We are property owners, hosts, contractors, and employees who rely on short-term rentals (STRs); small business owners, neighbors, and community members who benefit from STRs; and residents who appreciate the substantial and irreplaceable economic and cultural benefits STRs bring to our community. 

We are petitioning for a fair, forward-thinking STR ordinance for the City of Dallas that protects property rights and encourages entrepreneurship.

• We support agreements between City of Dallas and online travel agency platforms such as Airbnb and Vrbo to collect Hotel Occupancy Taxes ("HOT") directly through their booking systems. 

HOT sustains shared amenities for our entire community, such as support for arts and cultural institutions like the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Black Dance Theater, Cara Mia, and Big Thought. STR operators are proud to contribute our fair share. Current HOT collection structures make it difficult and confusing to remit, so we endorse solutions that make HOT collection and payment as easy as possible for hosts and the city, as is done at the state level and for other cities in Texas.

• We support responsible renting practices, the enforcement of existing nuisance laws, and other simple, effective measures to curb the city’s few problem properties.

As a May 3 City of Dallas memo stated, “...Short-Term Rentals have a limited measurable impact on neighboring communities. Short-Term Rentals constitute less than half of one percent (0.42%) of the total housing stock in the City of Dallas, and there is no evidence in the data that STRs have a city-wide impact. This is not to take away from the experience of neighbors who live next to a problematic STR. However, the analysis shows that those experiences are outliers and not generalizable to STRs throughout the city.”

The City already has tools at their disposal to combat nuisance properties. Still, we believe STRs should be a leave-no-trace activity, and responsible hosts are committed to being great neighbors. We do not and never would support anyone operating a party house in a neighborhood. 

In addition to existing nuisance laws, we endorse a simple STR registration process that requires STR operators to provide a 24-hour contact person for their properties as well as other strong, effective measures from both the City and STR platforms to remove bad operators from our neighborhoods.

It is through this fair and solution-focused lens that we ask Dallas City Council and Mayor Johnson to take this valuable opportunity to create a reasonable, forward-thinking approach to an ordinance that works for all for years to come.