At the Malibu City Council meeting on Monday, Jan. 25, City Manager Reva Feldman said that the city had received 192 applications for short-term rental permits, of which 148 had so far been approved. The number of applications is growing, but still represents about half of the total number of STRs currently listed, city staff said.
The deadline for applying for a permit was Friday, Jan. 15, 2021, for currently listed properties, representing the latest and most sweeping attempt by the city to curtail short-term rental complaints. Successive Malibu City Councils have been trying for more than a decade to find a resolution to balance the rights of “good neighbors” to lease out properties with complaints about so-called “party houses” featuring raucous partying, unsafe living situations and disrespectful behavior. It was only last November that the council successfully passed an ordinance with stringent requirements for STR operators, with one of those requirements being to apply for a permit that must be renewed annually and can be revoked after only a few citations or noise complaints.
Feldman said that her staff had checked earlier in the day and found that there were still 313 listings for Malibu still online.
“We’re finding that there are duplicate listings on different platforms and so we are proactively working with the different platforms to get the listings down that are not supposed to be there because they have not applied for a permit,” she said. “We will stay on that to make sure that happens.”
