ASHEVILLE – While Asheville continues to wrestle with regulating short-term rentals, Airbnb announced it will begin collecting and paying sales and hotel occupancy taxes in Buncombe County next month.
The online vacation rental service, which began in San Francisco seven years ago and has since grown into a multibillion-dollar company, posted the news on its policy blog Monday. The company has also been notifying its Airbnb hosts of the changes via email.
These changes will impact the entire state and four North Carolina counties in particular.
Starting June 1, Airbnb will start collecting and remitting North Carolina sales taxes on behalf of its hosts in the Tar Heel state, as well as collect and pay the occupancy taxes in Buncombe, Mecklenburg, Durham and Wake counties.
Locally, this means any guest who books a room or home in Buncombe County through Airbnb on or after June 1 will see an additional line item on their bill for the county and state-imposed sales taxes.
The county and statewide sales tax together is 7 percent. Add that to the 4 percent occupancy tax to get the combined tax collection of 11 percent.
“When we collect this tax from guests on your behalf, it won’t affect your payouts,” an email obtained by the Citizen-Times from Airbnb to a Buncombe County host says. “The tax will be added to the total amount paid by guests to Buncombe County, North Carolina on stays of less than 90 days — hosts will not have to do anything extra.”
When a reservation is booked, Airbnb charges a guest service fee of 3 percent to the guest, however, that fee does not go back into the local economy.
The county occupancy tax, on the other hand, goes to the Tourism Product Development Fund of the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority to support community tourism projects. Attempts to reach the Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau for comment, which contracts with the Buncombe County TDA, were unsuccessful Wednesday.
In a May 18 post on Airbnb’s policy blog, spokesman Max Pomeranc writes this will not be the first time Airbnb has collected taxes.
The company currently collects taxes in San Francisco, Portland, Amsterdam, Chicago, Malibu, San Jose and Washington, D.C.
At a public March 25 short-term rental forum, many of the people who spoke said they would like short-term rental operators to pay the same taxes as other lodging establishments in the city, like hotels and bed-and-breakfasts.
As it stands now in the city’s Unified Development Ordinance, arrangements often found on sites like Airbnb come under the definition of short-term rentals, which are illegal in residentially zoned areas.
In Asheville, a short-term rental is a home rented out for less than 30 days while the owner is not staying at the property full time.
A quick location-based search on Airbnb Wednesday afternoon showed 957 rentals were available for rent in Asheville.
Supporters of short-term rentals say these properties provide visitors with an authentic Asheville experience and can be a source of supplemental income for people who live and work here, and that this is a representation of the growing sharing economy.
Critics say short-term rentals destroy the character of neighborhoods, and these properties could have been allocated for long-term rentals for the people who live and work in the city, and could one day drive up prices in the rental market.
Last week, a majority of Asheville City Council members said they would like to see tougher enforcement of short-term rentals going forward.
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