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hello everyone. welcome to friday morning’sgoogle hangout. this is a live conversation discussing short-term rental regulations.and if you are joining us… the website is vacationrentalmag.com/strgooglehangout andi probably should have that in a form that i could put up on the screen. if you are joiningus either through facebook or through youtube you are welcome to keep watching there. ifyou want to join the conversation, we have a live chat roll on that website, vacationrentalmag.com/strhangoutand join us over there if you want to participate. looks like we already have some questionscoming up. michelle, we see your question. so, we are gonna go through just a very briefagenda. i’ll introduce my esteem panelists and we do have a q&a and we want to make sureto answer everybody’s questions and we’ll

get to that very shortly. let me jump in tothis and introduce my two guests. i’ve worked with these guys quite a bit, just great respect.these are fun folks but also they are probably the two best resources in the industry rightnow when it comes to understanding short term rental regulations. so, our first guest ismatt curtis. matt say hello. you’re on camera now. matt: hi everybody, good to see you. joel: matt is the director of government relationsfor homeaway and he was also recently elected to the board of the vacation rental managersassociation and he is just fresh from a flight back from nashville. so, matt, welcome. thanksfor joining us. our other guest is tim doyle

who is a spokesperson for str advocacy center.that’s stradvocacy.org. and str advocacy… he is gonna give us a more complete…well,tim, i’m gonna give you the floor. give us the fifty-thousand level view and in thethird segment we can go into more depth into about what great resource str advocacy is. tim: sure. good morning. good afternoon. stradvocacy.orgprovides resources to any stakeholder looking for information about short term rental regulations.specifically, we work with a lot of policymakers and people operating short term rentals tohelp them better understand what the laws are locally and how they can advocate forfair and reasonable regulations. it is a platform for folks that are trying to learn more, tryingto organize locally and trying to learn how

they can advocate for fairer and reasonablerules. joel: outstanding. alright. so, a brief lookin the agenda. we gonna break these essentially into three segments and then we have a q&a.first segment, matt is gonna talk about the current state of regulations. so, we gonnalook at what’s happening not only here in the us but around the world. there are conversationsthat are happening in a number of different places -- in new york, in madrid, all overand there are some great examples of communities that are doing the right thing but i thinkthe evidence really bares this out. there’s a way to look at short term rentals and whatregulations that are beneficial to all the parties involved and some really bad thingsthat just end up hurting everyone involved.

so, matt’s gonna talk about that for aboutten minutes. i’m gonna give a case study of what it actually looks like on the groundif you’re a manager or an owner. i think most people just want to do their businessand not be concerned with all these regulations stuff. i think the number one thing that bothmatt and i heard and probably tim as well when we talked to people about regulations,when they end up facing them, they always thought it could never happen to them, youknow, not here -- we’re not gonna face unfair regulations. so, we gonna talk about whatit really looks like on the ground when those things start to happen and we’ll give somepretty good examples of what we did in austin that was done well and some things that wedefinitely could have done a lot better. and

then the third segment -- and man do i wishthat there had been resources like str advocacy when we were having our battle here. the thirdsegment, tim is gonna talk about what new resources are out there particularly thisonline clearing house but also some… just some great case studies for how you can buildyour constituency locally, how you can find some common natural allies, and how you canjust walk yourself through this process. so, we are looking at somewhere around 30 minutesfor the program part and then we’ll open up for the questions, and then… we’realready seeing a bunch of questions pop up on the chat roll. so, we will try to answerevery single one of those. our hangout today is sponsored by vacation rental magazine.hopefully, if you signed up through the registration

you got your coupon for a free three-monthsubscription. we’re pushing the boundaries here technologically so we have a couple ofclips here from our sponsor. we don’t have any audio because we’re not able to workany audio working today but today’s hangout is sponsored by vacation rental magazine.it’s a gorgeous magazine. i hope you pick up a subscription. every issue takes you aroundthe world. we highlight beautiful, interesting, unusual vacation rentals around the worldand there are also travelers stories. any of these properties that are highlighted youcan actually click right through and find a listing on homeaway, vrbo or flipkey. andthere are also stories for owners about how to better manage your properties, everythingthat is happening in the industry is covered

in the magazine. so, that’s the bit fromthe sponsor. but let’s jump right here into this. matt, i’m gonna hand you the floorand you kinda give us the rundown of what’s going on with regulations around the us andaround the world. matt: you know it’s fascinating and thanksso much for having me on joel. this is just really fantastic. it is just fascinating situationbecause when you look at it there is clear best practice and there’s clear sweet spotfor a regulatory framework that can work for most communities and every community justcan augment it just a little bit to work well for them but what is very clear is that theregulatory framework that would best work for all stakeholders involved would have tobe something that is fair and reasonable,

easy to follow and allows the vacation rentalowner or manager to easily understand the rules and easily follow. and to achieve thati think there have been some discussions that have worked very well and some well-thoughtout regulations have come together but at the same time i think there have been somediscussions where the regulatory atmosphere got a little bit maybe down the wrong pathand the regulations that came together just don’t really work. so, want we want to dois talk about regulations that worked well. at homeaway and with short term rental advocacycenter, within the industry all around the world it seems that every time we have thisconversation, the best way to look at having a regulatory discussion is for it to startwith the managers or with the owners, you

know, with the stakeholders involved in thatcommunity. in one case, we actually had a situation wherein a former owner, a womanwho didn’t even own a home currently, she just got so involved in this conversationthat she actually put together the local alliance of stakeholders to go down to her local towncouncil and have this conversation. so, what make cities that are small, medium and large?there are some regulatory discussions that have happened in small, medium or large communitiesthat have happened outside of working with the stakeholders; so, not working with themanagers, not working with the owners, not working maybe with the travelers or otherpeople who are invested in short term rentals. then there are some communities that havedone great job of bringing all those stakeholders

to the table. and i think austin is a reallygood example of that. and to come and brought all those stakeholders from sort of outerring back into the inner ring, it actually included not just travelers and owners andmanagers, i guess to start with the outer ring. it really started with the economicdevelopment professionals in austin and the creative community -- the music, film andgaming community who used short term rentals -- the people who put together fast rolesand other events that use short term rentals. they got involved; the travelers were involved;and all of these were organized by a local alliance of owners and managers. that broughtall the stakeholders to the table to have the best possible conversation that we couldhave in austin. and we see that in some other

communities as well and sometimes it has workedout in advance enough so that the regulation that was able to come together was the bestregulation that could be. in some circumstances like the cuchara valley. so, these are townslike palm spring, palm desert, rancho mirage, indio and cathedral city, they had some prettysignificant regulations that were… which directly were short term rentals from thelate 1990’s to early 2000. so, they did not allow for rental or rent properties forless than 30-day stays. in the cuchara valley cities locked to this over a period of time.this is just to generalize lots of those communities. some of them even double down on that heavyheavy restriction and created even more owner restriction or even stronger fines to opposerentals of less than 30 days. in about 2009

or 2010, i think it was palm desert was thefirst one… i’m sorry, it was palm spring was the first city that come along and say,“hey, wait a second. we are trying to eliminate the ability for people to rent out their rentalproperty for less than 30-day stays to be able to do rent out vacation rental opportunitiesfor people for less than 30-day stays but at the same time what we’re missing outon is the opportunity for this industry to be transparent and above the radar and forthe industry to be able to pay their necessary hotel or transient occupancy taxes.” so,they came along, they created a regulation and you can find them on the short term rentaladvocacy website where people are allowed to register and pay their taxes. and whatdid you know? they started to make more money

than they were in fines and they were notspending as much in compliance aspect trying to regulate an activity that is… or restrictan activity that is very difficult to restrict. so, one by one, rancho mirage, palm desert,palm spring and the other cities have created good regulations that allowed folks to rentout properties for less than 30-day stays and each of those communities are benefitinggreatly from the transparent activity and from the taxes that are generated from theactivity such as transient hotel occupancy tax. that’s a small city example. mid-sizecity example if you want to look at maybe an example where this conversation got a littlebit more challenging is galveston, texas. in galveston, these conversations are goingon right now and early on when i talked to

some of the different stakeholders in galveston-- people from the city or people from the community down there or owners and managers.everybody seemed to think that clearly this is a common sense opportunity and they willfind a common sense solution and they develop a regulation that will work well but unfortunatelythe conversation got a little bit out of hand and later an owner and manager alliance, anowner alliance and manager alliance were part of galveston did form and has had some strongpositive response from the county to local town council and helping them to see what’sthe best practices are from around there and the rest of the country. there is an existingvacation rental manager association chapter in galveston and they have done a good jobin their area of galveston prior to this conversation.

and in big cities a little bit weird. in urbancities you can look at some examples and probably one of the most glaring ones is new york city.in 2010, new york banned short term rentals and was a state law. since 2010 there seemsto be multiple short term rentals that are in operation. you can find then in craigslistand different sites but those folks now are operating under the radar and not paying theirtaxes. in paris, the conversation has been very difficult. there is currently heavy restrictionagainst short term rentals and there are some conversations to restrict that activity evenfurther. however, we would see the same effect happen that activity would go under the radar,people would not be paying their local taxes and of course not being in compliance meansgreater other issues that could become even

more apparent like maybe not providing goodservice because they don’t have to worry about reviews because they are operating belowthe radar. so, looking backwards we’ll break about cities that have been regulatory discussionsrecently are berlin, munich, hamburg, frankfurt -- all if which are talking about some restrictionsright now. we are hoping that the owners and the managers’ groups that are coming togetherthere can help us convince those folks to find a best practice that could work for thosecommunities where the activity can start operating. in spain there is a potential for a nationallaw but madrid, the canary islands and the balearic islands were looking at restrictionson short term rentals. in catalona, however, there is a very good example of a regulationthat works. they put together a regulation

that allows folks to register and pay theirtaxes. they allow them to operate above the radar and we use that example often throughouteurope. in the united states… i’m sorry, i skipped over france. in france there isa discussion about a national law that would probably primarily affect paris. however,several different groups of owners and managers and stakeholders have been working on thatto try to positively affect that regulation as well. it seems that if you can get in frontof the decision makers early and discuss with them the positive effects of having a transparentindustry vastly outweighs the negative effects of having an industry that would probablystill operate under the radar. joel, i wonder if i could just go through a real quick withthe us. in the us there are several cities

that are discussing regulations. many of themare discussing regulations that would work and would be good for the community. manyof them are very restrictive. and i think a good place to look at the short term rentaladvocacy center website is to look at the us conference affairs policy that they unanimouslypassed in 2011, i believe. basically, what that said was key cities there is economicbenefit that comes from short term rental activity; there is a level of tourism andbusiness travel that comes through the short term rental activity that won’t come throughour hotels the same way. these are people who are staying for longer periods of timewith a larger group and it goes on talking about the value of having a transparent andabove the radar industry in the community

that you can work with rather than tryingto pretend it doesn’t exist, allowing it to go under the radar. so, in the united stateswe have some communities that are a little surprising that they have tried to restrictshort term rentals like sandusky, ohio or atlantic city, new jersey or saint joseph,michigan or even page, arizona. but for several communities they have had these discussionsand are finding positive results and i think some of them can be found in some discussions…i think working positive in action in oregon. in monterey, california there’s a conversationthat has been going on for a while i think some people quite described as have been challengingbut at the same time everyone has been open to the idea that there are best practicesand there is a common solution out there,

a common sense solution. so, i hope that answersat least some of the regulatory discussions that are happening around the country yetmy biggest challenge that i see, as joel alluded to, the number of owners or managers or travelerswho have said that “this will never happen in my town.” i usually hear that just afew months or a few weeks before they call me back and say, “hey, guess what?” thenumber of people who said, “we knew it’s gonna happen. we just thought we had moretime,” is also a big challenge for us. the best thing we see is to organize your localowners and managers alliance early, become an active part of your community and definethe message rather than let the message define you. alright joel, i turn over to you.

joel: yeah. well, it’s tough. well, i meanas an owner myself and i help manage a couple of properties and now have friends in austin,a pretty large group of people that have vacation rental properties, i think everyone wouldprefer just to manage your business day to day, bringing your guests in, giving greatservice and the idea that you are gonna spend a bunch of time running around city hall,you know…the natural tendency is just to hope that it just goes away. in my segmenti’ll talk pretty specifically what it kinda feels like on the ground as you should bepaying attention to those signals. but before we let you go matt, i want to get a perspectivefrom you because i know what those conversations look like, specifically in austin, you weretalking about when the conversation can start

to go the wrong direction, starts to go alittle bit or maybe very negative. what are some of the commonalities throughout the placesthat you are seeing that are having a challenge or talking about owners’ regulations. whatare the objections or what are the complaints that start this process rolling that peopleare looking to, you know, crackdown? there are problems. i think there are some commonalityto the perceived challenge of this type of rental property. matt: you know, i think that you are absolutelyright. i think that there is. well, i feel these conversations, whether it is in thecanary islands or in page, arizona this conversation starts with typically start with what peoplerefer to as nimbys -- not in my backyard folks.

and they tend to be people who -- i just sawsome last night in austin city hall -- people who do hang around in city hall usually arevery active in these discussions. and so when they hear about this going on in their communityor they see a regulatory discussion happening in another community they start that conversationin your community. the three probably common places where people seem to be settling arediscussions of how this is a commercial or spot zoning in a residential area that isa commercial activity in a residential area. another place might be how it affects affordablehousing and that could be two different ways. one is how it affects the overall cost ofyour neighborhood, the value of your neighborhood, and then two, in some communities, how ittakes away from affordable or from housing

stock thus driving the cost of housing loanand then the other one, is oftentimes, you’ll hear folks “we’re okay with primary homeowners renting versus people who own a secondary property, vacation property and renting outtheir home or vice versa.” that seems to be the three places where this gets startedand where often it goes bad is when the conversation goes for far too long. there are best practicesout there. there are places where both government decision makers can go to find information.and i think our short term rental advocacy center is one of those and then, of course,the stakeholders involved in this discussion can go and find that information. and i thinkthe more quickly people can educate on “hey, here’s what best practices look like. here’swhat works, here’s what doesn’t. here’s

the economic value,” and maybe do a littleeducation on what the industry is. i think the decision makers can more quickly findtheir answer but it’s one way operating in a vacuum that don’t have anyone givingthem education, they don’t know anything about the industry at all that maybe theymight turn to say, “hey, let’s form a working group or a task force or put thisinto a committee of the sub-committee of the city council for the next six months.” andthat allows for the conversation to be far more negative and a lot of misinformationto fester. i was gonna say very quickly the easy places to go against some of these argumentsare these are still residential use and that many people who are renting out their homesfor short term rents aren’t always running

out for short term periods of time. i knowin a lot of cities when we talk to owners and managers they will point out that theirproperties that they are renting, they are renting for sometimes 60 days, sometimes 45,which is typically a long-term rent but also sometimes less than 30 days. so, this is aresidential use that is not even a short term activity. there’s no study that says anythingother than almost for that fail the short term rental investments that people make intheir properties actually helped the property value. and of course, in communities wherefolks think that it’s taking away from the housing stock, especially that argument mightbe laid at the feet of secondary homes. remember these are secondary homes. these are homesthat people use for vacation not some investment

property. it’s not going back to the housingpool or else they are empty otherwise and not be contributing to the local community.and then finally, the primary versus secondary arguments, you know, we see the professionallyrun secondary homes operating very well. they see people renting out their primary homesworks well too. there is no example wherein if you try to have them restrict one or theother that they are still going to operate which is underground and then they are notcontributing to the community and paying their taxes. joel: perfect segway. thank you matt. so,i’m gonna talk just briefly and kinda share with the audience what happened on the groundon austin and i’ll just give it… i’ll

give the ending away by telling you rightnow the number one mistake we made, if i had to do it all over again, is that we didn’tget organized quickly enough and take these threats seriously enough and we also did nothave a resource like str advocacy. and i’m just so thankful that it’s out there nowfor the people that are facing conversations about regulations. but those are the two bigones. we had no model to look to but we also just did not take it seriously as i’ve said,you know. everyone at the... members of our ad hoc group at that point were having conversationswith one another. thankfully, we had a group of people online. thanks to a woman namedcindy hill here in austin. she had formed i think it was a yahoo group and so vacationrental owners and managers had discovered

each other online and we were sharing bestpractices -- how do write your contracts? who do you use for cleaning? does anybodyknow a good plumber? -- those sorts of things were the focus of that ad hoc group but westarted to… most of the neighborhoods in austin had some sort of a neighborhood listservand we started to see through people finding these conversations on their neighborhoodlistservs.. there were a couple of little neighborhoods that were having an issue withparty houses and so just as a heads up that's typically one of the ways that this will appear.there is a property that you know an owner may not be acting responsibly we certainlyhave to allow for that possibility. there are people who run furnished rentals, shortterm rentals who are bad neighbors, they’re

bad actors. they're typically a very ,verysmall number. i think the whole controversy in austin really stemmed from about five propertiesout of you know who knows how many hundreds of really good operators. but there were acouple of bad eggs and so we started to see these pretty angry posts thrown upon our neighborhoodlists, parties until three in the morning and this is a residential neighborhood. there'strash in the yard. there are people you know and some of them were pretty outrageous. guysdrunk late at night peeing on somebody's car. not something that anybody wants to experienceand our group response was to... i think we did a fairly good job of finding the ownersof these properties finding the neighbors who were affected, trying to mitigate thesituation, trying to help the owner be a better

neighbor. but those neighbors who were upsetconnected with one another and we just didn't pay close enough attention to realize thatthis was a dialogue that was starting to gain momentum until we started to hear from ourcity council that they were going put together a working group because there were peoplewho were asking to the council to do something about these problem properties. and what theywere asking was for the city council simply ban the process or ban the practice of rentingshort term. hey, matt looks like i’m gonna mute you for just a second... so that waswhat was happening on the ground. it sort of burst in neighborhood online lists butthen it made its way to city council and suddenly we had to deal with what was now politicalproblem. and i think i have told matt before

i think the low point for me was meeting oneof our council members and we had laid out a very clear argument about what these propertiescontributed to the local economy, how short term rental is almost invariably the nicesthouse on the block. how the use is without exception residential use. it’s not a commercialuse. it’s no different than a long term rental. and he looked at me and he said , “yes,absolutely i understand your arguments. these are all great points and your problem joelis now you have a political issue. it has gained momentum and you need to solve it politically.so what we ultimately had to do was form a real organization, you know an official non-profit.we formed the austin rental alliance. we brought in owners. we brought in managers and thenwe had to mount what ended up being a year

and a half long campaign of going to all ofthese stakeholder meetings but also going in meeting individually with each one of thecity council members. meeting with the planning and zoning commission and laying out a veryclear argument for all of these different folks about again how much short term rentalcontribute to the economy, how the uses is not commercial no matter how many times ouropponents tried to characterize it that way. know what people were doing in the house wedemonstrated was sleeping and eating and watching tv and that it’s a residential use. we hadto go make those arguments in front of the council in front of all these different constituenciesand it was really a long process. and so again what i’ve been telling people consistentlyif you are if you are starting to hear these

things take it very seriously and get organized.find the other owners in your area if you don’t have an organization form one. ifyou do, make sure that you’re communicating and that all of your members are paying attentionto your local listservs. because it really just takes one or two problem properties fora group of people to get together and decide that this is their next cause l'assureur.mat talked about people who are here in austin who frequently go down to our city hall. thosesame people are down there protesting something new now. we just happened to be their causeat that particular point in time but they’re dedicated. i mean they are, they were downthere at every meeting they had people lined up. they had talking points, they had scheduling,they were absolutely very, very involved locally.

and i think probably every city around theworld has people who are to their credit they are very concerned about their community buti think they fundamentally misunderstand what short term rentals are because the argumentsthat they kept bringing to city council were you know these are cover for drug runners,these are you know really just a cover for brothels. they’re nothing but party houses.and we had to, you know the other piece that i think we did really well and i’ll seeif i can i might be able to bring out some of these videos. see if i might even be ableto bring out some of these videos . the other piece that we did very well was bringing insome of the people who use short term rentals. and it was grandmothers visiting their kidsin the neighborhood who didn’t have enough

room. it was, you know, professionals whowere coming to either do business in austin or they’re looking to relocate here. itwas ut alumni coming back for a long game weekend. it was really everything except thekind of bad actors and party crew that we kept on being characterized as. so to sumagain, to sum again have your feelers out there, be paying attention, paying very closeattention on what’s happening on your neighborhood listservs . organize all of your owners. getsome sort of a group together; if you don't have one, the short term rental advocacy,i going to turn the table over to tim in just a moment, but str advocacy is a phenomenalplace to find other owners and to start a local chapter if one doesn’t exist . andthen there are a number of different case

studies up there that will walk you throughin much more specificity than i can go into in a you know 15 or 30 minute hangout aboutthe tools that are available to you and the steps that you can take. the last piece thati am going to share here and again we're pushing the edge technologically i am going to seeif i can make this happen. do you guys see a video here on your screen, matt and tim? matt: no. joel: no you do not. allright. i going tohit play and we’ll see if this works or not. matt: hey joel, while you do that i am goingto shout out that we formed a local alliance

where we get other people rally together.it just means less work on you. all of a sudden you've got, you've got you know dependingon the size of the town you've got four, five , ten other friends who are working with youto help you know find out what's going on at city hall. hear about things, to rallysupport. it's just more help for you so it’s a great thing to do. joel: absolutely. i'm going to give this ashot here and see if i can play this video back. just a couple of examples and one ofthe things that i think really had an impact on our council members was bringing in examplesof who's actually using these property, who would be affected by the regulations thatwere being proposed and so those were four

to five videos that we shared that had youknow highlights from the neighbors, highlights from business travellers who were coming into town. and then there were even some videos that we did with the local art community.just showing the support for the art community and also highlighting with those natural allies.the hotel occupancy tax that we’re collecting as vacation owners goes to directly supportthat community so that's just a quick overview. i think tim has a bunch of more in-depth andgreat examples on the str advocacy site so i am going to hand the floor over to tim. tim: sure. well can you see my screen joeland matt? joel: yeah. absolutely.

tim: so the short term rental advocacy centeris again really meant to be sort of a resource center for policy makers and specificallyshort term rental operators and we have three sort of big pillars in terms of trying towork with people, trying to educate them and trying to help them organize and win fairlyreasonable regulations in their community. so the first pillar hear would be learn. soyou just click on the learn tab. this is at stradvocacy.org. so here we have at the topour fact sheet, very useful to show people our best practices, these are some of thebest. it has some specifics about you know presenting this to policy makers, gives themsome specifics about you know what are in terms of the creation of legislation and ordinances.what thing sort of work the best and then

we have a series of case studies here thatall connect to a presentation that walks through some places and some approaches that havebeen incredibly effective and this is palm desert, california being one of them thatmatt talked about earlier. we also have some videos here. this is the video here that joelwas just referencing of some very short clips from folks in austin, texas talking aboutthe use or their use of short term rentals or this guy specifically appears as a neighborwho of the house next door he was very much in favor of being a short term rental andthen we also have some previous webinars and here a great example of the blue ridge lodgingassociation in blue ridge, georgia that sort of has done a tremendous job in terms of organizingthe short term rental operators in that community.

we also have some stories from policymakersand folks on the ground about you know bringing about really effective legislation and ordinances.the next pillar would be connect that is and this goes back to what joel talked about youknow the number one thing you can do, you know. whether you are concerned about shortterm rental regulation in your community or you’re facing an imminent threat is to forma local group of folks this is typically not a very large group but somewhere between anywherefrom 6 people to 2 or 3 dozens and what happens there is... and that is really how you wouldgo about through the organizing and approaching your city about through the value of shortterm rentals. so here we have maps you can punch in your zip code and look up if thereis a group near you. we only have about 22

on our site right now but are looking to addmore and more every day. and then here we have if you click on this and you will seea guide about how to start a group. typically these groups are formed typically as googleor yahoo groups which give people a very easy ability to email everyone in their group strikeup conversations and then once people create groups they can submit them here. we put themon our map and then we work with homeaway and other companies that are in our groupto make sure everyone locally knows about it. and, lastly we have just a feature herewhere people can submit their email address we send out a monthly newsletter that sortsof highlight things going on, how to implement these steps better so on and so forth andjust give you some good tips and tricks. lastly

we have act. once your group is formed whatdo you do? how do you approach your city? what are the most important things? we havea 6 step advocacy guide here. so this about how you learn about short term rentals youknow for instance step 1 and step 2 how do you learn about the laws near you and howdo you calculate the impact of short term rentals. so this, you click on this righthere give you more detail. the one example we cite here is a small community in floridacalled lake worth. they calculated that just 50 short term rentals created $3.5 m in spendingevery year. once they formed get that number together and try to advocate to the localgovernment. they're incredibly effective in terms of having those numbers having themsome materials together. so again here we

go through how do you craft your argument,what materials do you need to get together once you approach h your city? here are the5 things we suggest but by no means you can follow them. and then we have some more informationabout how you talk to local officials, how do you deal with the media, how can you leverageup ads and interactions with the local newspapers or broadcasters and then six it's just sortof sum everything up in terms of the need to really be persistent and as joel alludedto, how to cultivate champions for your cause, try to find third party voices that can speakabout the importance of short term rentals and what they bring to our local community.so that is sort of a quick guide if you ever have any questions about you know forminga group or some of thespecific steps we are

always here to sort of work with folks onthe ground. we work with people all the time. the easiest way to get in touch with us isjust to email us at info@stradvocacy.org and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. joel: outstanding. and there are definitelyquestions right now. so i think we should you know perhaps go ahead and jump in intothe q and a and i’ll just try to open this up and you guys both jump on them or takeone that seems to appeal to you. one of the first questions is, what is the first stepto fighting owner's regulations that are already in place? so for cities that already havepassed either an outright ban or maybe they just made it very, very restrictive, they’vemade it difficult to get registered to comply.

what are, what are the first steps? tim: i would say you know obviously forminga group again is always sort of the first step. when there are laws in the books thatare owners restrictive or an outright ban i think that some of the steps we have inour guides still sort of apply. it is important for you to get your materials together, tryto figure out what the impact is on your community and the importance of it. obviously it isa more difficult situation than if you’re, if it’s something your town's consideringor something that’s you know far down the road. but you know matt spoke about this earlieryou know presenting and talking about some of the case studies of places that had restrictiverules and then went out and created something

that is a little more fair and reasonablesuch as palm desert, palm springs, california are great examples of, you know, these arecities that have laws that didn’t work. they made some changes and they started toreap some humongous economic benefits and frankly that was a solution that worked alot better in terms of, you know, wrapping their arms around the issue what they perceivedas an issue with short term rentals. matt: you know, i just want to chime in fora quick second because i think that's very important. i'll make out an example. it willbe a far-fetched example but what to say have scranton, pennsylvania. i have no idea ifthey have restriction or not. i can imagine they do but to tim's point organizing is thebest first step in finding even this one or

two other people like yourself. the shortterm rental advocacy center, homeaway, and other companies like ours will email peoplewho list in that area as a way of notifying them that that group like yours has formedand we have seen in some communities groups grow from just a couple of members one ortwo to groups having dozens of members a week later after receiving that email and findinga place online where they can organize with you may be on facebook or if you create awebsite. so that would be the first step is to organize and just quickly go into whatthe immediate next step would be is you have all these information out there for you. nowthat i am a new member of the vacation rental managers association, there is a lot of informationon that website if you are a main website.

of course the short term rental advocacy center,homeaway itself and you can look at joel’s website of how they kind of got organizedfrom the austin rental alliance and many other places and i think finding the us conferenceof mayors resolution. here's the largest group of elected officials that get together andvote on policy that are facing urban areas around the country and they agreed unanimouslythat this is the best way to handle short term rental. this is hundreds of mayors whovoted on this. so i think the idea of organizing and gathering your information should quicklymove into how do you use it. that’s one thing we did not mention. but i suggest everyoneput every decision you make through a very simple filter of are we being transparent?are we being positive? are we being solutions

oriented? and are we being data driven? andthe reason for that is as joel discussed your opponents are almost without fail going tobe negative, they are going to obfuscate for their real purposes, they’re not going comewith the solution. their solution is going be just ban the activity which is not a realisticsolution. and they are going to operate from a point of emotion and not from data. andone quick last thing is if we can have fun with this. we’re frankly getting organizedearly really helps is if you do want to use data add a little of anecdotal informationto sell your point and you are from scranton, pennsylvania, you are organized , you’vebeen somewhat active with you know maybe chamber of commerce issues that relate to housingor anything you may care about. maybe somewhat

active with the local real estate councilon any issues that they are discussing. well then you may know that the end of the budgetseason what to say that the scranton city council got to the end of their budget andthey were starting to really cut into the bone on the budget there and they are sayingwe cannot fund this $150,000 improvement to this park or you know this $ 290,000 improvementto our local civic arena.what’s great about that is when you use your data and use someof the information that tim has talked about or joel has talked about and you develop yourown economic analysis. now you are able to come back and say, “you know what we doas vacation short term rental owners and operators who bring people into this community as faras paying taxes and the direct and indirect

economic impact of our activity? it’s millionsof dollars. so when you were discussing the $ 290,000 budget item or the $150,000 budgetitem proper regulation of our industry and proper partnership with our industry can benefitthis community to the tune of millions of dollars.” and it always does. tim: and to that point i do not want to taketoo long but it's sort of an amazing transformation too when a local city official hears thatin the context of keeping their job or not keeping their job because that's often whatpeople, it's on the table given how constrained local and state government policy is. joel: yeah. and there’s just aren’t manyindustries where the constituents come in

and ask to be regulated but i think that hashappened enough times now. there's clearly a trend of that because there is such a benefitto good regulations. there are so many clear examples of that. one of the other questionsis: can you provide an example of good ordinances? that's a question for both of you. tim doesstr advocacy have sample regulations? tim: yeah. i would encourage folks toi wasgoing to pull it off for a quick start. if you see on our main page i talked about thelessons learned presentation we have. so this is a presentation that walks through, hassome general information about the short term rental industry but has very specific examples.here's one about palm desert, about how they passed owners’ rules and then sort of switchedand cared for something that was much more

strict before. we have a quote here from theprincipal planner about why that was such a good change. yes, we do have examples ofgood regulations here. we also talk about just get to know a little bit about the rulingin atlantic city that basically found that the city was wrong to try to go after "absentee"owners. some great resources here and there’s also an example here, this is not really aboutthe regulation but about a group of owners in blue ridge, georgia that organized createda very formidable organization and also includes the professional association of innkeepersinternational about a favorable decision they made about short term rentals and finallythe us conference of mayors resolution that matt talked about earlier.

joel: wow. those are great examples. okayone question that stands out. briefly it says can we show a youtube of this hangout we arehaving right now to our constituents right now? absolutely so... there will also be anemail about a replay but this will also live on youtube. so, i will make sure that allof the participants probably post upon this page if you are watching on vacation rentalmagazine page. i was going directly to that. i suppose tim you may also do something. puta link up. tim: yeah. yeah. it will definitely be postedwithin the next few days or week at stradvocacy.org/learn. joel: great. okay. one of our next questionsis about hoas. how can we have influence over hoa boards that rewrite the by-laws in orderto restrict short term rentals?

tim: hoas are definitely a different and abit more difficult of a situation but i would say some of the principles in terms of howyou know approach these board members. approach them and talk about the value of short termrentals is very similar to the way you should do that with local policymakers. unfortunatelytypically those in many scenarios hoas have boards that sort of rule a bit more firmlyi would say and not sort of in line with the principles of our democracy but i think thatyou know gathering a group in your hoa that is in favor of short term rentals you knowproviding some good examples of what they’re doing to the community. you know, a lot oftimes getting some testimonials from the neighbors saying they never had a problem with noiseor anything along those lines i think all

of those things would help tremendously tofinding and getting to some rules that everyone can live with. joel: yeah, i know they’re tricky. mattwe are talking about hoas and the question is for hoas that are trying to rewrite theirby laws or maybe they already have their by laws that are very restrictive to rentingfor less than 30 days any insight there into how somebody can deal with that. i know whenwe had the panel in las vegas at rezfest cindy goslin had so much interesting things to sayabout hoas from your perspective any thoughts? matt: you know one of the things, i don’tknow if we’ve been given adequate background of cindy goslin but she was a former citystaff for palm springs who helped rewrite

their ordinance and helped all the... valleyrewrite their ordinances to become far more effective. one of the things that she saidi think was like with hoas just like with cities , over-restriction of this is justgoing to drive the industry underground. people will to participate in the activity. so, youknow, i don’t know what the right answer is but you know some hoas have such prettyinteresting thinking on this. they made a lot of policies some policies internally thatdraw a lot of people to essentially register with the hoa. just to file the little thingand say, “hey, i am gonna be renting my property for short term rent and if you needto get hold of me for any reason here’s a contact number.” and the hoas also cametogether and said, “look, if you gonna to

rent your property for short term rent thenyou must realize that we may have an issue with increased need to monitor and be concernedabout the maintenance of the facility and potentially the security we’ll ask for a$ 50, $ 200 a year fee for registering your property within that building. we heard greatsuccess from that particular property. the people said, “hey, that’s great we hada little fee we had to pay to participate because of there were some members of thecommunity that were concerned. those concerned didn’t have any real data to support thembut they were willing to pay a small fee to placate those concerns and then of courseyou know being able to continue to register their home and provide a 24-hour or have sometype of contact number or have a manager who

had a contact number. a lot of homeownersfeel comfortable in fact with that activity was going to occur. they wind up working forthat particular hoa. i think what’s cindy’s point is, what my thought is that it stillhappens anyway. it’s been incredibly difficult and very unbelievably expensive to try toenforce this activity so the easy thing is to create a program that is very easy forpeople to participate. joel: that makes perfect sense. one of myfavorite programs now is boardwalk empire because its partly because steve buscemi isvery amazing but we brought out the volstead act with city council and i think a few ofthem laughed. but there’s a lot of validity to that. when there’s an activity whetheryou like it or not if there is an activity

that the seller is going to benefit from financiallyand that the buyer is very interested in and that is certainly the case with short termrentals, vacation rentals then it’s going to happen whether cities want to be involvedor not it’s going to happen and just like prohibition people didn’t stop drinkingit just gave power to criminal elements it basically made a bunch of law abiding citizensinto criminals. and i think from the examples that i have seen and talking to vacation rentalowners around the us and around the world, the cities that have tried to enforce a banfail miserably but they also completely lose the money. so i think the money is not onlya piece when you are talking to cities that already have owner’s regulations in placeit’s certainly something that you can bring

in as your supporting evidence for why goodregulations make sense. again into matt’s point in the situation of an hoa i have severalowners that i have worked with that have been facing issues with their hoas, hoas have eventhreatened to sue her they have actually initiated a lawsuit and they lost. i am not providinglegal advice but i have certainly seen a number of situations wherein an hoa is trying tolimit the rights that someone has in terms of how they can rent their property almostinvariably those lawsuits end up being very expensive lawsuits and the hoa ends up losing.so had cindy talked about it for a little bit we might have another hangout and haveher involved. one let’s see a couple of other questions that have come up here. sorryi didn’t see the name, michael: “as a

management agency we’ve seen a lot of undergroundrentals in our community that are not [i am going to paraphrase a little bit around here]they are not following local regulations, they are not paying their taxes. they listwith vrbo and flipkey and other websites how can we work with these listing sites to ensurethat everyone that rents through them, how do we help them ensure that their customersare following regulations”. matt: you know i’ve had a lot of thoughton that one and a lot of success with it too and my suggestion to michael again is to goback to our suggested first place to start which would be to organize a local alliance.i think what joel will tell you is they have had a whole lot of luck with compliance inaustin and self-regulation among the industry

by forming an alliance and then people tendto say, “hey i know joe down the street who is doing this or i know my cousin hasa best friend who is engaged in this activity. we can get him involved and then of coursewe can make sure they are following all the local regulations. so step 1 would be to formthat alliance and the other step is to go out there and gather the information and resourcesthat are available to you and that would mean homeaway, vrbo, tripadvisor, flipkey and othercompanies that are willing to email their listings in that area and let them know ifthere are regulations in place here’s maybe a link to those regulations and there’slocal owners and managers alliance that has formed and here’s how you can find out moreabout it. that usually has the great benefit

of driving a lot of people who probably arejustunaware to being aware. and then from there that’s a good place to start. youknow we want people to abide by local regulations, that’s very important to us but the unfortunateaspect of a lot of regulations are that they don’t always make sense. they’re hardto read, they’re hard to understand. there’s not a lot of uniformity in this industry atthe local level around the world to the language that’s used for that sort of things so ithink a good place to start is organize that local alliance and then you can start withthe information gathering, the resources and the self -regulation. tim: yeah i want to also i want to just quicklyadd i think places that have enjoyed the best

compliance are also… this is more sort ofabout the local regulatory environment. the places that have sort of the simplest againand easiest to understand rules, and then governments that are proactive in reachingout to folks about paying taxes, the need to register are the ones that sort of usuallyhave the highest compliance. one quick example there would be okaloosa county florida thatis the area in northwest florida known for its very nice beaches. the town destin isthere which is something people are familiar with and they’ve been doing this since 2005.they have one employee who just works on this issue and spends one day every week goingout in the field to go into people’s houses telling them about the laws, telling themabout the need to register. this has to happen,

this has to happen. it’s not hostile. it’snot you owe for the last five years but they get everyone to start paying and i think inthat time span i am ball parking these figures here they went from a million or two dollarsof revenue in 2005 to over 13 million dollars revenue from transient occupancy taxes i believein 2012 we have that information up on our site if you want to check it. it is in thepresentation i have just talked about. but i think it’s a great example of being proactive,being easy to understand local government and that kind of outreach in general is whatleads to best results. matt: you know joel, i don’t want to expandon this too much but tim had a really good point about okaloosa.it reminded me of somethingyou know the woman who is in charge of the

okaloosa situation recognizes that a heavyhand and strong enforcement will not raise what she calls the lawn money in the hoteloccupancy tax and the compliance that you get from people being engaged in her program.when i talked to her about other communities around the world that feel like heavy fines,hiring more enforcement officers to try to enforce heavy restrictions they wind up sayingreally strong negative, negative in the overall cost of the owner of the program because ofthe salaries that are included for those enforcement officials and the cost of running that programin a very heavy handed manner. she has found a whole lot of luck as tim laid out aboutby being far more positive promoting the industry, promoting the activity but at the same timebringing people in their regulatory environment

in a very positive manner. joel: and as alluded to that i think we certainlysaw that here in austin as we were going through our challenge. once we were organized as anofficial non-profit one of the things that we had to do was phone tree simply puttingdown lists of people we knew out there who are renting and then we would sit down andeach of us would make 4 or 5 phone calls. it was very positive supportive and just lettingpeople know that they needed to be involved and that they needed to be also you know forus at that point the number one thing we had going for us was that the prerequisite formembership in the austin rental alliance was being compliant with your hotel occupancytax and just making people aware. and there

was a pretty astounding level of i don’twant to call it ignorance you know misunderstanding about hotel occupancy even within our cityofficials but also to people who were operating as hotel rental owners. so that educationaleffort was probably the best things that we did to bring people into the fold and alsogrow the ranks of the austin rental alliance. so, hopefully that was an answer that youcan take... actually that was an answer. we’re coming up on top of the hour here. i thinkwe just have one or two more questions and i think we have kind of addressed this onethem was what is being done internationally regarding regulations? i think matt you havegiven a pretty good rundown of you know the challenges that you are keeping track of andtim talked about some groups that are forming

around the country. anything else you wantto discuss about what is happening internationally? matt: well, internationally there are actuallya couple of interesting things happening. these are strong enforcement right now inpanama of the not less than 45-day rental regulation. again what we gonna do is tryto help people organize local owners and managers alliances there and why that is because weknow people who are on the ground locally who are voters, property taxpayers involvedin their community are gonna have much better luck with their local elected officials thanpeople who come from another town. we’ve seen some regulatory discussion in columbia,in the philippines and of course i had the discussion about europe. europe is probablythe most dense area with the most activity.

that’s why we have seen the most owner manageralliances in each of these major cities formed and then of course even a pan european associationhas formed called the ehha. don’t ask me what that stands for but they have been helpfulwonderful people. it’s the european holiday homes association if i remember correctly.and the vrma frankly is also very engaged in that discussion at the pan-european level.again the regulations on the local level but we are trying to organize and discuss in thepan-european level because then we can identify best practices. joel: tim, anything else? tim: no, i have nothing to add to that, mattis the expert on international.

joel: very good. we just have one last questionthat popped up and i don’t know that we can offer a lot of help here. jason says,“i have a legitimate short term rental. it’s licensed. i am paying my taxes butit’s currently anything less than twelve months is not allowed by my hoa. jason ifyou just joined us we had talked a fair amount on how you can talk to hoas. it really isprobably something that you‘ll have to engage an educational process with that hoa becauseit’s you know there are by-laws for every hoas some of them it just depends on you knowhow i guess how enthusiastic they are about enforcing. but you can certainly use the toolsthat are available on stradvocacy.org. an earlier part of this hangout there was a prettylong discussion about how to deal with hoas

so we encourage you to grab the replay andtake a look at that. all right we’re exactly on the hour here and i think we’ve answeredall of our questions. this hangout will be available as i said we’ll put the link upon this page there’ll also be a link that tim going to put out on stradvocacy.org. iwill just quickly acknowledge my two guests here and we’ll wrap this up. tim, thankyou so much for joining us and any final words? tim: thank you. this has been great. againi encourage people to check out our site and again if you have any questions about what’sgoing on locally and your campaign feel free to email us at info@stradvocacy.org. joel: and man i wish that resource had beenaround when we were going through our challenge

here in austin. mr. matt curtis you are aboard member str guru extraordinaire any final words? matt: yeah. organize, organize, organize.use the free resources that are out there starting with stradvocacy.org and the us conferenceof mayors policy is written as if it was written from somebody within the industry. and whenyou look at each individual line feel free to quote from each individual line and usethat to present to your local decision makers about how these regulations can be formedin such a way that it is good for everyone. joel: and i will steal this directly fromyou matt, positive, data-driven, solutions oriented and transparent. that’s it forour hangout. we are hosted today my vacation

rental magazine if you did not get the linkplease just send me a not to joel@vacationrentalmag.com and we’ll make sure that you have a complimentarysubscription. we thank you for joining us. all right. have a great friday. matt: thank you everyone.