Daytona Beach, FL - The short-term rental company Airbnb is marking a new beginning in the ongoing campaign to secure laws in Volusia County that support rental hosts' ability to share their homes.
On Tuesday, June 5, an official Host Club was launched to unite the Daytona Beach Airbnb host community. According to Airbnb, one of the main issues for hosts is restrictive laws, such as those they say are currently imposed in Daytona Beach and the rest of Volusia County. The restrictions include limiting what city zones short-term rentals are allowed to operate in.
Currently, there a 444 active Airbnb hosts in Daytona Beach. Airbnb officials calculate these hosts make an average of $4,900 per year. In 2017, these hosts welcomed over 23,100 guests into their homes.
In 2017, more than 40,000 Airbnb hosts welcomed $2.7 million visitors in Florida. These hosts also earned a combined $450 million in income and remitted $45.7 million in taxes to Florida state and local governments last year.
In 2015, Airbnb launched a campaign to partner with all 63 Florida counties to allow the company to collect and remit bed taxes on behalf of hosts. Since then, 40 counties jumped on board and Airbnb remitted a combined $12.7 million in bed tax revenue.
According to Benjamin Breit, Public Affairs Manager for Airbnb Florida, if Volusia County was to allow the company to collect bed taxes, the tax revenue could possibly be greater than $419,000. In Brevard County where Airbnb is allowed to collect bed taxes, $6.5 million was earned by hosts and $419,000 was remitted to the county in 2017. In Volusia County, hosts earned roughly $7.5 million.
Airbnb says that making these tax agreements help hosts forgo having to figure out what taxes need to be paid, to whom they need to be paid to and how often these taxes need to be remitted.
"It's just very challenging to figure out the taxes associated with both hotels and vacation rentals. These are taxes that were designed with professional hotel accountants in mind, not regular people," said Breit.
"What's really encouraging is that the data shows that this is not having an effect on hotels. In fact, Florida hotels, as well as in Volusia County, experienced record growth last year even as Airbnb was continuing to grow as well in parallel," said Breit.
Photo courtesy of Mark Winfrey and Shutterstock.com.
