The city of Columbia is now offering a 24/7 reporting line for residents concerned about short-term rentals in their neighborhood.
The number for the reporting line is 1-800-283-3618.
Residents can also call the city’s Contact Center during business hours, send an email to the city or report complaints on the city’s website.
The city has struggled with enforcement of its 2024 short-term rental ordinance, and through the new dedicated channel, residents can report short-term rentals that are not licensed or are causing problems in their neighborhood.
Short-term rentals are typically homes used as vacation rentals and advertised on platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo. There are 88 licensed short-term rentals in Columbia, according to a city staff presentation from a Monday night Columbia City Council work session.
However, many short-term rentals operate in the city without a license. The city staff report said Neighborhood Services has opened 155 illegal short-term rental cases, with 19 referred for prosecution.
The city is also working with the vendor Neumo, which assists with the reporting line, to identify and request compliance from illegal short-term rentals.
Proposed changes to the short-term rental ordinance have been up in the air for over a year, but during the work session, the City Council put further discussion on hold. The council requested that city staff bring back an updated report in May or June of 2027.
Columbia City Manager De’Carlon Seewood said waiting for another year will give the city time to see if the reporting line, among other factors, leads to any changes in the data.
“We don’t have any data from exactly how many calls we’ve gotten, what does that look like, and so this will allow us at least a little bit more time to track,” Seewood said.
Second Ward council member Vera Elwood supported waiting for another year. She said it would be better to have more data before making changes to the ordinance.
“I just don’t know that in six months, even with the additional information, we’ll have the, for lack of a better term, environmental scan that we need to decide what the changes should be,” Elwood said.
Columbia residents, especially those in the Fourth Ward, have raised concerns about some of the proposed changes to the ordinance.
If they are implemented, the changes would decrease the number of opportunities for public input on short-term rental licenses. In many cases, the process would shift to administrative work for city staff instead, and neighborhoods would not receive as many notifications about properties around them that could become short-term rentals.
“99% of the feedback that I’ve received on this has been on the neighborhood notification,” Third Ward council member Jacque Sample said. “People are very concerned about that.”
