Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed the apartment-share company Airbnb on Monday to force the owners to disclose who rents rooms in private homes to New York City tourists, shirking hotel taxes.
But even though the AG’s office cast a wide net, the state isn’t going after the average person who only rents for a short period of time, officials said.
“We are looking for information about property managers or brokers who are skirting the law by renting multiple units, or people who rent their primary unit for large amounts of time throughout the year,” a source familiar with the months-long investigation said.
“We aren’t targeting the casual user who may rent their personal apartment out while they are on vacation or anything like that,” the source said.
The company, the source said, was not cooperating like other online apartment-sharing services.
“Airbnb has not [cooperated], hence the need for a subpoena,” the source told The Post.
The popular company’s Web site says that it plans to fight the subpoena.
“We always want to work with governments to make the Airbnb community stronger, but at this point, this demand is unreasonably broad and we will fight it with everything we’ve got,” David Hantman, the company’s head of global public policy, wrote in a blog post.
State law requires people who rent their apartments through services like Airbnb to pay a hotel tax.
About 15,000 people currently use the site as hosts citywide, serving as many as 225,000 visitors.
The company said only a small percentage of hosts are violating the law.
“The vast majority of these hosts are everyday New Yorkers who occasionally share the home in which they live,” Hantman wrote.
“We believe the attorney general is only seeking to target an incredibly small number of bad actors who abuse the Airbnb platform. That’s a goal we all share. Bad actors like illegal hotel operators and slumlords aren’t part of our vision and have no place on Airbnb and we hope we can work with state leaders to weed out these individuals.”
A spokesman for the AG’s office would not comment Monday morning.
The AG’s crackdown follows a recent pledge to lawmakers by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky that the company will consider charging hotel taxes and forking that revenue over to the city.
“Our hosts are not hotels, but we believe that it makes sense for our community to pay occupancy tax, with limited exemptions for those who earn under certain thresholds,” Chesky wrote on his blog. “We would like to assist New York City in streamlining this process so that it is not onerous.”
The company expects about $1 billion in New York City bookings this year.