Vrbo flattens its commission, Oregon writes a new line onto your receipt, and the rules database our industry still doesn't have.

The Check-In · October 17, 2026

The rundown

The 5 Headlines

Vrbo goes to a flat 12% on October 29, and the fine print matters more than the number. The old menu — 5% plus 3% pay-per-booking, or the 5% software rate — collapses into a single 12% commission with payment processing folded in. Most US hosts go from roughly 8% to 12%; managers connected through a PMS jump from about 5%, with their own card processing still sitting on top. The quieter clause is parity: from the 29th, your Vrbo rates, discounts, and fees have to be at least as favorable as on Airbnb or your own site. Bookings taken before the 29th keep the old terms.
Santa Barbara just rewrote the rules for about 2,300 listings. The City Council backed a two-night minimum, 10 p.m.–7 a.m. quiet hours, and a hard one-short-term-rental-per-owner limit that excludes trusts and corporate entities — inland rules start in January 2027, with the coastal zone waiting on the California Coastal Commission. Operators get six months to apply for a license. City finance staff expect the package to cost Santa Barbara itself close to $3 million a year, which is a rare case of a city pricing its own ordinance out loud.
Oregon's state lodging tax nearly doubles on January 1, and it comes with homework. HB 4134 lifts the state transient lodging tax from 1.5% to 2.75% for stays ending on or after January 1, 2027 — and the 1.25-point increase has to be broken out on invoices and receipts as a separately identified "nature conservation fee." That last part is the kind of rule that doesn't change your math so much as your templates: your PMS, your folio, and your direct-booking confirmation all need a new line in them before New Year's Eve.
Hostaway became the first short-term rental PMS worth a billion dollars. Ten years after Marcus Rader, Saber Kordestanchi, and Mikko Nurminen started it in Finland, the company crossed a $1B valuation — up more than 50% from the $925M mark on its $365M round in 2024 — with users in 90+ countries and a fully remote team spread across 44. Whatever you run your business on, a unicorn in this category means more money chasing the unglamorous parts of our stack.
Twenty local management companies just merged without giving up their names. Pavilion launched October 5 with more than 5,000 homes and roughly 50,000 guests a month, pooling technology, data, owner reporting, accounting, revenue management, purchasing, and insurance — while leaving the local teams and leaders in place and handing majority ownership to the founders it acquires. Backed by TZP Group, HPS, and Capital Dynamics, with PGIM as lender. Call it the anti-roll-up: share the infrastructure, keep the sign on the door.

Pro Tip

build the jurisdiction sheet, then keep the diff log

Most of us hold this in our heads, which works right up until it doesn't. Take an hour Monday and build one page per market — not a binder, one page.

Five fields, every time: registration (permit number, renewal date, fee, what triggers a re-inspection); tax (every layer — state, county, city, special district — with the rate, who remits it, and the filing cadence); limits (night caps, minimum stays, one-per-owner, occupancy); people (local-contact or responsible-agent requirements, and the response window); source (a link to the actual ordinance, plus the date you last read it).

Then the part almost nobody does: keep a diff log at the bottom. One line per change — the date, what moved, and the link. Oct 7, 2026 — state TLT 1.5% → 2.75% eff. 1/1/27, new receipt line item required.

Six months from now, when an owner asks why their payout math changed, or a town asks for proof you were registered in March, the answer is on a page you already wrote instead of in an inbox you have to excavate.

Dream Weaving

the postcards you mail for them

Put four pre-stamped postcards of your town in a small tray by the door, with a decent pen and a card that reads: Write one. Leave it here. We'll mail it Monday.

That's the whole thing. What happens next is the good part — somebody writes to their grandmother. A couple writes to the friends who couldn't come. Half the time a family writes to their own address, so the trip shows up in their mailbox nine days after they've unpacked and gone back to Tuesday.

It costs about two dollars a stay, and it buys something a glossy printed guidebook never has: a physical object with your town's name on it, sitting on somebody else's refrigerator for a year. You don't ask for a review. You don't put a QR code on it. You just drop them in the blue box on your way to the bank, and let the US Postal Service deliver your marketing at a dollar a shot.

Press Play

the tax questions you're pretty sure someone else is handling

A short video, podcast episode, or audiobook chapter for the commute, kitchen, or hot tub.

The Short Term Show with Avery Carl · Podcast · ~28 min listen

Are You Actually Paying All Your STR Taxes? with Pam Knudsen

Pam Knudsen spends her working life inside lodging-tax compliance, and she makes the case that "Airbnb collects and remits for me" is one of the most expensive sentences in this business — platform collection often covers some layers of tax and not others, and a property manager in the loop doesn't automatically mean the city's share got filed.

She also gets into the thing that's actually changed: jurisdictions now run the same address-matching and listing-scraping tech that compliance vendors sell them, which means the gap between "nobody noticed" and "certified letter" has gotten a lot shorter. Twenty-eight minutes, and worth it before year-end filings.

Spotlight

let's build the rules database in the open

Here's the thing about that ledger up top: every manager in all ten of those places is tracking the same change, separately, in their own spreadsheet, and paying for the same mistakes separately too. A missed renewal is a fine. A stale tax rate is an amended filing. A cap you didn't know passed is a listing taken down in July.

Software solved this exact shape of problem once already. The time zone database — tzdb — is a set of plain text files, maintained in the open by a small group of volunteers under IANA. When a government moves its clocks, somebody in that country submits a patch, it gets reviewed on a public mailing list, and within days every phone, server, and airline booking engine on earth is correct again. Nobody owns it. Nobody sells it. Everybody ships it.

We don't have that. What we have is Granicus Host Compliance, which is sold to cities to find you; Avalara MyLodgeTax, which is paid and covers the tax layer only; and about fifty thousand private spreadsheets.

So Ohana Vacations, the team behind The Check-In, would like to start one — and give it away. An open, community-maintained dataset of STR rules by town, county, and state: registration and renewal requirements, occupancy and lodging tax rates by layer, permit and night caps, minimum stays, local-contact rules, filing cadences — each row carrying a link to the actual ordinance, an effective date, and the date a human last verified it. Plain files in a public repo, openly licensed, versioned so a PMS can pin a release, and open to pull requests from anyone who manages there.

We'll seed it with what we already track across Maine, Vermont, Oregon, and Costa Rica — four very different flavors of the problem: New England town-by-town registration, a statewide registry and rooms tax, a state that just changed its own rate on us, and a foreign country with a national tourism regime on top of it.

That's four jurisdictions out of thousands, which is exactly why this only works as a group project. Reply to this email with your market — the town or county, and the one rule there that people get wrong — and we'll fold it into v0 and send you the link when it's public. Mahalo.

Credits

Sources

Credit where it's due, and a doorway in if you want to dive deeper on any of the above.