Tax revenue from thousands of such units across the city soared by 72% last fiscal year \u2014 totaling $9.6 million \u2014 over the year before, according to city officials.<\/p>\n
Short-term rentals, booked through digital platforms such as Airbnb and\u00a0Vrbo, are usually houses or condominiums that owners rent out overnight but not less than 12 hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n
City Council passed several changes to its\u00a0STR ordinance in 2024, including higher permit fees and a new way to collect taxes from owners\u00a0\u2014 many of whom hadn\u2019t made their tax payments. Airbnb and\u00a0Vrbo agreed to\u00a0automatically collect taxes from STR operators and hand the revenue to the city. The two sites host roughly 90% of short-term rental bookings in the city.<\/p>\n
The change went into effect in February 2025, almost eight months after City Council changed the ordinance\u00a0\u2014 which was five months longer than originally expected.<\/p>\n
But the city is still chasing after owners with unpaid tax bills from past years.<\/p>\n
And a recent internal audit scolded two city departments\u00a0\u2014 Development Services and Finance\u00a0\u2014 for not properly managing the short-term rental program to ensure all taxes are collected. Auditors examined how the departments performed between October 2023 and February 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The audit said Development Services wasn\u2019t adequately researching and identifying which properties need to adhere to STR regulations.<\/p>\n
It also found that\u00a0Avenu, a third-party company the city uses to track STRs, was not sending notice letters to owners who delayed reporting taxable revenue. Notices must be sent before the city can revoke an owner\u2019s permit to operate. In a sample of 20 properties, auditors found that in at least 16 permits should have been revoked but could not be because no notices had been sent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Also, the city was not confirming that STR revenue reported by operators was accurate, and it wasn\u2019t properly monitoring collection of past-due hotel-occupancy taxes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are 3,350 STRs with permits in San Antonio and about 1,000 operating without permits, Development Services Director Amin Tohmaz\u00a0told City Council\u2019s Audit Committee on Wednesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The city said in a response to the audit that Avenu now sends letters in a timely fashion, and the city is meeting monthly with a law firm to collect more overdue taxes through lawsuits and injunctions.<\/p>\n
It is unclear how much\u00a0STR operators owe in past taxes. City Auditor and Finance Department representatives couldn\u2019t give four members of the Audit Committee a total Wednesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Councilman Marc Whyte called on the city to continue trying to collect delinquent taxes because of major budget deficit that San Antonio is facing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore we even look at raising taxes on the people, we\u2019ve got to be doing this kind of work to figure out where we are not collecting the revenue that we should be because these budget deficits and shortfalls would not be as great as they are if we were collecting some of this revenue,\u201d Whyte said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tax revenue from thousands of such units across the city soared by 72% last fiscal year \u2014 totaling…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":846457,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5133],"tags":[5229,7202,7203,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-846456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-america","tag-san-antonio","tag-sanantonio","tag-texas","tag-tx","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/846457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}