How Cincinnati regulates short-term rentals
In Cincinnati and across the country, disruptive technologies like Airbnb have transformed visitor accommodations and changed the way people travel. Short-term rentals provide immediate, flexible accommodations and generate income for hosts, but negative side effects can be challenging or, on rare occasion, dangerous. In Cincinnati and elsewhere, local governments are enacting regulations to balance the economic benefits of short-term rentals with the undesirable impacts on housing availability and utilization.
Developing the short-term rental ordinance
Short-term rentals stretch the existing definitions of land uses in the zoning ordinances of most cities. For example, if an apartment building contains more short-term rentals than owner-occupied units or traditional long-term rentals, at what point does that building function less like a group of private residences and more like a hotel? Hotels and apartments impact their neighborhood and its traffic patterns in different ways, and the Ohio Building Code treats these two occupancies very differently.
In developing the ordinance over the course of the last year, Cincinnati staff debated these questions, and weighed regulating rentals differently based on whether the operator is renting an entire dwelling unit (also known as an “unhosted rental”), or renting a room in an owner- or renter-occupied dwelling unit (a “hosted rental”).
The ordinance was initially proposed to have both license and registration components, along with an excise tax. It eventually passed as registration only — without a licensing component (which would have required inspections to ensure compliance with building, zoning, and fire regulations) — and 7% quarterly tax that funds the city’s affordable housing trust fund.
Nicollette Staton, Chief Performance Officer & Director of the Office of Performance & Data Analytics, says that registration processes in Cincinnati are designed to “meet people where they are with respect to access to technology”. In this case, since the City’s short-term rental community advertises and operates online, the City could safely conclude that people registering short-term rentals already had access to and familiarity with the internet. “Short-term rental registration presented an opportunity to be 100% web-based”, says Staton.
Throughout the development of the registration program, the Cincinnati City Council and administration insisted that registration be user-friendly and not burdensome on the operators or hosts of these short-term rentals.
“When thinking of a user-friendly, web-based platform, OpenCounter was an immediate recommendation from staff,” says Staton. “The City was on a tight timeline — two months from passage of the ordinance — to implement the registration portal and needed a partner they could trust to be responsive, nimble, and execute rapidly. Cincinnati chose OpenCounter because of the user-friendly nature of the product and the responsive, fast-paced work of the OpenCounter team.”
Cincinnati and OpenCounter have been working together since 2018 on Zoning, Business, Residential, and Special Events portals, and Cincinnati knew OpenCounter would be a reliable partner in quickly implementing their short-term rental registration process.
“Cincinnati chose OpenCounter because of the user-friendly nature of the product and the responsive, fast-paced work of the OpenCounter team.”
Registering short-term rentals with OpenCounter
Over the course of two short months, OpenCounter worked with staff from the Office of Performance and Data Analytics and the Department of Finance to understand their needs and set up a form for the registration process. Like OpenCounter’s other products, the form is dynamic, with questions only appearing when necessary. Different information is collected and different messages are displayed to the registrant depending on whether they’re registering a hosted or unhosted rental, or if they’re registering a single unit versus multiple rentals.
OpenCounter also calculates quarterly tax information based on which platforms the registrant uses to advertise and host their rental. Airbnb and a few other hosting platforms plan to withhold taxes in Cincinnati, but for the rest of the platforms there is no such withholding plan. OpenCounter takes these platform differences into account when calculating estimated taxes.
Cincinnati’s registration process is handled entirely online through OpenCounter, and features our most advanced features including administrative workflows for staff, direct linking to forms, address fields on forms that work as miniature interactive zoning maps, and online permit approval & issuance. Applicants get real-time updates on their application, receiving a notification every time the status of their application changes. This improves transparency between government and constituent, and reduces the number of calls that staff receive about application status, letting them focus on reviewing and approving short-term rental registrations.
Staton recounts a moment during the morning of launch. Informational webpages about the ordinance, which the OpenCounter form linked to for additional info, had become unavailable. “On the morning of the 8 am (EST) launch in Cincinnati, OpenCounter staff on the west coast were the first to catch” the issue. The OpenCounter team notified the City, who quickly fixed the links, leading to smooth launch.
“OpenCounter has been a great partner to design the registration process. They consistently provide a level of service that surpasses many of our vendor experiences.”
~Nicollette Staton, Cincinnati Office of Performance and Data Analytics
Cincinnati was pleased to discover that registrants think the registration process is simple, straightforward, and quick to complete. Just as important, Staton says that the OpenCounter administrative portal for staff “makes the administration of the process as simple as the registration process itself”.
The Short-Term Rental Registration can be accessed from the City’s Finance page or directly at OpenCounter.
