She’s reported over 100 St. Petersburg short-term rentals. Others want to do the same

Marley Price’s boyfriend likes to play video games in his spare time. She prefers to find potentially illegal short-term rentals and report them to code enforcement.

Price, 27, has made a hobby out of reporting potential violators to St. Petersburg Code Compliance. She has filed at least 108 complaints since starting this work two months ago. According to the city, 88 of those properties reported by Price have received violation notices.

“We have received complaints from other individuals in the past, but not in the numbers that Ms. Price has submitted,” Amy Foster, city housing and neighborhood services administrator, wrote in an email.

Price last week posted her work on the social media platform X.

“I was banned from the local Airbnb hosts Facebook groups after reporting 100+ listings and all I got was this lousy T-shirt,” Price wrote. She included screenshots of conversation threads discussing her “complaint spree” as well as Facebook and text messages threatening her and asking her to withdraw complaints.

The post has reached over 1.5 million users and received 20,000 “likes.”

“It’s not fun that I have to deal with that because the city doesn’t want to enforce their own codes. But I just feel like if not me, who?” Price told the Tampa Bay Times on Friday. “There’s so much I can’t deal with, (like) abortion rights being rolled back. This is the one thing I can do, so I might as well.”

Since then, she’s received a barrage of messages from others around the country wanting to put an end to short-term rentals of homes once used to house working class residents.

Many have hailed Price as a hero for doing what she can to slow down St. Petersburg’s affordable housing crisis. But some have decried her as a “Karen,” a pejorative term for a woman who doesn’t mind her own business. Some have taken issue with an image she posted under her viral tweet of a soldier with a gun with the words “how compelling, please face the wall now.”

Price said it was “obviously” not a threat of violence. “I don’t care if they think I’m being (politically correct) or whatever,” she said.

Like a game

Price began filing complaints in February after her long-term neighbor died and his home was sold. She said a California couple bought the Disston Heights home and flipped it into a rental listed for $350 a night.

Price began her hunt for “entire house” rentals. She discovered that the city has had rules on the books since 2007: Homes can be rented out for no fewer than 30 days or, if fewer than that, no more than three consecutive times within a 365-day period.

Price sees finding potential violators like a game: She checks the zoning and whether the property is declared as a primary residence, which comes with a tax break that doesn’t apply to people renting out their homes. If there is no address listed, she’ll try to match photos of the rental with older postings on Zillow or Realtor.com. Sometimes the door, windows or layout of the kitchen can be a giveaway.

“It’s really not that hard,” Price said. “It’s fun to be able to find it and match it.”

She logs that data into a spreadsheet, which she shared with City Council members last month in an email. Price wrote that of the 52 reports she had submitted at that time, she found that seven owners (13%) lived in St. Petersburg, 19 owners lived within the state of Florida (36%), 23 owners lived in a different state (44%) and three owners lived in a different country altogether (5%).

“I don’t need to remind you that rents in St. Petersburg has increased astronomically in the past 5 years. You are all well aware of the housing problem we have, it’s posted all over the city website and each of you virtue signal about how it’s your top priority constantly,” Price wrote. “Enforcing existing zoning requirements is the BARE MINIMUM the city should be doing. Having ONE city employee check the AirBnB/VRBO against the county appraiser website is all it would take and you would open back up hundreds of single family homes.”

Foster said that if a violation is backed up by evidence, the property owner has 20 days to stop. If the owner continues renting the home on a short-term basis, a hearing is scheduled for the Code Enforcement Board, which determines if the property is still in violation. If so, it can impose a fine that recurs each day the owner offers their home as a short-term rental.

She said historically, the board has set that fine at $200 per day. The maximum allowed by state law is $250. If the property continues to operate illegally, Foster said the fines can result in a lien against the property.

The city does get a cut from local taxes collected by Airbnb, just as it does for taxes collected by hotels. Airbnb charges fees to cover Pinellas County’s tourist development tax. That’s the same tax that would fund the county’s $312.5 million share to build a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium.

Foster said that, as with all of those taxes collected by Pinellas County, St. Petersburg receives a share. She pointed out that a state law passed in 2014 prohibits the city from passing stricter regulations on short-term rentals.

The city’s job

Price has received messages from landlords who find her complaints.

“I didn’t make them rent that house out,” she said.

“I’m OK with putting a lot of time into this because I want the city to do this,” said Price, who works full-time from home but said she didn’t want to share information about her job to avoid harassment. “This is what you should be doing instead of dumping way too much money in overpriced affordable housing.”

As for all the attention she’s getting online, Price said she’s received some “comical” comments. But she said she is getting tired of the harassment. She wants the city to hire a full-time employee to find and report illegal short-term rentals.

“I’m not a politician, I’m not a city worker, I’m just a girl,” she said. “Them reaching out to me telling me they’re good people, or they’re different than other landlords, things like that. I don’t care. It’s not about the person or who they are. It’s about the systemic issue that they’re able to do this that just goes unnoticed.”

Codes Compliance Director Joe Waugh wrote in an email that the city has an investigator assigned to 22 zones throughout the city. He said there are currently seven vacancies because those inspectors were promoted to other roles.

“Still, our Codes Compliance team has kept the pace, ensuring a timely responses to all complaints, including the majority of complaints submitted by Ms. Price,” Waugh wrote.

Foster wrote in her email that the city launched a better tracking system for short-term rentals in 2016. Since that time, the city has received 1,012 complaints and issued 775 violation notices.

City Council member Richie Floyd reposted Price’s viral tweet with the caption: “Local (Democratic Socialists of America) member doing the Lord’s work here.” He said he did not see Price’s post of the soldier with a gun.

Floyd said he’d like to explore “how to enforce codes a little bit better.” He said Price’s tweet could be a catalyst to getting that done.

“We have ordinances on the books for a reason,” Floyd said. “If people are upset with what she’s doing, they probably shouldn’t be breaking the law.”