Data-Sharing Ordinances: Cities That Require Platforms to Hand Over Your Booking Data Directly

For years, one of the biggest challenges in short-term rental enforcement was simple: cities could create as many rules as they wanted, but they had no reliable way to know who was actually operating.

That gap is closing fast.

A growing number of jurisdictions now have the legal authority to go directly to Airbnb, Vrbo, and other platforms to obtain information about short-term rentals, including property addresses, booking activity, and registration status. In many cases, they no longer have to wait for a complaint, investigate a specific property, or rely on a tip to find out who is operating.

Several states and cities have passed laws that compel short-term rental platforms to report host and listing data on a recurring schedule, sometimes quarterly, sometimes monthly. This isn’t the platform choosing to cooperate, it’s a legal obligation with real penalties attached if they don’t. Once a jurisdiction has this kind of data flowing in automatically, matching a live listing against your local registration becomes a routine comparison, not an active investigation.

Where This Is Already Happening

California: California’s SB 346, the Short-Term Rental Facilitator Act, is the clearest and most recent example. Signed in October 2025 and effective January 1, 2026, it lets any California city or county adopt an ordinance compelling platforms to hand over host data including physical addresses down to the 9-digit ZIP code, registration status, nights booked, and even unit-specific detail identifying accessory dwelling units or guest houses at shared addresses. Cities can demand this as often as quarterly. Los Angeles was among the first to actually invoke it, using the data to identify and pull unregistered listings at scale, and the penalty structure gives it real teeth: platforms that don’t comply face fines up to $10,000 per day.

New York City: The has actually been doing a version of this longer than California. Its Booking Service Reporting Law took effect back in January 2021, well before Local Law 18 added registration on top of it, and requires platforms to report the physical address of any listing booked five or more nights in a quarter, along with the host’s identity, contact information, and payout account details. Local Law 18 then layered a registration requirement on top: hosts must register with the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement before listing at all, and platforms are legally barred from processing a booking for an unregistered unit. The combined effect has been dramatic as Airbnb listings in the city dropped from roughly 22,000 to about 2,300 within months of enforcement starting.

New York State: went further in 2025, moving the concept beyond individual cities. Article 12-D of the Real Property Law, effective September 22, 2025, set up a statewide registration and reporting framework: counties can operate their own STR registries, and platforms are required to verify registration status and report quarterly, county-level aggregated guest-stay counts as part of the law, meaning even counties that never passed their own local ordinance now sit inside a state-level reporting structure.

Houston: rounds this out with a more direct enforcement mechanism rather than a data-sharing statute: under its ordinance effective January 1, 2026, the city can direct platforms to remove any listing that lacks a valid certificate of registration number, and platforms have exactly 10 business days to comply once notified.

The common thread across all of these is that the data-sharing obligation sits on the platform, not on you, but the enforcement consequence lands squarely on the host. A listing that doesn’t match a current, valid registration is now something a city can find in a routine data pull, not something it has to stumble onto.

Where Hosts Usually Go Wrong

• Assuming enforcement still relies on complaints: In jurisdictions with data-sharing laws in effect, a city doesn’t need a neighbor to report you, the platform’s own reporting does the finding.
• Not realizing the law applies even without a specific city ordinance: New York’s Article 12-D shows how a state-level framework can put a county inside a reporting structure even if that county never passed its own local law.
• Treating registration as optional if you haven’t been caught yet: As LA’s early use of SB 346 shows, jurisdictions that have this data are actively using it to sweep for unregistered listings, not just responding one complaint at a time.
• Assuming smaller or newer booking platforms are outside the requirement: California’s SB 346 defines “facilitator” broadly enough to cover any platform that processes STR bookings, not just Airbnb and Vrbo by name.
• Not keeping registration numbers current on every platform you list on: If a platform is required to verify your registration before processing a booking, an expired or mismatched number can get a listing pulled automatically, independent of any manual review.

Your Action Checklist

• Check whether your city or county has adopted an SB 346 ordinance, an Article 12-D registry, or a similar data-sharing law, even if you haven’t seen enforcement locally yet
• Confirm your registration or permit number is current and displayed exactly as required on every platform you list on
• If you operate an ADU, guest house, or unit at a shared address, confirm that unit-specific detail is registered correctly, since these are now specifically called out in some data requests
• Don’t assume a lack of complaints means you’re unnoticed, data-sharing enforcement doesn’t require one
• If you list on a smaller or newer platform, don’t assume it’s exempt from local data-sharing or registration-verification requirements
• Re-check your registration status any time you cross into a new jurisdiction, since these laws are expanding city by city and state by state

The days of a listing quietly existing below the radar are ending in a growing number of markets, and it’s happening through infrastructure, not investigation. Lodge Compliance keeps registrations current across every jurisdiction a property touches, so a data pull from a platform never turns up a mismatch.

Get a Property Compliance Report at lodgecompliance.com to understand the rules that apply to your jurisdiction, and how they affect your property.