Aloha All,
The County of Kauai is very serious about shutting down illegal vacation rentals. To assist with this they have partnered with a third party software system to ascertain who is advertising their illegal vacation rentals online.
While doing this the third party software has shut down many legal vacation rentals. The reason for this is the way the property's TMK (TAX MAP KEY) number has been entered into VRBO or AirBnB.
A TMK number is the tax ID number the County of Kauai gives to every property on Kauai. If you don't know your TMK number you can find it by looking for your property on the County of Kauai's website or your property tax bill.
An example of a TMK number is 4-1-1-001-001-0001. The first number "4" designates the island of Kauai. The second number "1" shows the zone, the third number "1" is the section, the fourth number "1" is the plat and parcel number. If the property is a condo or a CPR property there will be a sixth number designating the specific unit.
It is common for people to write a TMK number as "4-1-1-1-1-1" omitting the zeros. If you do this it will not be read as a legal vacation rental by the third party software system.
To type in the TMK number so that the software reads it correctly as a legal vacation rental you want to first drop the "4" indicating the island of Kauai and start with the second number of the zone. You'll also need to keep all the zeros in the TMK. TMK number are sometime printed without the correct number of zeros in them. You need to know where the zeros go in a TMK number. The fourth and fifth numbers in your TMK have three digits, and if you own a condo or a CPR you'll have a sixth number with four digits.
In my example both the fourth and fifth number are "1", but your fourth number could be "12" (or any other number). When you type the fourth and fifth number into AirBnB and VRBO you'll need three digits for those, and you'll want to put the zero(s) first. In the example in this blog you'd write both the fourth and fifth number as "001". For your CPR/condo number you'll also want to put the zeros first like "0001".
For this example the way to correctly input the TMK number in AirBnB or VRBO would look like this "110010010001".
Drop the "4" for the island of Kauai, type in all the zeros, and omit the hyphens.
I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions!
Aloha, Anne Eliason
Posted by Anne Eliason on
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