(Source: Crain's New York Business)
Airbnb isn't the only home-rental site pushing back
HomeAway also refused to provide state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman with client info but, unlike Airbnb, has not been subpoenaed.
Last Friday afternoon, New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman served Airbnb with a subpoena after it refused to provide details about its clients as part of an investigation into whether apartment-sharing websites were facilitating the operation of illegal hotels.
According to a person familiar with the investigation Airbnb was the only such website served because other apartment rental services in New York had complied with the attorney general's request.
That turns out not to be the case. The attorney general's office also contacted HomeAway Inc. about its New York clients, according to the Austin, Tex.-based company's co-founder and chief strategy officer, Carl Shepherd. One of the largest players in the field, the firm includes the servicesHomeAway and VRBO, which stands for vacation rentals by owner.
"Our response was, 'we'll be happy to work with you to educate our owners [about state laws], but we respectfully decline to give you our customer list,'" Mr. Shepherd said. "I support Airbnb's view that that is private."
He added that the company never heard back from the attorney general's office.
A spokeswoman for the attorney general declined to comment.
San Francisco-based Airbnb is enormously popular in New York City, with 225,000 members in the area, including 15,000 hosts.
But it is by far the most controversial of all the home-sharing and rental services websites, and has become a thorn in the side of local legislators, hotel industry officials and housing advocates. They say that illegal hotel operators, using the service as a cover, disturb neighbors and take much-needed housing off the market.
David Hantman, head of global public policy, maintained in a recent blog poast that the "vast majority" of hosts in the city "are everyday New Yorkers who occasionally share the home in which they live." The company regularly says 87% of its local users are New Yorkers looking to rent out their homes for a few nights.
Mr. Hantman added that the company would like to work with the city to root out "bad actors."
Airbnb's critics maintain that a far higher percentage fall afoul of regulations.
The attorney general's office declined to comment. But according to the person familiar with the investigation, the request for information was aimed at clients who rent out multiple units, or rent out their homes for long periods of time—that is, users who are in clear violation of a 2010 law that targeted illegal hotels, but left room for people who rent out part of their home for less than 30 days.
Airbnb has been offering other olive branches lately. These include an offer to work with New York City on "streamlining" the collection of hotel occupancy taxes from users, even though "our hosts are not hotels," wrote founder and Chief Executive Brian Chesky in a blog post.
That didn't impress local authorities either. State law "already requires" people renting out their homes on Airbnb "to pay the hotel tax," said the person familiar with the attorney general's investigation.
In the meantime, Airbnb has until Wednesday to comply with the subpoena, and has given no indication that it will.
"We always want to work with governments to make the Airbnb community stronger, but at this point, this demand is unreasonably broad and we will fight it with everything we've got," Mr. Hantman wrote in his blog post.
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