GovTech · Enforcement

How integration, enforcement, and system design determine what's actually achievable

By Nick Del Pego June 22, 2026 6 min read

Two jurisdictions. Nearly identical ordinances. One has 80% STR registration rates; the other is stuck at 30% and can't figure out why. Same rules, same intent, completely different results. The difference almost never comes down to political will or staffing. It comes down to system design.

The US short-term rental market generates roughly $20 billion in annual revenue. Industry estimates put the national STR tax compliance gap in the billions, most of it undetectable without transaction-level visibility. States are responding, California's SB 346 and a similar New York State law now require platforms to share host registration data directly with local governments. More states are following. But new data flows don't automatically create compliance. That gap persists not because of how ordinances are written, but because of how compliance programs are built. Compliance isn't something you declare; it's something you operationalize.

The Two Variables That Actually Matter

Every STR compliance program runs on two levers:

Visibility: Can you actually see everything operating in your market, across thousands of listing sources, not just the major platforms?
Control: Of what you can see, how much can you actually enforce and validate?

If either lever is weak, your compliance ceiling drops regardless of how strong the ordinance looks on paper.

Four Levels of Program Maturity

At Deckard Technologies, we've seen this play out across hundreds of jurisdictions. Compliance outcomes are largely predictable from program design. Most programs fall into one of four types:

Program Type	What You Have	What's Actually Achievable
Type 1: Discovery-Led (Rentalscape only)	Inventory identification, ownership mapping, evidence from public data, manual enforcement workflows	Low. You can see the problem, but can't fully control it. Compliance plateaus because enforcement is reactive.
Type 2: Operational Compliance (Outreach + Partial Integration)	Structured operator Outreach, partial integration, early workflow automation	Moderate. ~20% improvement in registration compliance over manual enforcement alone.
Type 3: Integrated Compliance (Registration + System Integration)	Integrated registration systems, continuous data sync, improved audit capabilities	High. Additional ~20% on top of Type 2. Compliance becomes coordinated.
Type 4: Fully Integrated Ecosystem	Full platform integration, unified system of record, automated enforcement, transaction-level revenue visibility	Systemic. Compliance becomes continuous, not episodic. Jurisdictions move from managing compliance to engineering it.

What High-Performing Programs Do Differently

Top-performing programs don't just have better rules, they have better systems. Specifically, they:

The result: compliance improvements that are stepwise, not incremental. Discovery creates awareness. Outreach drives conversion. Integrated registration sustains it. Full ecosystem makes it automatic. The difference between a 30% program and an 80% program isn't effort, it's system capability.

What Deckard Does

Rentalscape by Deckard Technologies helps over 500 jurisdictions move from reactive to continuous compliance through five steps:

The future of STR compliance isn't going to be defined by stricter rules. It's going to be defined by better-connected systems. Cities that build the right infrastructure (integrated data, automated workflows, unified operational visibility) will achieve higher compliance, capture more revenue, and build programs that don't require constant manual intervention to sustain. Cities that don't will keep investing in enforcement that plateaus.

Compliance excellence isn't about chasing 100%. It's about building a system where non-compliance is visible, compliance is easy, enforcement is inevitable, and outcomes compound over time. That's an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.