A data leak affecting the municipality of Amsterdam revealed the names and addresses of residents upset about the city’s home share policy. In one case a phone number was also leaked, AT5 reports.
The data was not recorded on the municipality's website in an unrecognizable way, according to the Amsterdam broadcaster. Around 10 Amsterdam residents were affected by the leak. Whether the data was misused is unclear.
Amsterdam wants to limit the number of Bed & Breakfasts in the city. The municipality is therefore making it compulsory for anyone who wants to open a B&B to get a permit. The permit will also state how many rooms may be rented out as holiday accommodation, the city said in a statement.
Most of the Eindhoven residents who rent out their homes through Airbnb do not pay tourist tax, according to ANG, a specialized company hired to inspect Airbnb accommodation in the Noord-Brabant city. This means that the city treasury is missing out on a large sum of income, NOS reports.
Over the past month ANG contacted more than a hundred Airbnb landlords and inspected 38 Airbnb locations. "Only 30 to 40 addresses paid the sum of 3.50 euros per person per night", the company said.
An illegal hotel was closed down for three months in Amsterdam's West-Indischebuurt earlier this week. The hotel was discovered during extra checks the city is doing this week and next, Het Parool reports.
The illegal hotel was closed due to fire hazards, according to the newspaper. The apartment offered six rooms to rent under names like the Harry Potter Room and the Van Gogh room. Eleven people were staying in the apartment. The illegal hotel was boarded up and the owner and tenant of the apartment were each fined 20,500 euros.
The new Amsterdam college of mayor and aldermen will also be tough on tourism. The coalition negotiations between GroenLinks, D66, PvdA and SP are still ongoing, but the parties reached an agreement on their tourism plans, they announced on Wednesday morning, Het Parool reports.
The number of Airbnb listings in Amsterdam increased by only 4 percent last year, bringing a seeming end to the explosive growth in holiday house sharing listings in the Dutch capital. The number of ads on other house sharing platforms also hardly increased, if at all. Last year Amsterdam handed out a total of 4.2 million euros in fines for housing fraud, the vast majority of which was for illegal vacation rentals.
Last year a total of 1.7 million people rented accommodation in the Netherlands through Airbnb, compared to 1.4 million in 2016 and only 75 thousand in 2012, the company announced. Almost half of the rentals were in Amsterdam, NOS reports.
The number of rentals listed on the house sharing site also increased, from 31 thousand in 2016 to 36 thousand last year. Around 19 percent of Airbnb guests came from the Netherlands itself, the rest were foreign visitors.
The Dutch association of hotels KHN is calling for strict, national measures to regulate house sharing through sites like Airbnb and other forms of private rentals to tourists. Platforms like Airbnb are increasingly gaining ground in the Netherlands and often involve illegal rentals by homeowners who work without a license, do not pay taxes and do not comply with the legal regulations, KHN said in a press statement.
The municipality of Amsterdam has decided to decrease the maximum number of nights a private home may be rented. The 50 percent reduction takes the number of nights from 60 down to 30 beginning on New Year's Day 2019, the city said in a statement.
"I know that the decreasing of the limit is not the solution to the fuss in the city. But at least this ruling could diminish the nuisance caused by tourists in certain districts," said Laurens Ivens, the Amsterdam Alderman in charge of housing issues. He acknowledged that it will deter many from renting their home out at all.
This year Hurricane Irma, the parliamentary elections in March and the government formation that followed, a Dutch comedian mocking Donald Trump, and gay bashing in Arnhem held NL Times the most readers' attention. Here follows the top 10 most read stories on NL Times in 2017, in contrast to our picks for the top stories of the year.
Amsterdam is home to at least 6 thousand illegal Airbnb rentals - homes and rooms rented out to tourists on the site that don't comply with Amsterdam's rules on house sharing, Trouw reports based on studies by Amsterdam data analyst Nico van Gog and Airbnb data expert Murray Cox from New York.
It is unclear whether the municipality of Amsterdam will be able to implement a ban on renting entire homes to tourists through sites like Airbnb, as the Amsterdam faction of the PvdA proposed doing in its election program for the upcoming municipal elections.
With additional reporting by Zack Newmark.
The Amsterdam faction of labour party PvdA wants to ban holiday apartment rentals in the Dutch capital, including those available through sites like Airbnb. This ban applies to the rental of complete homes, but not the letting of single rooms, meaning the proposal would not affect true Bed & Breakfasts, according to the party's election program released ahead of the 2018 municipal elections, Het Parool reports.
Amsterdam implemented another measure to combat illegal vacation rentals on Sunday. From now on, all Amsterdam residents who rent out their homes or rooms in their homes to tourists through Airbnb or other house sharing sites, are obliged to report their listings to the municipality. Those who fail to do so, will be fined, the municipality said in a press release on Sunday.
Last year the municipality of Amsterdam found illegal prostitution in three Airbnb rentals during checks, the municipality said in answers to questions from PvdA city councilor Dennis Boutkan. This problem in Amsterdam is much smaller than in Great Britain, where the police recently warned homeowners of a growing trend, AT5 reports.
Airbnb refutes a study released by Trouw and other European newspapers last week that stated that about 40 percent of Dutch Airbnb hosts rent out their homes for more than the limit of 60 days per year. "The data is wrong and uses flawed methodology to make false conclusions", the home sharing site said in a statement sent to NL Times by Simon den Haak, press agent for Airbnb in the Netherlands.
About 40 percent of the Dutch who rent out their homes on Airbnb don't hold to the only 60 days per year limit, according to a study by Trouw, De Tijd, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Le Monde. The study looked at the Airbnb rentals in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France and Switzerland based on data from Airbnb and data analyst AirDNA.
Airbnb and other home-sharing sites like Wimdu and HomeAway cause stress for the owners of traditional hotels, bed and breakfasts and campsites in the Netherlands, according to a survey by Statistics Netherlands. The survey showed that a quarter of Dutch accommodation owners experience competition from home sharing.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and director of diversity David King will personally contact a woman who fell from a flight of stairs in Amsterdam after being pushed by an Airbnb landlord on Saturday, King said to broadcaster NOS. He called the incident "repulsive" and "unacceptable".
A young tourist was inured in Amsterdam on Saturday after getting into an argument with her Airbnb host. A video of the incident shows the young woman being pushed down a flight of stairs by a man. The man, 47-years-old from Amsterdam, was arrested, a police spokesperson confirmed to the Telegraaf.
Amsterdam residents renting out their homes on Airbnb, are finding ways to get around increasingly strict restrictions implemented by the municipality. Hundreds of Amsterdam rentals previously advertised as 'homes', are now listed as 'rooms', because the rules around renting out a room is less stringent, according to research by blogger Dirk Kloosterboer, AT5 reports.
The number of Amsterdam homes being rented out on Airbnb is still growing significantly, BNR reports based on figures from Inside Airbnb from July 2016 and April 2017. BNR teamed up with map specialist Esri to create a map showing the numbers of Airbnb listings per neighborhood, for 2016 and 2017.
Remarkably, most of the Airbnb growth happened outside the Amsterdam city center. Some neighborhoods in the city center and Amsterdam Zuid, like Nieuwmarktbuurt, Museumkwartier and Zuidas, even saw a decrease in listings.
Sharing platforms like Uber and Airbnb must be regulated before they form a monopoly, Dutch think tank Rathenau Institute said in a report titled Fair Sharing on Wednesday. If these platforms aren't regulated, jobs in the regular economy will be put under pressure and the platforms will cause problems, the report states, ANP reports.
Rental platform Airbnb is calling on its members to protest against Amsterdam's plan to fine Airbnb landlords who don't report their listing to the municipality. People who want to complain about this new obligation, which will be implemented on October 1st, can do so on a website Airbnb established especially for this purpose, NU.nl reports.
