Kodiak Assembly member asks for monthly short-term rental counts, citing Coast Guard housing crunch

Kodiak Island Borough Assemblymember Bo Sedillo-Whiteside asked Thursday for monthly updates on short-term rentals, saying the borough has "compounding housing issues, especially with this Coast Guard expansion."

"We're seeing now a lot of longer-term rentals hitting the market, but it's for 8 months, which doesn't do a lot of people much good," he said at an Assembly work session. He also noted that rentals can bring in $430 a night during peak season. The borough manager offered to include the updates in the manager's report.

Assessor Seema Garoutte said her department uses Rentalscape, software from Deckard Technologies, mainly to find short-term rentals that owe business personal property tax. It pulls listings from sites like Airbnb and VRBO into one place. This September it identified 165 short-term rentals among 524 listings, compared with 169 a year earlier, which she said was not a significant change. One property can show up as several listings, she said, such as a bedroom, a larger unit and a converted garage.

Garoutte said the software is not always accurate, so staff verify what it shows. Sometimes that means searching house by house down a street to match a listing photo. She said the department usually checks the software in September and may be missing rentals that operate only in summer, so she has added an earlier check.

Mayor Jared Griffin asked that the next report separate whole houses from basements and accessory units, saying the policy question is how many whole houses are coming off the market. Garoutte said she can do that.

Finance Director Dora Cross, asked whether the staff who handle the borough's accommodations tax use the software, said she has no access to it and has never compared its data to what the borough receives.