Question 1: How many short term rental houses are licensed in Portland?

 

On Election Day voters agreed to lower the number of short-term rental houses allowed in the city to 285, about 1.5% of the housing in the city. That’s for non-owner occupied rentals: the owner leaves and only the guests live there.

 

But the city isn’t following its own new rule. They’re slightly above the limit.

 

We looked through the Portland database of approved rental licenses. In the less than two months since Election Day, Portland has approved 128 new applications for non-owner-occupied short term rentals.

 

Right now there are 292 houses approved for renting. (Plus another 428 owner-occupied rentals, but there’s no limit on those).

 

Some licenses will expire at the end of this year, but there are still 251 with licenses that run through 2025. That’s already very close to the limit voters approved in November.

 

When you include houses where the owner lives on the property, there’s 806 licensed rentals.

 

 

Question 2: That’s how many homes are officially licensed for rental. But in reality there’s more on the market, right?

 

Yes - a lot more.

 

The website AirDNA combines data from a bunch of home rental sites including AirBNB. There’s almost 1,500 rental homes available in Portland, even though the city has only approved 806 licenses. It’s possible some of those are being rented for more than a month, meaning they don’t need a license.

 

For a long time, owners were able to post their homes on AirBNB and similar sites without first showing their license from the city. That supposedly won’t be possible under the new regulations passed this year. We’ll see if it reduces the number of unlicensed properties.

 

 

Question 3: How is the city impacted by these unlicensed rentals?

 

They presumably haven’t paid their registration fee. The fee can be anywhere from $100 to $4,000 depending on how many houses one person is renting out. So that’s a decent amount of lost revenue for the city.

 

And if there’s too many short-term rentals, it can make housing harder to find for people who actually work in Portland. Last year only 3% of apartments in Portland were vacant. The national average was about 7%. 5-10% is considered “healthy.”