Jan. 16–Airbnb said it expects to have about 5,500 San Francisco listings at the stroke of midnight Tuesday, a dramatic decline from August when it had about 11,000.
Meanwhile the city's Office of Short-Term Rentals said it's seeing a last-minute rush from hosts to comply with a registration requirement. It said 187 new applications were submitted from Wednesday to Monday.
After Jan. 16, Airbnb and rival site HomeAway/VRBO are obligated to ditch any San Francisco hosts who've failed to register with the city, under terms of a legal agreement.
Airbnb said its 5,500 remaining listings include some 2,650 properties that are exempt from registration requirements because they rent for 30 days or more, or are hotels or legal bed & breakfasts.
In August, San Francisco tracked Airbnb as having 8,453 listings plus the exempt ones, adding up to about 11,000.
HomeAway data was not yet available but the company, owned by travel giant Expedia, had about 1,300 listings in May 2016, according to a Chronicle investigation.
As Airbnb and HomeAway jettison listings, they will also cancel any reservations at those properties that are six days or more away. Hosts can still register with the city after Tuesday, and can post listings online and accept reservations while their applications are pending, but those who wait until tomorrow will see their pending guest stays cancelled.
"All guests impacted by the cancellations will be notified, offered a refund and our agents will be available to assist as necessary," Airbnb spokeswoman Mattie Zazueta said in a statement.
The Office of Short-Term Rentals, which manages the applications process, said there's an eleventh-hour rush.
"We received 88 applications yesterday," said Kevin Guy, director of the office, in an email on Tuesday. The city has approved 2,170 approved registrations, and has another 922 awaiting verification, for a total of 3,092, with more applications still coming in on Tuesday. Verification involves hosts proving through documents such as utility bills that they are permanent San Francisco residents of the property that they want to rent to travelers.
The city averaged about two applications a day before August, when Airbnb and HomeAway began notifying hosts that the deadline was coming up. Once that started, anywhere from seven to 20 applications a day came in, Guy said. "The number of applications per day has increased the closer we came to today's deadline — again, culminating in 88 applications on a single day, yesterday," he said in an email.
Hosts could drop off the sites for several reasons. Airbnb said some 4,000 listings were dormant with no activity in the six months prior to mid-fall. Other hosts may have decided not to register because they feared the mandate for the city to inform their landlord, or because they are only sporadic hosts and didn't want to pay registration fees.
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @csaid. Click here to hear her discuss the new registration requirements on KQED on Tuesday.
