Airbnb quietly drops licence requirements for Vancouver listings

The agreement between City of Vancouver and Airbnb requires the platform to make the licence field mandatory for all listings. Airbnb deactivated all unlicensed listings last fall and for a while enforced this rule. But our latest scan of Airbnb data show that Airbnb has quietly dropped this requirement. As a result we have seen […]

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Petition: Conduct public inquiry into fentanyl money laundering in Lower Mainland real estate

To: Hon. David Eby, Q.C., Attorney General of British Columbia Whereas: Police reports have been uncovered that transnational fentanyl traffickers are laundering billions of dollars every year through Lower Mainland real estate market. BC Coroners Service reports that fentanyl-related overdoses have killed 4,000 people last year alone in BC Statistics Canada data show that the […]

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Nathanael Lauster, Nazism, and tobacco tactics in housing crisis denialism

“Hitler introduced tobacco control measures,” the tobacco industry propagandists would say. “Therefore, anyone who advocates for tobacco control measures is a Nazi.” The use reductio ad Hitlerum — a logical fallacy in the form “Hitler did X, therefore anyone who does X is a Nazi”1)http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/1874/1/How%20the%20growth%20of%20denialism%20undermines%20public%20health%20_%20The%20BMJ.pdf — is a common tactic used by the tobacco industry […]

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Don’t let a callous City Hall bulldoze our neighbourhoods

Update 8:30AM: Vision Vancouver is playing dirty again! The online sign ups for public hearings are supposed to end an hour before the hearings open. But they closed the hearings for mass rezoning the night before. If you haven’t already registered, please go to the city hall in person before 2:30PM and register to speak. […]

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578 new Airbnb listings added in the last 10 days

Vancouver’s chief licencing officer announced with much fanfare that the number of Airbnb listings in the city have dropped from around 6,600 in April to just 3,742 in September. But in just 10 days since the City of Vancouver’s September 5 announcement, hosts have added 578 news listings, bringing the total to 4,320. Out of […]

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Vancouver has a fake Airbnb licence problem

Airbnb hosts seem to be getting around the new City of Vancouver’s licensing requirements by using brazenly fake licences. Some fine examples include “12345678str”, “000000000” and “Exampp”. To meaningfully protect our long term rental market from being decimated by Airbnb and other short term accommodation platforms, we must take the following steps: Introduce licence auto-verification, […]

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