A coalition of hotel and tenants’ associations is calling on the City of Ottawa to regulate short-term rentals by commercial hosts like Airbnb, arguing they’re negatively impacting Ottawa’s long-term housing market.

More than 1,000 homes could be put back on Ottawa’s housing market if the city cracked down on owners who have converted their properties into “ghost hotels” on Airbnb, a new report suggests.

Some full Ottawa homes being run as “ghost hotels,” on Airbnb, are hurting the city’s vacancy rate, which sits at just 1.6 per cent.

Downtown, the suburbs, the hills around Wakefield, the heartland of Nepean — so-called short-term rentals are everywhere. Most of them are illegal but, as we learned with “disruptive” innovations like Uber, rarely prosecuted, a fact that probably fuels the proliferation.

A Centretown resident says her landlord attempted to evict her from her rental unit on Cooper St. alleging he wanted to turn it into an Airbnb.

Personable biographies or even fake photos obscure the operations of big businesses