How to Find Airbnb Owners in a Specific City
Start from the register that covers the city, clean the city name, check what contact data it publishes, then work the list by ZIP. A step-by-step method with real city numbers.
On this page
To find the owners of short-term rentals in one city, start from the public register that covers it, clean the city name, check which contact details that register publishes, then work the list ZIP code by ZIP code. PermitPulse has done that for 127 U.S. cities as of 2026-10-08; this guide shows the method with their real numbers, so you can judge a city before you buy its list or build one yourself.
Booking sites do not publish who owns a listing. Permit and license registers do: the name on the permit, the property address and, in many places, a phone or email. The work is in getting from a state or city register to a clean list for one town.
1. Find the register that covers the city
Short-term rentals are registered at three levels, and the level decides what you get:
- Statewide license files. Florida (DBPR vacation-rental licenses) and Wisconsin (DATCP tourist rooming house licenses) license short-term rentals everywhere in the state. Every town is in one file.
- Statewide tax rolls. Texas has no statewide STR license, but its hotel occupancy tax applies to rented houses and condos as well as hotels, so the permit roll lists rentals in towns across the state, mixed in with hotels.
- City and county registers. Nashville, New Orleans, San Diego, Seattle, Denver, Chicago and dozens of other places run their own programs. Each covers only its own jurisdiction.
The register list shows which of these exist in each state we cover.
2. Check what the register publishes
Registers differ most in contact detail. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, 98% of the 673 license records carry a phone and 98% an email. In Kissimmee, Florida, 76% of 2,788 records carry a phone and almost none an email. In Houston, Texas, none of the 2,034 records do, because the Texas tax roll publishes no contact details at all.
| City | Register | Records | With a phone | With an email |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Green Bay, WI | Wisconsin DATCP's tourist rooming house licenses | 673 | 98% | 98% |
| Kissimmee, FL | Florida's DBPR vacation-rental license file | 2,788 | 76% | 0% |
| Houston, TX | the Texas hotel-occupancy-tax permit roll | 2,034 | 0% | 0% |
That one fact decides your channel. A phone-rich register supports calling; an address-level register supports mail and skip-tracing. Every city page on this site states which kind it is in the first paragraph.
3. Clean the city name
Registers are typed by people, and the city field shows it. Kissimmee appears in the Florida file under 4 spellings, and St. Augustine under 4 ("ST. AUGUSTINE", "ST AUGUSTINE", "SAINT AUGUSTINE"). A filter on one spelling misses the others. Across our 127 city files, 36 needed spellings merged.
The fix is a normalization pass before you count anything: uppercase, strip punctuation, expand "ST" and "FT", merge known typos, and check the result against the ZIP codes.
4. Drop the rows that are not in the city
Some sources fill the city column with the owner's home town instead of the property's. We found a Texas file where more than a thousand rows were labelled with a city whose ZIP codes are in California, and a South Carolina dataset whose city column was the owner's mailing city in other states. The test is simple: if a row's ZIP code belongs to another state, it is not a property in your city. Across our city files that rule removed 82 rows.
5. Separate hotels and other businesses
Tax rolls include hotels as well as rentals. Of the 2,034 Houston records, 815 are filed under NAICS 531110 (lessors of residential buildings) and 1,000 under 721110 (hotels and motels). If you sell to short-term rental owners, keep the first group and drop the second. The Texas guide lists every code.
6. Break the list down by ZIP
A city list is rarely spread evenly. In Kissimmee, ZIP 34747 alone holds 1,739 of the 2,788 records. Working ZIP by ZIP lets a service business build routes and lets a manager start where the density is. Each city page has a ZIP table.
7. Group the owners
Count how many different property addresses each owner name holds. In Kissimmee, 413 records sit under names with two or more Florida addresses, and 23 under names with ten or more. Those are management companies and investors; the rest are individual owners. Which group you want depends on what you sell. The multi-property guide covers the method in detail.
8. Contact them legally
Public records are not consent. Phones in permit files are often personal mobiles, so calls and texts fall under the TCPA and the Do Not Call rules, and email falls under CAN-SPAM. Postal mail is the least restricted channel, which is one reason address-level lists still work. Read contacting STR owners legally before you start.
The shortcut
Every city on the city index has already been through steps 1 to 7: one register, merged spellings, out-of-state rows removed, ZIP counts, permit types and owner grouping, refreshed from the live database. The city is part of its state plan ($99 a month, exports filtered by city) or the one-time state file ($149). If your city is not on the index, it is still in the state file; it just has fewer than 100 records.