed to scrub its site of so-called "professional
landlords." In a Feb. 14 blog post, Airbnb said it removed more than 4,000
of the city's listings for the three months ended Feb. 1, including more than
2,800 in Manhattan, reducing its listing total to about 46,000. Airbnb also
said that just 4% of its New York hosts have more than one listing.
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Correction: The illegal hotels mentioned in this report were not listed on Airbnb. A previous version of this report implied that they were.