7 ms·

One Year of Airbnb

79 points by hvo 11y ago

iokevins 11y ago
TL; DR: For one year, a late-30's academic and his artist spouse document the use of Airbnb, as a tool to facilitate law-abiding, temporary living, in varied New York City neighborhoods. Airbnb comes out looking responsive, to lack of care from certain hosts. Impressions of neighborhoods vary, as you would expect, sometimes from simply finding contaminated pasta. After gaining a few positive reviews on Airbnb, they successfully negotiate their way into spaces above their price range, while avoiding "red flags", like unmentioned fifth-floor walk-ups. Great article, lots of tie-ins to various cultural history of the neighborhoods.
- greggman 11y ago
  I've been using AirBnb to live all over for the last 2.5 years. Not 100% has been AirBnB but enough that I mostly think AirBnB as a company could use a lot of improvement (edited from something more derogatory) Of the 16+ places I've stayed at 5 of them have lied about their facilities where as of the 20 or so hotels I've stayed at only 1 lied about their facilities and they fixed the issue. But, on AirBnB there's no way to really deal with the issue. Most landlords don't have some other place so you show up, suitcase in tow, what can you do except deal with lies? It's not like you can easily find another place in a few minutes. At best you have to sit there with your cellphone and try to find a nearby hotel and stay there several days until you find a new place. As far as I'm concerned the AirBnB refund guarantee is mostly useless. I don't feel free to leave a bad review because the next landlord might not rent to me if they see I've left other bad reviews. Why should they take the risk of renting to someone that leaves bad reviews? AirBnB provides almost no way to deal with these issues. There are zero repercussions for lies on the facilities and unless you actually rent the place there is no way to contact AirBnB. So for example, once I got used to the lies I started asking the landlords for specifics before I rented. Example: Two places claimed they had "free parking on premises" but when questioned, one said I could park in the street but they didn't actually have any parking on premises. Another said unless I had neighborhood sticker I'd have to park 3-5 blocks away. There was nothing I could. I can't report them to AirBnB unless I actually rent As far as other lies. One claimed they had Wifi. Turned out they were stealing it from a neighbor and it was only accessible from small area in the corner of the living room. Another said the apartment was a 1bedroom but it turned out to be studio. The difference? A 1bedroom has a door so I can shut out the refrigerator sounds, a studio does not so I had filtered out studios. One claimed they had free parking on premises. When got there I was told it was often blocked and I'd have to park on the street. Car was broken into there BTW. Another claimed free parking on premises. Turned out he was on vacation and left is car in the space so no parking. Another no lies I suppose but it wasn't ready to rent. No curtains on the windows and buildings all looking directly into it. Also it claimed air conditioning which was true but in a hot august in LA with it running on high it took til 4am to cool the place down.
  - ajb 11y ago
    "I don't feel free to leave a bad review because the next landlord might not rent to me if they see I've left other bad reviews". A hack to deal with this: leave praise in the review, but end it with 'and I'll be sure to tell all my friends'. That used to be code in hotel guestbooks that all the preceding praise should be inverted. (I think that's the codephrase - someone correct me if it's wrong please!) Not sure if it's used in AirBnb, but hey, why not start the tradition now...
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      I've never heard of this before; I don't know how many hosts would pick up on it. Also, I think I've left that comment before in various places, and I certainly didn't intend it to mean that I hated it.
    - random_rr 11y ago
      This comment is much, much funnier when I imagine Michael Scott from "The Office" saying it. Thanks for brightening my day. :D
    - knughit 11y ago
      That's s horrible spoilage of communication, and makes no sense in a hotel guest book. i think someone played a joke on you.
  - xixixao 11y ago
    I'd list all positives first, then negatives. I guess I'm used to descriptions online being inaccurate, so background check is always valuable, and past comments should help with that. This applies to Uber and any similar scheme, you gotta be honest otherwise the scheme won't work. You can always soften with "in my opinion, my experience" etc.
  - pkaye 11y ago
    Right now AirBnB is still a growing business. They are trying to get as much properties on their system so they are playing fast and loose on the accuracy and quality. But once things settle down, they will start tightening the screws on all these listings kind of like how eBay did on the sellers once it finally grew up.
- golergka 11y ago
  I wish every post here had a TL;DR like this. You saved my time and yet gave me a reason to get back to this article later. Thanks.
gozo 11y ago
As someone who has lived a similar lifestyle for a while I have strong indications that Airbnb has made this much harder. People have become reluctant to rent out for one to three, or even six, months and prices have gone up significantly. Especially in international or dynamic cities, which are generally the ones you want to stay a bit longer in.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  Consumers are willing to pay way more to rent a room (or a car) for a day than 1/365th of what they are willing/able to pay for a full year. Airbnb makes that matchmaking easier (on both parties), and in exchange takes a 9-15% cut. Property owners who used to be forced to choose between offering 1-year lease or trying to piece together some mid-term rentals (and suffer vacancies in-between) now have an additional choice: take ~85% of the much higher daily rate people are willing to pay. I agree it's perhaps made that specific pattern of consumption more expensive, but IMO, it's done that by making the overall market more efficient.
  - gozo 11y ago
    I don't know, it think the scenario in the article is pretty common where people offset the time the property is empty with a high price. Especially when there's things like seasonality. If an apartment becomes empty in the spring the owner might have it empty to the summer, rent it out at a higher price to tourist and then instead rent it out in long-term in the autumn when there is more demand. I don't pretend to know everything about the housing market. Just that in a time where the Internet have created opportunities to more easily work on the things you think matter with like-minded people, the housing market is going the other way in terms of flexibility. Paradoxically time and space are more important than ever. Being able to do conferences and have people hang around afterwards, as a smaller company bring some in to consult in person, even just hanging out and exchanging ideas all takes time. It's all possible now, but not only is it not equally distributed, it's somewhat getting less so.
  - a-dub 11y ago
    It's nice to have efficient markets that effectively price things... however I think that perhaps it's not the worst thing in the world to accept market inefficiencies in trade for the opportunity to not live in a shitty society. My general sense is that merging the vacation/short term rental market with the long term home rental market puts serious upward pressure on the latter, thereby increasing scarcity of opportunity for middle income people in urban locales. IMO, anything that puts downward pressure on the derivative of social mobility over time is ultimately putting upward pressure on the shittiness of society as a whole and really makes life pretty unpleasant regardless of socioeconomic class. I'll take an inefficient housing market any day over that.
msoad 11y ago
Is this a sponsored content? It's too nice to Airbnb!
- tedmiston 11y ago
  I found it realistic. There are a few critiques of the experience as well. > We later came to recognize the cold, commercial experience offered by this host and others of his ilk, with multiple listings of impersonally furnished places and a willingness to let non-reviewed guests stay, was something we wished to avoid. > The central heating had apparently been broken for years and the weather forecast predicted a blizzard. > Our rear-facing prewar one-bedroom, where the couch sagged and the shower was in the kitchen, was as silent as a padded cell.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    The silence is a critique? A New York apartment where you can't hear neighbors or street noise is something to be cherished.
    - tedmiston 11y ago
      I mean in Manhattan, sure -- but there are plenty of quiet neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The eerily silent room was in Gowanus.
      - pavel_lishin 11y ago
        Nope; that was the UES/East Harlem location that they found the day after leaving the Gowanus one. It's confusing and poorly written, because they compare both to Hamsterdam :/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- venantius 11y ago
  Really? I found the bits about worms, impersonal hosts and places that smelled like gas to be definitely in the mixed bag territory.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
edward 11y ago
Posted 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10634015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10634015
- tedmiston 11y ago
  It looks like the extra query params here pass through the de-dupe filter.
- detaro 11y ago
  From the FAQ: > Are reposts ok? > If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
pavel_lishin 11y ago
> We later came to recognize the cold, commercial experience offered by this host and others of his ilk, with multiple listings of impersonally furnished places and a willingness to let non-reviewed guests stay, was something we wished to avoid. I'm not sure what would constitute a warm and personal experience. They want to have the place all to themselves, but are put off by ... what exactly? A lack family photos? Or more "morbid" art that they also ended up hating? > Our rear-facing prewar one-bedroom, where the couch sagged and the shower was in the kitchen, was as silent as a padded cell. Here, the heat blasted unbidden, from which we escaped by opening the windows to winter’s coldest month. That first night, on the way to the corner store to get some food, we dodged mice scurrying between bags of trash. Back in the kitchen, Elaine fired up the stove by the bath towels, but when the pasta from the corner store hit the boiling water, a few little worms floated to the top. I skipped dinner that night. This adds color to their story, but doesn't say much about AirBNB - opening the windows to deal with winter heat and seeing rodents in the street is pretty standard for New York. What isn't standard is having an apartment that's "silent as a padded cell" - as far as I'm concerned, that should be listed as an amenity.
- hackaflocka 11y ago
  Haters gonna hate.
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    The mediocre sentiments of someone who can only communicate via received aphorisms.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  > I'm not sure what would constitute a warm and personal experience. They want to have the place all to themselves, but are put off by ... what exactly? A lack family photos? Or more "morbid" art that they also ended up hating? It's not about having the place all to themselves. Having stayed in a handful of Airbnbs, I've found the distribution pretty bimodal too. There's a cold uncomfortableness to the commercial room run purely for business. Pardon my mildly overdramatic digression, but they feel like prison cells. Especially in contrast to the familiarity and personal touch when staying with a host that actually lives there, wants to have a conversation, and cares about people. While they may appreciate the extra income, I really believe these hosts share their rooms for the greater community experience.
11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
I'm glad to have read this, as I've had the same notion of living locally during world tours. I am curious about a couple of things... All of these experiences were in New York. How would it have been different in Athens, Tokyo, or Sydney, in terms of misrepresentation? Also, using average apartment cost to gauge the amount to spend on the AirBnb unit is probably not apples-to-apples (for similar reasons that a regular full time salary is likely going to be significantly less than a contractor rates for the same position). I would have used hotel rates instead, which would have been much higher than $100/night in New York. It might be that had they stayed in higher priced lodging, they'd have had a better experience.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  I'm not sure how much higher; when we first came here to visit, before moving, we stayed at Hotel Marakkech on the UWS - a great place, and looking at their booking page, their rates for all of January are under a hundred dollars (with the exception of New Year Eve's weekend, of course.) To be fair, the rooms are much smaller than a typical AirBNB, and it doesn't come with a kitchen.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    I wonder if you can even compare areas like that. There's enough of a difference between Sydney CBD and North Ryde that comparing them is difficult (even though hotel prices can be the same).
dotcoma 11y ago
Is this what they call "native advertising"?
- taternuts 11y ago
  It raises similar thoughts with me... mostly I guess because I don't think I've read such a positive AirBnB write-up before, especially around them responsibly handling landlord screw ups
  - skrebe 11y ago
    same here. too good to be true. airbnb crisis?
- msellout 11y ago
  Unlikely, as it leads with negativity and a comment on how prevalent illegal rentals are.
- ktamura 11y ago
  No, at least not on NYT. On NYT, paid content/native ads are marked as such at the beginning of the article like this one: http://paidpost.nytimes.com/ca-technologies/apis-the-building-blocks-of-the-app-economy.html http://paidpost.nytimes.com/ca-technologies/apis-the-buildin... (Note the subdomain) I must say that a lot of "paid content" pieces are pretty good, considering that companies are paying money to place these articles.
Xyik 11y ago
I didn't learn much about AirB&B, but the insight into living in New York was interesting.
tedmiston 11y ago
> Frustrated with the stock of apartments in our price range, I started contacting hosts of more expensive places, up to triple our budget. I really admire the "hacking" of leveraging what you have (some money + a great story) to get what you want when you can't afford it in dollars.
bm1362 11y ago
I'm currently doing this in NYC with my brothers; it's been rather stressful living week to week. I've just started phone interviews with a few companies and it's quite irritating to schedule something only to arrive at an room with poor internet; or to move across town the night before.

79 points by hvo 11y ago

TL; DR: For one year, a late-30's academic and his artist spouse document the use of Airbnb, as a tool to facilitate law-abiding, temporary living, in varied New York City neighborhoods. Airbnb comes out looking responsive, to lack of care from certain hosts. Impressions of neighborhoods vary, as you would expect, sometimes from simply finding contaminated pasta. After gaining a few positive reviews on Airbnb, they successfully negotiate their way into spaces above their price range, while avoiding "red flags", like unmentioned fifth-floor walk-ups. Great article, lots of tie-ins to various cultural history of the neighborhoods.

greggman 11y ago
I've been using AirBnb to live all over for the last 2.5 years. Not 100% has been AirBnB but enough that I mostly think AirBnB as a company could use a lot of improvement (edited from something more derogatory) Of the 16+ places I've stayed at 5 of them have lied about their facilities where as of the 20 or so hotels I've stayed at only 1 lied about their facilities and they fixed the issue. But, on AirBnB there's no way to really deal with the issue. Most landlords don't have some other place so you show up, suitcase in tow, what can you do except deal with lies? It's not like you can easily find another place in a few minutes. At best you have to sit there with your cellphone and try to find a nearby hotel and stay there several days until you find a new place. As far as I'm concerned the AirBnB refund guarantee is mostly useless. I don't feel free to leave a bad review because the next landlord might not rent to me if they see I've left other bad reviews. Why should they take the risk of renting to someone that leaves bad reviews? AirBnB provides almost no way to deal with these issues. There are zero repercussions for lies on the facilities and unless you actually rent the place there is no way to contact AirBnB. So for example, once I got used to the lies I started asking the landlords for specifics before I rented. Example: Two places claimed they had "free parking on premises" but when questioned, one said I could park in the street but they didn't actually have any parking on premises. Another said unless I had neighborhood sticker I'd have to park 3-5 blocks away. There was nothing I could. I can't report them to AirBnB unless I actually rent As far as other lies. One claimed they had Wifi. Turned out they were stealing it from a neighbor and it was only accessible from small area in the corner of the living room. Another said the apartment was a 1bedroom but it turned out to be studio. The difference? A 1bedroom has a door so I can shut out the refrigerator sounds, a studio does not so I had filtered out studios. One claimed they had free parking on premises. When got there I was told it was often blocked and I'd have to park on the street. Car was broken into there BTW. Another claimed free parking on premises. Turned out he was on vacation and left is car in the space so no parking. Another no lies I suppose but it wasn't ready to rent. No curtains on the windows and buildings all looking directly into it. Also it claimed air conditioning which was true but in a hot august in LA with it running on high it took til 4am to cool the place down.
- ajb 11y ago
  "I don't feel free to leave a bad review because the next landlord might not rent to me if they see I've left other bad reviews". A hack to deal with this: leave praise in the review, but end it with 'and I'll be sure to tell all my friends'. That used to be code in hotel guestbooks that all the preceding praise should be inverted. (I think that's the codephrase - someone correct me if it's wrong please!) Not sure if it's used in AirBnb, but hey, why not start the tradition now...
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    I've never heard of this before; I don't know how many hosts would pick up on it. Also, I think I've left that comment before in various places, and I certainly didn't intend it to mean that I hated it.
  - random_rr 11y ago
    This comment is much, much funnier when I imagine Michael Scott from "The Office" saying it. Thanks for brightening my day. :D
  - knughit 11y ago
    That's s horrible spoilage of communication, and makes no sense in a hotel guest book. i think someone played a joke on you.
- xixixao 11y ago
  I'd list all positives first, then negatives. I guess I'm used to descriptions online being inaccurate, so background check is always valuable, and past comments should help with that. This applies to Uber and any similar scheme, you gotta be honest otherwise the scheme won't work. You can always soften with "in my opinion, my experience" etc.
- pkaye 11y ago
  Right now AirBnB is still a growing business. They are trying to get as much properties on their system so they are playing fast and loose on the accuracy and quality. But once things settle down, they will start tightening the screws on all these listings kind of like how eBay did on the sellers once it finally grew up.
golergka 11y ago
I wish every post here had a TL;DR like this. You saved my time and yet gave me a reason to get back to this article later. Thanks.

gozo 11y ago

As someone who has lived a similar lifestyle for a while I have strong indications that Airbnb has made this much harder. People have become reluctant to rent out for one to three, or even six, months and prices have gone up significantly. Especially in international or dynamic cities, which are generally the ones you want to stay a bit longer in.

sokoloff 11y ago
Consumers are willing to pay way more to rent a room (or a car) for a day than 1/365th of what they are willing/able to pay for a full year. Airbnb makes that matchmaking easier (on both parties), and in exchange takes a 9-15% cut. Property owners who used to be forced to choose between offering 1-year lease or trying to piece together some mid-term rentals (and suffer vacancies in-between) now have an additional choice: take ~85% of the much higher daily rate people are willing to pay. I agree it's perhaps made that specific pattern of consumption more expensive, but IMO, it's done that by making the overall market more efficient.
- gozo 11y ago
  I don't know, it think the scenario in the article is pretty common where people offset the time the property is empty with a high price. Especially when there's things like seasonality. If an apartment becomes empty in the spring the owner might have it empty to the summer, rent it out at a higher price to tourist and then instead rent it out in long-term in the autumn when there is more demand. I don't pretend to know everything about the housing market. Just that in a time where the Internet have created opportunities to more easily work on the things you think matter with like-minded people, the housing market is going the other way in terms of flexibility. Paradoxically time and space are more important than ever. Being able to do conferences and have people hang around afterwards, as a smaller company bring some in to consult in person, even just hanging out and exchanging ideas all takes time. It's all possible now, but not only is it not equally distributed, it's somewhat getting less so.
- a-dub 11y ago
  It's nice to have efficient markets that effectively price things... however I think that perhaps it's not the worst thing in the world to accept market inefficiencies in trade for the opportunity to not live in a shitty society. My general sense is that merging the vacation/short term rental market with the long term home rental market puts serious upward pressure on the latter, thereby increasing scarcity of opportunity for middle income people in urban locales. IMO, anything that puts downward pressure on the derivative of social mobility over time is ultimately putting upward pressure on the shittiness of society as a whole and really makes life pretty unpleasant regardless of socioeconomic class. I'll take an inefficient housing market any day over that.

msoad 11y ago

Is this a sponsored content? It's too nice to Airbnb!

tedmiston 11y ago
I found it realistic. There are a few critiques of the experience as well. > We later came to recognize the cold, commercial experience offered by this host and others of his ilk, with multiple listings of impersonally furnished places and a willingness to let non-reviewed guests stay, was something we wished to avoid. > The central heating had apparently been broken for years and the weather forecast predicted a blizzard. > Our rear-facing prewar one-bedroom, where the couch sagged and the shower was in the kitchen, was as silent as a padded cell.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  The silence is a critique? A New York apartment where you can't hear neighbors or street noise is something to be cherished.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    I mean in Manhattan, sure -- but there are plenty of quiet neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The eerily silent room was in Gowanus.
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      Nope; that was the UES/East Harlem location that they found the day after leaving the Gowanus one. It's confusing and poorly written, because they compare both to Hamsterdam :/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
venantius 11y ago
Really? I found the bits about worms, impersonal hosts and places that smelled like gas to be definitely in the mixed bag territory.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

edward 11y ago

Posted 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10634015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10634015

tedmiston 11y ago
It looks like the extra query params here pass through the de-dupe filter.
detaro 11y ago
From the FAQ: > Are reposts ok? > If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

pavel_lishin 11y ago

> We later came to recognize the cold, commercial experience offered by this host and others of his ilk, with multiple listings of impersonally furnished places and a willingness to let non-reviewed guests stay, was something we wished to avoid. I'm not sure what would constitute a warm and personal experience. They want to have the place all to themselves, but are put off by ... what exactly? A lack family photos? Or more "morbid" art that they also ended up hating? > Our rear-facing prewar one-bedroom, where the couch sagged and the shower was in the kitchen, was as silent as a padded cell. Here, the heat blasted unbidden, from which we escaped by opening the windows to winter’s coldest month. That first night, on the way to the corner store to get some food, we dodged mice scurrying between bags of trash. Back in the kitchen, Elaine fired up the stove by the bath towels, but when the pasta from the corner store hit the boiling water, a few little worms floated to the top. I skipped dinner that night. This adds color to their story, but doesn't say much about AirBNB - opening the windows to deal with winter heat and seeing rodents in the street is pretty standard for New York. What isn't standard is having an apartment that's "silent as a padded cell" - as far as I'm concerned, that should be listed as an amenity.

hackaflocka 11y ago
Haters gonna hate.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  The mediocre sentiments of someone who can only communicate via received aphorisms.
tedmiston 11y ago
> I'm not sure what would constitute a warm and personal experience. They want to have the place all to themselves, but are put off by ... what exactly? A lack family photos? Or more "morbid" art that they also ended up hating? It's not about having the place all to themselves. Having stayed in a handful of Airbnbs, I've found the distribution pretty bimodal too. There's a cold uncomfortableness to the commercial room run purely for business. Pardon my mildly overdramatic digression, but they feel like prison cells. Especially in contrast to the familiarity and personal touch when staying with a host that actually lives there, wants to have a conversation, and cares about people. While they may appreciate the extra income, I really believe these hosts share their rooms for the greater community experience.

11thEarlOfMar 11y ago

I'm glad to have read this, as I've had the same notion of living locally during world tours. I am curious about a couple of things... All of these experiences were in New York. How would it have been different in Athens, Tokyo, or Sydney, in terms of misrepresentation? Also, using average apartment cost to gauge the amount to spend on the AirBnb unit is probably not apples-to-apples (for similar reasons that a regular full time salary is likely going to be significantly less than a contractor rates for the same position). I would have used hotel rates instead, which would have been much higher than $100/night in New York. It might be that had they stayed in higher priced lodging, they'd have had a better experience.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
I'm not sure how much higher; when we first came here to visit, before moving, we stayed at Hotel Marakkech on the UWS - a great place, and looking at their booking page, their rates for all of January are under a hundred dollars (with the exception of New Year Eve's weekend, of course.) To be fair, the rooms are much smaller than a typical AirBNB, and it doesn't come with a kitchen.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  I wonder if you can even compare areas like that. There's enough of a difference between Sydney CBD and North Ryde that comparing them is difficult (even though hotel prices can be the same).

dotcoma 11y ago

Is this what they call "native advertising"?

taternuts 11y ago
It raises similar thoughts with me... mostly I guess because I don't think I've read such a positive AirBnB write-up before, especially around them responsibly handling landlord screw ups
- skrebe 11y ago
  same here. too good to be true. airbnb crisis?
msellout 11y ago
Unlikely, as it leads with negativity and a comment on how prevalent illegal rentals are.
ktamura 11y ago
No, at least not on NYT. On NYT, paid content/native ads are marked as such at the beginning of the article like this one: http://paidpost.nytimes.com/ca-technologies/apis-the-building-blocks-of-the-app-economy.html http://paidpost.nytimes.com/ca-technologies/apis-the-buildin... (Note the subdomain) I must say that a lot of "paid content" pieces are pretty good, considering that companies are paying money to place these articles.

Xyik 11y ago

I didn't learn much about AirB&B, but the insight into living in New York was interesting.

tedmiston 11y ago

> Frustrated with the stock of apartments in our price range, I started contacting hosts of more expensive places, up to triple our budget. I really admire the "hacking" of leveraging what you have (some money + a great story) to get what you want when you can't afford it in dollars.

bm1362 11y ago

I'm currently doing this in NYC with my brothers; it's been rather stressful living week to week. I've just started phone interviews with a few companies and it's quite irritating to schedule something only to arrive at an room with poor internet; or to move across town the night before.