A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled Airbnb must face the city’s lawsuit accusing the platform of allowing rental hosts to illegally jack up prices on more than 2,000 properties in the days after January’s deadly wildfires, according to a report on the June 30 ruling. Judge Robert Broadbelt rejected Airbnb’s bid to dismiss the case, finding that the city’s claim that Airbnb itself advertised and charged those prices, not just the individual hosts, was enough for the lawsuit to move forward.
Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto originally filed the suit on July 17, 2025, months after the Palisades and Eaton fires killed at least 30 people, destroyed more than 16,000 structures, and forced over 100,000 residents to evacuate. In the city’s official announcement of the filing, Feldstein Soto said it was unconscionable that Airbnb permitted prices to be jacked up on thousands of rental properties at a time when so many people lost so much and needed a place to sleep.
What the lawsuit alleges
- Prices rose by more than 10% on at least 2,000 LA-area listings between Jan. 7 and Jan. 17, 2025, according to a Courthouse News Service summary of the complaint — a direct violation of California’s anti-price-gouging law, which caps increases at 10% once a state of emergency is declared.
- Governor Gavin Newsom’s Jan. 7 emergency declaration triggered that price cap, and the city says Airbnb’s automated “Smart Pricing” tool kept adjusting listing prices upward with demand anyway.
- The suit separately accuses Airbnb of misrepresenting its “verified host” program, alleging some listings marketed as verified were tied to false or nonexistent identities.
The city is seeking a permanent injunction barring illegal rent increases during declared emergencies, restitution for consumers who were overcharged, and civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation. Airbnb disabled its Smart Pricing feature on Jan. 17, 2025, after California Attorney General Rob Bonta pushed the company to comply with the state’s gouging law.
Airbnb’s response
An Airbnb spokesperson has disputed the allegations as inaccurate while pointing to the company’s disaster response, which it says included close to $30 million toward wildfire recovery and emergency housing for roughly 24,000 people displaced by the fires. That response hasn’t ended the case: with the motion to dismiss denied, the lawsuit — filed under Los Angeles Superior Court case number 25STCV21244 — now heads toward trial, where a jury or judge will have to weigh Airbnb’s disaster relief efforts against the city’s claim that its own pricing tool let hosts profit off people who had nowhere else to go.
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