Airbnb regulations lead to layoffs at Vancouver property management firm

Months after BC announced short-term rental regulations for platforms like Airbnb, we’re still seeing the impacts in Vancouver before they’ve even gone into effect, including layoffs.

In October, we spoke with Jordan Deyrmenjian, who runs Artin Properties. Our story focused on how his company managed over 150 properties on Airbnb in Metro Vancouver.

Since then, Artin Properties has had to lay off eight employees and expects to take a financial hit.

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Deyrmenjian has maintained that we need a short-term rental market like the one BC is regulating that allows for shorter stays. May 1 is when sweeping short-term rental regulations go live.

He even pointed to recent weather as an example of that.

“We’ve seen probably about eight different flood situations where people are calling us to get temporary housing on a monthly basis while their pipes are being fixed.”

Deyrmenjian told us how he plans to pivot when the regulations take effect. He also said that layoffs that hit his company directly resulted from the announced changes.

“The announcement made it so we lost a lot of clients, and that affected our revenue, which affects what we’re able to spend on our personnel.”

Most of Deyrmenjian’s clients are homeowners that he says would rather rent their homes out “in more transient, tenure or fashion so that they can come back to the home that they own, or make use of the home that they own, whether that’s their living there or putting family there or however they like to manage their property.”

“Now, they have to provide support or provide documentation proving the principal residence,” he said, adding that if they can’t prove it, they can’t go that route.

Deyrmenjian doesn’t think the province has made clear what a principal residence even means according to the regulations.

He says the definition suggests your principal residence is “the place where you spend your time, most relative to anywhere else.”

A data-driven approach could have made things more tenable for companies like Artin, Deyrmenjian believes.

The data he speaks of is that there are around 5,300 Airbnbs in Vancouver, at max, according to AIRDNA.

“Out of all these properties, half of them are available for only three months of the year.”

He also thinks that Vancouver’s desirability as a place to live, and some people feeling entitled to live here, complicates matters.

“It’s been mentioned as one of the most desirable places to live in the world. That brings our demand up, then we have constraints on our supply, and for me, it really is an expectation or perspective issue, or a lot of people are entitled to live here. There’s no guarantee that you should live here; that’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s one that comes with the truth.”

Ultimately, Deyrmenjian believes the province went after the low-hanging fruit to address the rental market, which was the short-term rental regulations it brought in. He’s also not opposed to them entirely; he wishes it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution and that more consultation could’ve been done.

The City of Kelowna also recently introduced its own regulations.