What does artificial intelligence software that finds illegal vacation rentals in Central Florida look like?
Brevard County Commissioners decided last week they wanted to explore using Deckard Technologies to cash in on lost revenue and crack down on problem rentals.
What will happen to those illegal short-term rentals if the county uses the software to uncover them?
Commissioners have not decided if owners of unregistered properties will face fines or back taxes.
Commissioners voted to direct county staff to examine Deckard’s proposal to identify all unregistered short-term rentals in unincorporated Brevard County for $44,000 per year.
Nick Del Pego is CEO of California-based Deckard Technologies, a company that scans all day, every day every single website that posts short-term rental listings — the big ones of course, Airbnb and Vrbo, and the smaller ones.
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“We’re tracking about 20,000 other short-term rental sites across the country, many of them just in Brevard County,” Del Pego said. “So little local property manager sites, we’re watching those too.”
Del Pego said his software can estimate how often a property is rented and how much money it generates.
“We watch the calendars every night and then check it against the previous nights so we can estimate when we think bookings have been taken,” Del Pego said. “The price points they were taken. And when they were taken.”
Brevard County estimates only 20% of the 1,200+ in the unincorporated portion of the county are registered which means only those 20% pay state and local taxes.
The unregistered 80% of vacation rentals do not pay any taxes unless they use Airbnb or Vrbo, which automatically collects the taxes with every booking.
Brevard County District 5 Commissioner Jason Steele was most passionate about identifying unregistered vacation rentals.
“We’re neglecting our duty to do what’s fair to the general public and that is collect the taxes that are absolutely due to this county,” Steele said last week.
Brevard commissioners also voted to charge a registration fee; Brevard currently does not.
Many cities do charge a registration fee of $50. Melbourne Beach’s registration fee is $500.
Deckard currently contracts with 28 states and 300 jurisdictions across the U.S., including Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach and the Seminole County Property Appraiser.
Cocoa Beach Development Services Director Tanja McCoy said when it hired Deckard to find unregistered rentals within the City, Cocoa Beach did not implement fines or back taxes.
“Deckard allowed us to create spreadsheets of unregistered units, to which we sent courtesy letters giving them 30 days to respond. After 30 days they received a code enforcement letter,” McCoy said. “We did not go backward unless they had registered in a previous year and failed to register in subsequent years.”
Seminole County also did not back-charge vacation rental owners who had not been compliant.
“It’s a win for the county — tax dollars are up, complaints go way way down,” Del Pego said. “This is public information. So what we’re doing is taking these billions of rows of data, information about property, and coalescing it in a very easy-to-use way. Because otherwise, the problem would be a daunting task for a technician at the County office or code enforcement officer to try to wade through each day and go, ‘Where are the new ads, what’s changed?’”
Knowing about a vacation rental means a county or city can do something about it if it’s causing problems.
Osceola County has been struggling with rentals going back to 2020 that allowed parties and violence to spill into the street. The sheriff at the time proposed limiting short-term rentals there.
Brevard estimates Deckard’s software would generate around $50,000 in lost revenue per year.
But the county said it will have to hire people to manage it which will cost another $150,000.
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