News & Record: The latest skirmish in the short-term rental wars involves swimming pools

Greensboro News & Record: There’s been a lot of talk lately about the potential demise of Airbnb. The homesharing platform deemed innovative by some, and a nuisance by others, has helped to define the public debate over sharing-apps that have transformed downtowns nationwide with e-scooters, rented condos, and the presence of Uber and Lyft cars on every street corner. Those local debates have been fierce in North Carolina metros including Raleigh-Durham, Asheville, Wilmington and Charlotte, and have given way to a tenuous compromise in the state between tech companies, homeowners, and established players in the hospitality and tourism industry.

But Airbnb’s steep revenue declines, close to 50% drops in Asheville, Myrtle Beach, and Austin, show that regulation designed with one technology in mind will make it harder to adapt as new tech emerges. Look no further than the troubles surrounding Swimply, a pool-sharing app not dissimilar in concept from Airbnb, causing a stir in Orange County, North Carolina.

Homeowners in the Chapel Hill-Hillsborough area were served with threatening letters from the Orange County Health Department (OCHD) for their use of the sharing app Swimply, which they used to rent out their backyard pool by the hour to customers on the other end of the app. Does that transaction transform a homeowner’s private pool into a public pool? Here you see where common sense and regulatory policy don’t overlap.

The OCHD says in their letter, “when an owner or resident of a single-family dwelling opens use of that dwelling’s pool to the general public, especially for rent, they are explicitly expanding the use of the pool to users beyond the private use of the dwelling’s residents and their guests, and the pool is no longer private.”

Their language implies that making money from the sharing of your pool is certainly problematic, but leaves room for it to be an issue if you were just opening your backyard gate to anyone looking to cool off.

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