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For the past four years, Katherine Taylor has rented a Westside guesthouse on Airbnb. She began to rely on extra income when it felt like everything was getting more expensive.
However, this spring she deleted the list.
“I’m out,” Taylor said. “There are too many rules. All these new regulations continue to emerge and I felt it was only a matter of time before they were fined.”
It appears that many people across the LA area are changing their preferences for income. Short-term rentals are far more advantageous than long-term stays, but steady turnover often causes headaches for landowners, increasingly on the crosshairs of local ordinances, including the risk of fines.
This and other factors led to short-term rental registrations falling in last year.
According to the planning department, LA City had 4,228 active home sharing registrations last July. In July this year, there was 3,972 – a 6% decrease.
Short-term rental software platforms also show list declines to varying degrees. In analyzing the sample set of short-term rentals in the LA Metro area, friendly hospitality estimated that the list had declined 44% year by year, steadily decreasing each month. Alltherooms reported a 13% drop in Airbnb list across LA County with the same stretch.
Because companies have different access to list data, data sources vary. Airdna reported an 8% increase in the list of Airbnb and VRBOs in the LA Metro area last year, but admitted that January has fallen since it was driven by a massive decline in the fire market. A 56% decrease in Altadena, a 36% decrease in Pallisade in the Pacific, and a 25% decrease in Malibu.
Experts’ opinions vary as to what causes the drop-off, but fires are definitely a factor. Thousands of homes were burned out in the Pallisard and Eton fires, taking many rentals from the market. However, in the wake of the disaster, many short-term rentals have been converted to medium-term or long-term rentals to accommodate fire casualties.
Other hosts have opted for medium-term rentals independent of fire.
“Short-term rental spaces have been stuck. Regulations have hit and we realize that the next best option is medium-term rental,” said Jesse Vasquez, an entrepreneur who runs the annual medium-term rental summit.
Vazquez said LA is the perfect market for a medium-term stay. Because many people are visiting the city for a long period of time without permanent planning, working on long-term projects such as travel nurses, students, digital nomads, or films and construction.
He said that mid-term rentals are about 15% to 20% less than short-term rentals, but in exchange, homeowners are dealing with reducing sales. If a 3-bedroom, two-bathroom home in a popular neighborhood could earn around $10,000 a month as a short-term rental, then it could bring in $8,000 a month as a medium-term rental, Vasquez said.
Last year, Airbnb CEO Brianchesky identified mid-term stays as a “huge growth opportunity” for the company, saying such bookings account for 18% of the company’s business, compared to 13% to 14% before the pandemic.
Mark Lawson had been renting a VRBO San Fernando Valley home for his weekend stay, but last year he set the parameters to only accept reservations for more than 30 days.
“I’m tired of having new people in the house every few days,” he said.
Short-term rentals have been argued for a long time. Advocates say sites like Airbnb and VRBO will provide income to homeowners and options for tourists, but critics have argued that home sharing will remove long-term rentals from the market amid the housing crisis.
In 2018, Los Angeles passed a Home Sharing Ordinance to prevent LA housing stock from being converted into short-term rentals. This regulates short-term rentals by restricting hosts from requiring only primary residences to rent and license them.
The regulatory framework has worked. The list fell 70% between 2019 and 2023, but the majority of the decline could be attributed to the pandemic. Last year, restrictions spread to unincorporated areas in LA County, which was previously not subject to the rules.
However, despite the new requirements, thousands of hosts have been operating without a license or forgerying registration numbers due to lack of enforcement.
Last year, a report from the LA Housing Authority stated that as of October 2024 there had been an estimated 7,500 violations of the Housing Sharing Ordinance, but only 300 citations. So in March 2025, LA City Council approved a number of recommendations to further strengthen the ordinance, arming the city with a new enforcement tool war box.
The plan calls for 18 staff to monitor for increased violations and fines. Based on the area of the rental, it costs $1,000 for rentals under 500 square feet, and up to $16,000 for homes over 25,000 square feet. Fines are twice and four times for the second and third violations, respectively.
The recommendation even requires city officials to go to spy missions with illegal rentals. Under the proposed plan, housing department staff will use prepaid cards to book shared home rentals, stay at home and gather evidence that it is illegally operated.
But two months later, the city’s $14 billion budget reduced spending in many urban sectors. As a result, no new enforcers have been hired, and many of the plans have not yet been implemented.
However, simply higher fines and the threat of stricter enforcement have had a calm effect.
“Conversing with customers is the biggest factor in the decline in short-term rental inventory,” said Derek Jones, Vice President of Sales and Partnerships at Hospitalable. “LA’s ordinance combines all the strict rules from other markets across the country.”
Jones said the possibility of a $1,000 fine (which can be dolled out without warning and without warning) has led some hosts to remove listings from the market as fines far out overnight income brought by the average listing.
“Housing is already expensive and adds high penalties and zoning that limits supply,” Jones said. “Everything that has been put together makes it a market where housing investors are cautious about investing, and that proves to be true this year.”
Taylor is one such investor. She especially bought a house on the West Side, as there were guesthouses available for rental. But she found herself frustrated 120 days, the biggest day that she could rent it every year under the Housing Shared Ordinance.
Her space was over 500 square feet, so under the new rules, she would be eligible for $2,000 for the first offence, $4,000 for the second, and $4,000 for the third offence, and $4,000 for the $8,000 for the third offence. In the end, she decided it was not worth it.
“I’m watching how cities are enforcing the rules, and I’ll probably try again someday,” she said. “But for now, it will remain empty.”
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