(Photo by Lauren Gilger - KJZZ)

A Phoenix home listed for rent on Airbnb.

A new law on home-sharing in Arizona has taken effect with the new year — among other things, it precludes cities and towns from prohibiting these kinds of transactions and allows for platforms like Airbnb to collect taxes and send them to the state and cities.

The League of Arizona Cities and Towns had some concerns about this law as it worked its way through the Legislature last year.

Executive Director Ken Strobeck discusses the worries he and members had, and how satisfied he is that cities will at least make out OK under this new law. 

Valley real estate, in particular, has seen its dramatic ups and downs. Some are wondering whether the new home-sharing law could cause its own unique speed bumps.

Mark Stapp, executive director of the Masters of Real Estate Development program at ASU, studies the housing market. He talks about what effect this new law could have on real estate, including traditional rentals.

Arizona isn’t the first state to try to get a handle on how to regulate the sharing economy — for that perspective, I’m joined by Christopher Koopman, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which describes itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas.”

Koopman discusses what are some of the models cities and states have used for how to regulate and how to deal with the sharing economy.