Questions that come up before the RFP
Who it is for, how we differ from listing monitors, where the data lives, and what has not shipped.
What is STAyTUTE?
- STAyTUTE is short-term rental permitting software for local government. Hosts apply on your site, on a parcel from your assessor roll. Staff license, renew, and inspect. Residents look up whether a stay is licensed instead of calling the counter, and if they file a problem the photo lands on that property. Finance sees lodging-tax filings on the same file. The database is yours.
Who is STAyTUTE for?
- Clerks, planners, finance, and code enforcement in cities, counties, and agencies that license short-term rentals. Hosts apply and renew. Residents look up licensed stays and can file a problem with a photo. It is not a booking site, a property-management system, or a host tax tool.
How is STAyTUTE different from Granicus Host Compliance?
- Granicus Host Compliance is built to find listings, send outreach letters, and run a 24/7 complaint line. Registration and tax are modules. STAyTUTE is the license you issued: a resident looks up the address on your site, sees whether it is actually licensed, and can file a photo on that property. Staff open the same file. Listing file import is here; we will not claim 70+ booking sites until a named partner feed is running.
How is STAyTUTE different from Deckard Rentalscape?
- Deckard's product page claims listing scans, a registration portal, a public map of registered stays, a tax payment portal, and a 24/7 hotline — still listing-first and vendor-hosted. STAyTUTE starts from the license you issued on the assessor parcel. Residents search those stays on your site. Filings, complaints, and cases sit on that file, in your database — not on a vendor map of inventory they identified.
How is STAyTUTE different from Accela short-term rental registration?
- Accela runs STR registration as a workflow on a broader civic permitting platform, with published customer results such as Denver's compliance lift (their numbers, not ours). STAyTUTE is a focused STR office: apply, review, license, a public directory of licensed stays, problems filed on the property, and a case file — data in your community's system. You do not need the rest of a civic suite to get that.
How is STAyTUTE different from Azora STRView?
- Azora sells discovery plus permitting: found addresses, GIS crosswalk, caps against that list, remittance tools, and a 24/7 call center. STAyTUTE configures zoning and night-cap flags on the license you issued, not on a national discovered-address list. Residents search licensed stays. Identification percentages are not the headline.
Does STAyTUTE scrape Airbnb and Vrbo?
- Not today, and not with a crawler we operate. Staff import listing files and keep a snapshot history, which is enough to show council how the market moved. Automated matching will come through a named partner or licensed feed, after the staff listings inbox. We will not claim live coverage of thousands of sites until a community is running it.
What is next on the STAyTUTE roadmap?
- The public directory, file import, and cases are live. Next: a staff listings inbox, lodging-tax checkout, renewal attestations that match your ordinance, and decision letters. After those: inspection records, zoning on the staff map, an enforcement ladder, and listing matches from a named partner feed. A page naming a city waits on a government that agrees to be named. Boston and Toronto in the worksheet stay labeled as other cities' studies. The roadmap has the full order, with no dates.
Where does your community's data live?
- On your community's STAyTUTE deployment and database — not a shared vendor cloud tenant. Staff roles, encrypted sessions, and an action history apply to that system. People and cases are linked by unique party IDs, not email.
Can residents look up licensed short-term rentals?
- Yes. The public directory shows stays you have actually licensed, pinned to the assessor parcel. That is different from a vendor map of discovered listings. Residents can also file a problem with an optional photo and location; staff see it on the same property.
Does STAyTUTE collect lodging tax?
- Filings and night-cap flags sit on the license today, so finance answers a remittance question from that file rather than a separate system. Card and ACH checkout for lodging tax is planned; application fees already run through City Hall checkout. The planning worksheet starts from published Washington city listing and lodging-tax figures, then you add your own license count — arithmetic for council, not a promised recovery total.
Do you have SOC 2?
- Controls are in place now: encrypted sessions, staff roles, lockout, optional passkeys, form protection, and a staff action history. We are on a SOC 2 path — Type I first, then Type II — and we will say so when those reports are complete.
See it running on your ordinance
Send us the text and the step that costs your office the most time. We configure apply, review, license, directory, and the case file against your rules, then walk your team down that path — not a sample city with invented addresses.