The online rental listings tantalize with descriptions of stunning city views, marble bathrooms and quartz countertops, rooftop lounges and state-of-the-art gyms ? all hallmarks of the latest in downtown luxury apartment living.
Interested? If so, no need to sign a lease; these listings are for overnight stays promoted on vacation rental platforms advertising nightly rates in buildings populated by long-term tenants.
Thanks to the mushrooming popularity of home-sharing platforms Airbnb and VRBO and less familiar sites like Stay Alfred, the increasingly lucrative business of short-term rentals is migrating to the luxury apartment building.
And it?s often under the radar of the building owners themselves. That?s because most leases forbid subletting rental units.
While the thousands of vacation rentals scattered throughout San Diego communities are still dominated by homes, condos, duplexes and shared rooms, a rising number of amenity-filled apartment buildings are becoming a magnet for entrepreneurial renters and startups looking for handsome profits.
So much so that the frequency of vacation rentals at one downtown high-rise, the 46-story Pinnacle on the Park, led one Yelp user to joke it should be called ?Hotel on the Park.?
Even Airbnb has jumped on the bandwagon, launching last year its Friendly Building program designed to forge above-board, short-term rental partnerships with apartment building owners and their tenants.
Still, building managers and owners remain wary of opening up their high-end complexes to a constant stream of vacationers, and they?re equally wary of talking about it, as are the tenants who engage in the practice.
?We now have a weekly audit where we?re going online looking for violators and photos of our buildings,? said Tracy Brunetti, an executive vice president with Alliance Residential Co., which manages the luxury Broadstone apartment complexes in San Diego. Even so, the San Diego Union-Tribune found two Broadstone listings for short-term rentals, including one for a tastefully decorated two-bedroom apartment with an advertised nightly rate of more than $300 in a building where monthly rents for similarly sized units average more than $4,000.
?This is such a frustrating situation for landlords when you?re trying to protect your residents from an expectation of privacy yet you have a revolving door of people trying to enter the building,? Brunetti said.
In another building ? the 241-unit Form 15 ? two vacation rental listings were removed within hours of the Union-Tribune contacting the building owner and property manager.
Emily Wiesner, a spokeswoman for Essex Property Trust, San Diego County?s third-biggest landlord and owner of the 3-year-old complex, would only say, ?We do not allow tenants to rent out their units via VRBO or any other short-term rental website, and we address all known violations.?
The 484-unit Pinnacle tower, with its 24-hour gym, pool, spa and panoramic views of downtown, shows up on multiple listings on Airbnb and booking.com, more widely known as a hotel reservation site. Its Canadian owner, Pinnacle International, did not return multiple phone calls and emails requesting comment.
Just last month, AIMCO, one of the country?s largest landlords, filed lawsuits in California and Florida against Airbnb, alleging its tenants are renting out units on the company?s website in violation of their leases. Airbnb has said the suit is ?without merit? and will fight it.
The growing proliferation of such rentals coincides with a boom in apartment construction, most of which has been high-end. Over the last five years, 2,900 apartment units were built in downtown alone, and this year, the region is expected to add 3,000 apartments ? double the volume of what was developed last year.
During the same time, the popularity of Airbnb has exploded, expanding way beyond its beginnings as a platform for people looking to make some extra income renting out a spare bedroom. In San Diego, Airbnb listings are dominated by rentals of entire dwellings where the owner is not present. Moreover, a recent hotel industry-funded study concluded that hosts listing multiple homes for rent are the fastest-growing segment of Airbnb?s business.
It?s nearly impossible to quantify how many apartment units are actually being used as short-term rentals because the online platforms don?t identify the addresses of listings, and many, like Airbnb, don?t even specify whether a whole-home rental is a condo, apartment or single-family home.
Airbnb spokesman Chris Nulty said the home-sharing giant does not track such information and therefore could not provide any data on apartment listings.
However, after some online detective work that involved comparing listing photos with the photographs on apartment building websites, the Union-Tribune was able to identify about a dozen short-term rental listings in eight downtown luxury complexes.
While these were the only rentals the Union-Tribune was able to absolutely verify as apartment units, it appears there are many more similar listings on multiple booking sites.
(Source: TNS)
