r/AirbnBusted

Airbnb.com lists well over 7,000 listings with 5,232 unique hosts for those listings in and around Austin! Now that we've got the headline numbers out of the way, let's get into the scope of what I'm analyzing here, because I'm not analyzing all of it.

I'm focusing only on corporate hosts with potential violations at this point. Room only listings are marked on the map but I don't show host information for those listings. Likewise, hosts with less than 1 "entire" home, apartment, condo, etc. are by default left out of the hosts filters. Later, I will add the hosts with 1 listing back in only if they meet my definition of being a party house: they're listed over allowed occupancy, list party amenities, or invite events to their listings.

Let's start with the boring stuff: none of this is evidence of a violation of any law or regulation. This data is for entertainment purposes only and does not prove any violation occurred. Before you report a violation, please confirm the details yourself by visiting any relevant listing. If you spot an error, please tell me and I'll correct it ASAP! Also note: it's very hard to prove any violation occurred in Austin because an exact address is not given for any license on the list. We really need to put pressure on the elected officials for more transparency regarding the license situation.

Here's the map: https://stvr-doorman.github.io/Austin_TX_STVRs/austin_site/index.html

Without further explanation, these are the hosts with the most license numbers missing from the listings: (as of 10/1/2026)

Hosts with missing license numbers

I have gone through and verified that a handful of properties here do not appear to be in a licensed address block. But verifying the addresses of many of these properties is something for which I can really use your help!

How? each listing has a link to submit an address for that listing. If you do so, I can update the map, and we can home in on unlicensed and non-compliant corporate hosts.

I've deliberately excluded every host that has not taken a home off the market, and I'm currently not focusing on any host with only 1 listing on Airbnb.

Austin doesn't publish licensed locations, but only licensed address blocks, so those show up as:

All we know is there's one license in this block!

Listings that are for a room or partial unit show up only as tiny eyes.

Just doing some basic math, we have 3,468 listings that are managed by hosts with more than 1 listing, but only 3048 licenses. That means of the "corporate hosts", a minimum of 420 listings are unlicensed. This works out to 12% of all listings on Airbnb.com operated by hosts with multiple listings being non-compliant or unlicensed. Also, only ~153 listings are possibly hotels, so even removing those from the 420 count, we still have near double digits percentage of unlicensed corporate hosts!

If we include the listings that I'm not focusing on, you'd have 60% unlicensed listings on Airbnb.com! Don't ask me to try and help expose the locations of those, unless they are operating as a party house.

If you'd like to help, please submit address proof for listings, or share any open records you may have already received. And a reminder: I'm not focusing on small time hosts, so don't waste your time there. Focus on the big players with double digits first!

I'm wrapping up my investigation into Nashville for now, I'll need to work on the page and receive community input to make it much better than it is now.

First, I've adjusted the potentially unlicensed count to be pretty conservative. Let's say a conservative estimate is that there are around 100 unlicensed listings.

Why am I estimating so few now? I found there were a few hotels advertising listings on Airbnb. It is my understanding a hotel does not need a STVR permit.

How can this number change? A few ways! Some people call their listings hotels when they aren't. For example, if you filter the listing type to tiny homes, you'll see one host that has hotel in the title, but they're not hotels, require permits, and the host has permits.

So, there may be listings marked as hotels that are not hotels, and listings not marked as hotels that are hotels.

All data here is for entertainment purposes only, and any status here does not indicate any sort of violation occurred. But you can see my progress here: Nashville STR map.

How can you find potentially unlicensed permits? find listings on the map with no green plots around! These listings should by default have a warning symbol near them. They also likely feature the privacy radius and you'll notice it doesn't overlap a green permitted parcel. Take this for example:

The green permitted parcel is for a hotel / inn with a listing.

The website also uses nickname to name matching. Many hosts use nicknames, I was able to pull all nearby property records and match nicknames to a parcel based on that. So you can find the likely related parcel:

Perfect nickname to name match!

Here we have another perfect nickname to parcel property owner match, and in this case, two matches because both are listed as hosts and both are listed as property owners!

https://preview.redd.it/bsm7duypj7th1.png?width=1260&format=png&auto=webp&s=e6a189953d19e99a10108adf9c8f792a1d231305

So I can definitely say there are unpermitted rentals in Nashville, but, not as many as I once thought possible.

Perhaps a bigger issue is the over capacity listings! You have many examples of covert capacity, such as this host, who is legally compliant with the advertised occupancy, but then lists there being 15 beds:

covert capacity

I've never personally known one person to need two beds in one night.

I've worked on a party filter. You can find listings over capacity (not always correct because some listings combine 2 or more units) that advertise party amenities. In my town, I've found that being listed over legal capacity and having the word "bar" in the listing anywhere is associated with 4x more police calls to the residence! It makes sense. large groups of drunk people can be a nuisance or danger.

Here's a party pad that appears to violate capacity rules:

https://preview.redd.it/6ryb18gcl7th1.png?width=457&format=png&auto=webp&s=1037a7858283f2b7d86aeeb38e01aadec90a6193

the occupancy limits are 2 per bedroom plus 4 more. That's pretty generous as it is IMO. Advertising with party in the title is kinda nuts to me! Seems to be inviting trouble.

Anyways! I thought there would be potentially many more unlicensed rentals, but the hotels sort of ate into that number a bit.

Play around with the site if you're bored, and share what you find!

Ideas, tips, suggestions? let me know!

And remember, nothing that I've done verifies any type of violations occurred anywhere. It's all hypothetical based on data that is about a week old and aging at this point.