For many municipalities, short term rental compliance will end up stagnating far below 100% compliance. That is a symptom of the underlying root cause: poor identification. Take a look at the identification challenge tree below.
Airbnb’s tend to be more difficult than HomeAway or Flipkey because the Location section of the listing does not contain a pinpoint on the map. Airbnb will randomly scatter the true location of the listing within a circle with radius of 0.3 miles. Condos will be more difficult to identify than houses, because there are fewer tools in your toolbox. Google Streetview, although useful for houses, is not so useful for apartment or condo short term rental identification. As you move up the Identification Challenge tree, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Near the top, you start to see listings with fake photos, fake account names, etc. that makes identification difficult.
Difficult, but not impossible! Harmari STR prides itself on recruiting, screening, training and managing its own team of research analysts, rather than crowdsourcing its core intellectual property and expertise to a third party like Amazon. With Harmari STR you are tapping an expert pool of analysts that have successfully performed 100,000 identifications of STRs for local government worldwide. Our company is passionate about the identification: we are problem-solvers who see each short term rental posting as a challenge! We have already serviced numerous requests from customers that have tested us directly under fire: short term rentals that have eluded detection from others that have tried to crack the case. These are actual testimonials from those that have taken up the Harmari Ident Challenge:
- “We found this information to be quite impressive” says a California city at 75% compliance after we ident 9/10 from their elusive list
- “Conclusion: I can assert that the Harmari company provides good results with many details, clues, data, etc“, says a European region after we assisted with good intel on 9/10 from their elusive list
- “Game Changer“, says a Florida county after we went 3/3 on their elusive list
Sometimes the elusive identifications are based on noise complaints that came in on a weekend and the listings are down during the daytime. With our industry-leading supporting evidence and identification service, you can prove those in the flat are guests and not relatives or tenants. We can assist with scenarios such as:
- provide us the building only and we identify relevant listings
- provide us the building with unit number and we identify the listings
- provide us the building with unit number, and the full name of owner/operator and we identify the listings
- provide us the hard-to-find listing and we identify the building and trace the unit number
Ready to take us up on our Ident Challenge? Please fill in the form below with up to 10 STR listing URLs and prepare to be amazed!