photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on Friday, Sept. 6, 2024.

To prepare for an expected surge in visitors during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Lawrence city leaders will consider temporarily relaxing regulations for Airbnbs and other short-term rentals.

As part of its meeting on Tuesday, the City Commission will consider a set of changes to Lawrence’s short-term rental property code that would be in effect during the World Cup this summer.

Kansas City will be hosting six World Cup matches in June and July, and it’s estimated that it could bring more than 600,000 visitors to the region. That includes Lawrence, which has drawn interest from several countries as a potential base camp location and will be connected to downtown Kansas City through daily bus routes.

In August — on the same day that it approved an increase in Lawrence’s tax on hotel or short-term overnight stays — the commission started the process of amending the city’s short-term rental rules in hope of adding more lodging for the World Cup visitors. City staff then drafted the changes that the commission will vote on on Tuesday.

Lawrence’s short-term rental rules were created in 2018 and apply to residential properties that the owner rents out for a period of less than 30 days, such as Airbnbs. The rules state that property owners can have no more than three short-term rental units within the city limits at a time. Owners also have to go through certain inspection requirements, and a rental property can’t be in certain residential areas of the city if the owner doesn’t live on the property.

The proposed changes to the code would affect all of those aspects of the city’s short-term rental regulations during the World Cup.

First, the language capping the number of rentals per individual owner at three would be removed from the code, allowing owners to have more such properties within the city limits.

Second, the city would allow non-owner-occupied short-term rentals in more parts of the city. The code currently prohibits such short-term rentals in areas zoned R-1 or R-2, or “residential low density” — that is, neighborhoods that are zoned for single-family homes. The proposal would remove that restriction.

There would also be a change to the inspection requirements that would help owners of long-term rental properties — those that are rented out for 30 days or more — to use them for short-term rental purposes during the World Cup. The change says that if a property has been inspected under the city’s long-term rental property code, the owner could use that to satisfy the short-term rental code’s inspection requirement, too, rather than having to get a new inspection for the short-term use.

The language of the ordinance that would amend the code mentions that other cities in the Kansas City metro area have changed their rental rules for the World Cup, too. KCUR reported last fall that Kansas City, Missouri, changed its rules, but in a different way than Lawrence is proposing; it added a new category of short-term rental permits with lower application fees that would be active during “special events.”

While Lawrence’s rental rules have been amended in the past, they haven’t been changed in a temporary way before.

The specific date the proposed changes would go into effect would be May 25. The report from Planning and Development Services in the commission’s meeting agenda doesn’t specify when the changes would end, but it says that would require additional procedural steps and would “become effective at the conclusion of the 2026 World Cup.”

The City Commission meets at 5:45 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St.