Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx announced changes last year to strengthen rules for short-term rentals. "Platforms need to be held responsible for enforcing these rules themselves," Wachsmuth said. Instead of going after individual Airbnb hosts, Wachmsuth said the province needs to target Airbnb directly. Wachsmuth said there's a much simpler solution that would allow Airbnb and other short-term rental sites to continue to operate, one that's been proven to work in other jurisdictions. So what we are proposing is ban it completely," he said "It does a lot to circumvent the rules and rules and regulations. "Airbnb is a really powerful lobby," Dussault said. So what's the solution?ĭussault says from a tenants' rights point of view, the simplest way to solve the problem would be to ban Airbnb from operating in Montreal outright. "It's a significant contribution to the housing affordability issues here in the city," he said. "That increases the prices for everybody who's looking."
"The consequences kind of ripple out, because there are fewer rental units available," Wachmsuth said. He said most short-term rentals are downtown, but the entire city feels the pain. "Removing this chunk of short-term rental apartments off the market makes it substantially harder to find a rental apartment in Montreal," he said. It may not seem like a lot, but he says it makes a big difference. Wachsmuth pegs that number at about 6,000. Montreal's rising rental and real estate prices central to municipal election."In recent years, we have lost thousands of apartments in Montreal to short-term rentals," Dussault said. "What they are doing is draining the housing supply," Cédric Dussault, spokesperson for the Coalition of Housing Committees and Tenants Associations of Quebec, told CBC. Contributing to housing crisisĪffordable housing advocates say all those illegal short-term rentals leave very little space for people looking for a place to live as the traditional July 1 moving deadline approaches. "There's just no way Revenu Quebec can keep up with those kinds of numbers," he said. "Realistically there are tens of thousands of short-term rentals in Montreal alone and probably 100,000 across the whole province," Wachsmuth said. "The government plays the role kind of like a private detective and tracks down people who are doing what they're not supposed to be doing," he said. Wachsmuth said tracking down individual Airbnb hosts, establishing who they are and then fining them isn't easy. The number of illegal listings in Montreal and across the province keeps growing. The number of fines assessed in the province has increased dramatically since 2019, going from 43 that year to 125 in 2020 to 911 last year.īut that doesn't seem to be acting as a deterrent. The city of Montreal introduced tougher rules as well, allowing some boroughs to restrict where certain Airbnbs (those that are not someone's primary residence) could operate. David Wachsmuth says Quebec has a great system on paper but tracking down and fining illegal Airbnb hosts is not easy.
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