The Airbnb Lobbying Files, Part 1: How Airbnb Made Its Numbers Look Small

Private emails show how Airbnb minimized its scale while lobbying Monroe County against stronger oversight.

Three hours before the Legislature voted 21–8 to opt out of a state requirement to create a short-term rental registry, County Executive Adam Bello responded to my letter requesting all lobbying records involving Airbnb, Ostroff and Associates, and Monroe County. He produced a 169-page trove of emails and related documents.

I asked for the records because the state lobbying portal showed that Nick Morelle — Congressman Joe Morelle’s son — was on the Airbnb account for Ostroff, where he is a vice president. I suspected he played a significant role in shaping the legislation and likely supplied key language. The documents did not disappoint.

The legislation bypassed the committee process and was introduced as a Matter of Urgency, making it extremely difficult for legislators — amid budget deliberations and the Thanksgiving holiday — to fully evaluate. Many voted to opt out believing the county could simply opt back in later.

But opting back in would require understanding what happened behind the scenes and reasserting the Legislature’s role in a process it was largely excluded from. Monroe County now stands alone among peer counties in opting out, despite encouragement from state legislators, the governor, the New York State Tourism Association, and even the New York State Association of Counties.

The reason for that outcome becomes clear in the documents: Airbnb, represented in lobbying by Morelle’s son, had extraordinary access to county officials and significant influence over how short-term rental policy was shaped — influence that left the public without the data needed to independently verify fair taxation or even understand the size and impact of the market. That access did not exist in a vacuum. Bello has long been one of Morelle’s closest political allies, and that relationship created a level of access for Airbnb unavailable to ordinary stakeholders.

This is the first of three posts examining what’s contained in that 169-page data dump. The posts that follow will examine how Monroe County backed away from its demand for data — and why the Legislature must vote on collection agreements with Airbnb.

Airbnb’s Fuzzy Math

Airbnb openly opposes short-term rental registries and has spent heavily lobbying against them at the state and local level. In its communications with Monroe County officials, however, the company appeared to be operating from the outset on the assumption that the county was already inclined to opt out of the state registry. Airbnb was simultaneously negotiating both the terms of its Voluntary Contribution Agreement with the county and the contours of the local opt-out legislation. Rather than arguing the opt-out itself, the company focused on shaping what would replace it — pressing for the lightest regulatory framework possible by minimizing the platform’s scale and housing impact.

In a May 23 email to county officials, Airbnb lobbyist Nick Morelle laid out that case, offering a set of statistics intended to show that short-term rentals in Monroe County are small in number, lightly used, and unlikely to affect the housing market.

Without a short-term rental registry, there is no way for the county or the public to independently verify Airbnb’s claims about scale and housing impact. But Airbnb’s own email makes one thing clear: while there are approximately 740 “active hosts” in Monroe County, the company says about 20 percent of those hosts operate more than one listing. That distinction is important, because it affects how short-term rental activity is distributed and concentrated.

Even setting that aside, there is at least one claim we can test directly using the county’s own data: Airbnb’s assertion that “a typical listing is rented about 60 nights a year.” That framing evokes the image of a homeowner occasionally renting out a spare room to make ends meet. Using Airbnb’s own figures, that claim would imply roughly 44,400 booked nights per year countywide.

The county’s tax data tells a very different story.

According to Mashvisor.com, the average daily rate for an Airbnb in Rochester is about $150. In 2024, according to the documents provided by the county, Airbnb remitted $1.18 million in occupancy tax. Because Monroe County’s occupancy tax rate is 6%, that remittance corresponds to more than $19.6 million in Airbnb lodging revenue.

At an average nightly rate of $150, that revenue implies approximately 131,000 booked nights in Monroe County in 2024.

Put differently: saying there were roughly 131,000 Airbnb nights in Monroe County paints a very different picture than saying the “typical” host rents for 60 nights a year.

That scale matters. In 2024, Monroe County collected about $9.8 million in total hotel and motel occupancy taxes — a figure that includes Airbnb. Airbnb’s $1.18 million share represents about 12 percent of the county’s entire lodging market by revenue. That is not a marginal slice of the market, particularly for an industry that often presents itself as primarily home-based and incidental.

Airbnb offered another statistic intended to minimize the scale of short-term rentals:

At first glance, that figure sounds vanishingly small. But Monroe County has roughly 340,000 housing units, and sixteen-hundredths of one percent translates to about 544 housing units rented for 90 or more nights per year. Airbnb has separately told the county there are approximately 740 active hosts in total. Taken together, those figures indicate that a large share of Airbnb activity in Monroe County is driven by high-intensity short-term rentals, not occasional or incidental use.

In other words, the numbers Airbnb provided to argue for minimal regulation undercut the notion that the “typical” listing is used only 60 nights a year. The activity — and the revenue — suggest a far more commercial market than the company’s framing implies.

And without a registry, we have no idea where these units are located and how many nights a year they are booked. Airbnb’s framing suggests they are evenly dispersed across a large county, but short-term rentals do not operate that way in practice. They cluster in high-demand neighborhoods — a pattern the county has made impossible to measure by opting out of a registry.

This data isn’t about punishment or prohibition; it’s the minimum needed to understand housing impacts, ensure fair taxation, and make informed policy decisions in a rapidly growing segment of the lodging market.

The county never challenged Airbnb’s math in its emails. And given the end result — an opt-out with no meaningful substitute for data collection — Airbnb’s framing appears to have prevailed over evidence-based policymaking.

Next: Monroe County Wanted Short-Term Rental Data. Until It Didn’t.