Canada: Guest-screening and verification software provider, Autohost, is launching its authority reporting feature, designed to help property managers easily navigate the increased regulations being introduced for short-term rentals worldwide.
Governments and other legal entities, such as Homeowner Associations [HOAs] and real estate developers, have increased their focus on short-term rentals in an effort to curb incidents and monitor hosts’ earnings for tax purposes, among other reasons. As a result, a growing number of property managers are required to collect, and sometimes formally submit, the identities of those renting their properties, and their accompanying guests, to local authorities.
To ease pressure on property managers, Autohost has automated the authority reporting process through enhanced data collection, introducing a simple process for all guests to provide detailed and required information during the check-in process. Autohost customers will have the ability to enable the new authority reporting capabilities as part of their guest portal experience.
Once enabled, the company will send a daily submission to the property manager and / or the appropriate authorities, identifying every guest scheduled to check in that day. Since regulations differ by region, property managers can configure the authority reporting feature to collect specific guest information depending on the location of the property.
Autohost says it ensures all necessary information is collected, supporting regulation compliance in over 130 countries.
Autohost CEO Roy Firestein said: “At Autohost, we believe responsible hosting is the key to the short-term rental industry’s continued success and longevity. That’s why building out the authority reporting functionality was so important to us.
“It’s not just a ‘nice to have’ for property managers, it’s a mandated requirement for operating. This feature will make the process a lot easier for our customers to adhere to the growing demands of local governments and authorities, while keeping their teams efficient and productive,” he added.
Existing Autohost customers can enable the feature in their settings.
Earlier this year, the company launched what it called an “industry first” threat intelligence platform in order to help protect the hospitality industry.
The platform, which is now generally available, aggregates critical reputation data from over 200 threat feeds globally into a single, searchable, API-driven database. It can be used to help protect hospitality operators from fraud, identity theft, and other criminal activity commonly seen in the industry.
