An 83-year-old Oʻahu woman is fighting $600,000 in fines from the City and County of Honolulu for an online advertisement of an illegal short-term rental.
Sandra May has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court Thursday for “mistakenly” posting her one-bedroom rental unit in Wilhelmina Rise as a short-term rental, which is available for rent for less than 30 days. Short-term vacation rental units are illegal to operate outside resort-zoned areas on Oʻahu.
The complaint called the fines were “excessive” considering it was unintentional.
“That's why we're headed to court, so that the court can assess whether the fine imposed against Sandra is grossly disproportionate to an accidental advertisement,” said May’s attorney, Loren Seehase of the Pacific Legal Foundation. “When you're looking at an excessive fine analysis and the culpability of the person … in Sandra's case, this was an accident, an inadvertent mistake. She was not purposely trying to violate the law.”
In an effort to curb illegal STR operations on Oʻahu, the city passed a law in 2019 that allowed fines to be issued just for advertising illegal rentals. It also set up stiff penalties of up to $10,000 per day that the posting is online.
The violations against May started that year.
May had rented out her one-bedroom unit to long-term tenants since the 1970s, the lawsuit said. In 2019 she began advertising the unit online after struggling to find tenants.
But the lawsuit describes May as “technologically illiterate,” and had struggled to set up the listing. She received a notice of violation for the illegal STR advertisement, and worked with the online platform to change the post so that it would only allow bookings of more than 30 days.
She reportedly received another violation in 2021 despite making no changes to the listing, and had asked the online platform again to correct any issues with the post.
In 2024 she received a third violation notice, but didn’t find out about it right away because she was also recovering from a car accident. That’s how she accumulated a majority of the $600,000 fine, the lawsuit said.
“Sandra was not aware of the violation and order for nearly two months because she was in and out of the hospital, lives alone, and nobody else checks her mail,” the complaint said.
May reportedly contacted the online platform, which was not named in the lawsuit, to correct the listing and found she wasn’t at fault.
“The online rental platform verbally informed Sandra that the ability to check the availability of her property for less than thirty days was an internal error,” it said, adding that the platform confirmed that May had set the listing months before to only allow bookings of 30 days or more.
Despite that, the city allegedly still required May to pay the fine. The lawsuit also said the city filed a lien against her property last year if she couldn’t pay the fine.
Read the filed lawsuit here.
