Airbnb boots hundreds of San Francisco hosts

In 2016, Airbnb introduced a “One Host, One Home” policy in San Francisco.

It was a voluntary concession in some of the markets that sought to curtail the short-term listing sites’ effect on local housing (the company put the same rule in place in New York), even as City Hall sought greater legal restrictions on STR hosts.

Now in a press release, the company claims that since then it’s evicted 923 listings “that appeared to be shared by hosts with multiple entire unit listings that could impact long0-term housing availability.”

The count is recent as of February 1 of this year. The company also claims to have over 10,000 listings citywide, up from approximately 8,600 last year.

At first glance, the 923 ousters are fewer than observers might have expected at the time.

The data aggregate site Inside Airbnb estimated in the summer of 2016 that about 2,900 San Francisco Airbnb hosts listed multiple homes. So it would appear the company fell several hundred crackdowns short, without even factoring in any new multi-home hosts since then.

However, many Airbnb hosts with multiple listings are listing them in the same building. Take, for example, the case of Bartlett’s Bunkhouse, an Airbnber with a record-setting 50 San Francisco listings.

But turns out this case is actually the Bunkhouse on O’Farrell Street, a 133-room registered hotel.

Although Airbnb may be cracking the whip on its own rules, city regulations are another matter. As SF Weekly points out, of those 10,000 local hosts, still fewer than 2,000 of them have bothered to register with the Office of Short Term Rentals.