Airbnb has put $7.1m into LA's elections while lobbying to legalise second-home rentals

Airbnb has spent about $7.1 million on Los Angeles city elections this cycle while pushing the council to let residents rent out second homes to visitors ahead of the 2028 Olympics. The figures come from campaign filings analysed by Capital & Main, in a report by Robin Urevich with Ben Poston contributing, and were picked up in the short-term rental trade press last week.

For managers in Los Angeles the stakes are straightforward. If the ordinance passes, a market currently limited to primary residences could gain as many as 15,000 legal units, and a lot of them would need managing.

Where the money went

The $7.1 million figure covers the mayor's race and three other local contests as of mid-October. It flowed through Airbnb's Committee to Expand the Middle Class, and it is roughly 30 times what that committee spent across all previous Los Angeles elections combined since 2018.

More than $6.1 million went to political action committees sponsored by the Central City Association, a downtown business group. That includes $750,000 to a committee backing Mayor Karen Bass and $3.3 million to committees supporting city attorney candidate John McKinney. A further $750,000 went to an IBEW Local 18 PAC supporting Jose Ugarte. Airbnb also backed Tim Gaspar in Council District 3 and Traci Park in District 11, who won outright in June.

Separately, the company spent nearly $4.2 million on lobbying over 18 months, mostly on the rental ordinance itself. Los Angeles Ethics Commission disclosures show about $3.7 million of that going to a coalition called Save Our Services, made up of labour unions, chambers of commerce and community groups, for media and canvassing.

The spending is not confined to one city. Airbnb's statewide California spending rose from $2.2 million in 2024 to almost $7.7 million as of 22 October.

Justin Wesson, an Airbnb spokesperson, said the company's political spending is part of a national effort to back causes and candidates that champion building local economies, and supports homeowners earning extra income from home sharing.

What the ordinance would do

Los Angeles has run on the 2018 Home Sharing Ordinance, which lets residents rent only their primary residence on a nightly or weekly basis. Rent-controlled units cannot legally be listed at all.

The proposed Vacation Rental Ordinance would override the primary-residence rule temporarily. Second homes could be rented to visitors around major events including the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Vacation rentals would be capped at 1% of the city's housing supply, which works out at up to roughly 15,000 units. Eligible properties would have to have been owned before the end of 2025, which is intended to stop people buying homes specifically to list them. Rent-controlled and affordable homes stay excluded. The whole thing would expire on 31 December 2028, about five months after the closing ceremony.

The tax argument, and who disputes it

Airbnb told the council in January that the ordinance could generate up to $110 million in additional transient occupancy tax, and IBEW Local 18's Kevin Norton repeated the figure at a committee meeting in May.

The city's own planning director disagrees. Vincent Bertoni wrote in a 2021 memo that the ordinance would not create new revenue, because it would not attract more visitors, only give existing ones more places to stay. In an April memo he added that the supply of eligible second homes is too small to move tax receipts much.

Hoteliers are not keen either. A September report commissioned by the Hotel Association of Los Angeles found six in ten hoteliers expect short-term rental growth to hurt their bookings and rates, and three hotel managers told a May committee hearing that their properties had enough rooms for Olympic visitors.

What happens next

Not much, quickly. Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who chairs the planning and land use committee, has said the proposal will not get a hearing until city departments report back on enforcing the rules already on the books. Those plans have not been fully delivered despite a request made nearly two years ago. A 2024 Los Angeles Housing Department report estimated 7,500 illegal short-term rentals in multifamily buildings, which is the enforcement gap he is pointing at.

Blumenfield's other objection is a cost argument rather than a housing one: "the actual cost to the city when you lose affordable housing can be much greater than any benefit" in tax revenue.

Bass supports the expansion as a temporary Olympic measure. Her mayoral challenger Nithya Raman pledged at an October forum to stop what she called the push to deregulate short-term rentals.

For operators outside Los Angeles, the useful part is the template. A platform spending at this scale on a time-limited, event-driven carve-out is a model that travels, and other host cities with restrictive primary-residence rules and a major event coming are the obvious places to watch it next.