To help meet rising demand for accommodations in Tokyo, the Ota Ward Assembly has passed an ordinance allowing condominium owners to rent vacant units to the record numbers of international travelers coming to Japan.

The law allows housing owners who register with the ward office to accommodate guests and charge fees for stays of at least six nights, so as not to harm hotels, a ward official said Tuesday.

The owners will be subject to on-site inspections if requested by the ward, and are mandated to give advance notice of their business plans to nearby residents.

Currently, the use of vacant houses as tourist accommodations, dubbed the minpaku business, is illegal without a hotel license, except in government-designated special economic zones.

Ota Ward, which hosts Haneda airport and one of the designated special zones, is lifting the ban to deal with residents¡¯ concerns that many minpaku businesses are already operating in a ¡°gray zone¡± to make up for a shortage of accommodations for visitors, said Kazutaka Sagara, the ward official who works on deregulation plans.

Ota Ward said the room occupancy rate for the area¡¯s hotels exceeded 90 percent in 2014.

Passed on Monday, the ordinance ¡ª a first for Tokyo ¡ª is the second in the nation. A similar ordinance was approved in October in Osaka, which is also a designated special zone.

Sagara said owners in Ota Ward can launch the new type of accommodations within a few weeks after the ordinance takes effect at the end of January.

Some people in the ward have expressed doubts about the system, saying it could reduce neighborhood security.

They say such accommodations could be used by terrorists, thieves and prostitutes. Others are worried about increased noise and trash.

The central government is meanwhile moving toward lifting the ban, as the labor and transport ministries jointly launched an advisory council in November to set legal guidelines for the operation of private home-sharing businesses.

According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, some 16 million people visited the country during the 10 months of this year. The number for the entire year could reach 20 million, a goal the government didn¡¯t hope to reach until 2020.

Airbnb Inc., a U.S. firm whose online service mediates between ¡°hosts¡± offering to share their homes and ¡°guests¡± seeking such accommodations, announced in November that the service had generated an estimated economic impact of ?221.9 billion between July 2014 and June of this year.