14 ms·

Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

245 points by w1ntermute 11y ago

timClicks 11y ago
As an outsider to the USA housing market (that seems to be very heavily regulated), could someone explain the significance of what is alleged here? More to the point, why are multi-listings of whole houses a bad thing?
- pmikesell 11y ago
  I think it's because it suggests that professional landlords / developers are using the platform to sidestep rent control laws, as opposed to regular people just renting out their homes while they are away on vacation.
  - brcs77 11y ago
    And so what if they are? Have them pay the proper taxes then. Win-win for the property owner and the city.
    - nommm-nommm 11y ago
      There is issues of locals being 'displaced' in places like NYC because it often is more profitable for landlords to rent on Airbnb rather than rent traditionally. The real big deal is tenants have lots of rights whereas transients do not, so it creates even more incentives to ditch the locals in favor of Airbnb guests. Then you can argue "why shouldn't NYC turn into a city of transients?" Which is probably more of a personal opinion if that is "wrong" or not. To the GP: The other thing to mention is in the US housing regulations are incredibly local so you're going to find a huge difference in different cities in how regulated rentals are. You will read online mostly about NYC of SF which have their unique problems.
    - calbear81 11y ago
      Zoning laws are not simply about taxes. What if your neighbor decided to open a nightclub out of his garage one day, would it be okay as long as they paid taxes? The externalities imposed have to be accounted for.
      - dalke 11y ago
        Nor is it only about zoning laws. A nightclub, or under-the-table hotel, will likely be subject to laws like the ADA, additional fire codes, health inspections, and more. These are tangential to paying taxes.
    - sdoering 11y ago
      So what? Let the strongest do as they please - very democratic, indeed. Just because you could tax them and the city might profit doesn't automatically invalidate the reasoning behind the current rules banning practices like this in the first place. Maybe the reasoning is flawed. OK - then prove it, lobby for a change, but not just do as you wish and ignore the current laws because they are in the way of your business model. This kind of disruptive thinking is a slippery slope imho. And I could argue lot's of evil with this line of thought.
      - brbrodude 11y ago
        I'm at a point where I've given up arguing, and maybe hoping, too. If anything history proves that the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Now as more and more democracy is eaten by monetary power I feel only what's left to do is to wait for the big shock.. It's sad to think that even when people dedicate their time pro-bono to building tools and information medium like this, at most what it does is moderate temporarilly the recklessness of one group at the expense of very limited resources of others(like the free-time, dedication, small-money that people make available for this kind of stuff) but while there's money to make in subverting it there'll always be incentive to push the way through and put much more money, time and resources into doing it, if someone call you out you can just tone it down a bit and start over another day, seems like there's no winning. I'm brasilian and understand the the judiciary of USA is stronger and faster than in other country, but even then still this logic prevails, for elsewhere and where I'm at.. eh, dreadful.
        conceit 11y ago
        > If anything history proves that the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must That's simply a truism, tautology, it's true by definition of the words used.
  - femto113 11y ago
    To expand on this somewhat, Airbnb likes to pretend their business is about the unregulated and largely legal practice of people renting out an extra room, or perhaps every once in a while their whole vacant home for a short period of time when they happen not to be home. What everyone suspects but struggles to prove without access to the data is that most of their business is people renting out apartments they don't live in but instead rent out full time. This potentially runs afoul of many laws, in some cities rent control rules may be the main issue, in others they may be considered an unlicensed hotel which could violate tax or zoning laws.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  (Note: not taking a position in this post, just describing both positions.) Many people unhappy with AirBnB want to portray AirBnB as primarily a means for large-scale commercial landlords to circumvent regulations on hotels, renting, or subletting; such a depiction makes it easier to argue for more regulation. A large number of people posting multiple "entire home" listings would lend support to that depiction. AirBnB wants to portray themselves as primarily letting individual people rent out their own property or rooms; such a depiction makes it easier to argue against existing or additional regulations. A large number of people posting only a single "entire home" listing, or listings of individual rooms in a home, would lend support to that depiction. The site linked here claims that AirBnB removed many "entire home" listings from their site right before producing a report, and that the removed listings disproportionately reduced the number of listings by people with more than one "entire home" listing. The linked site further claims that those removals only occurred in NYC, and the graph suggests that the proportion immediately started growing again after the removals and subsequent report.
  - kafkaesq 11y ago
    Such a depiction makes it easier to argue for more regulation. Or for existing regulations to be enforced. (There's no need to depict Airbnb skeptics as inherently "pro"-regulation, and instinctively wanting more of it).
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      I'd intended that to be a broad statement: "more regulation" can mean either additional regulations or broader interpretation/enforcement of existing regulations. Either approach has the effect that anti-AirBnB folks want to see AirBnB more regulated, and AirBnB and pro-AirBnB folks want to see AirBnB less regulated.
      - kafkaesq 11y ago
        Then there's people who just want existing regulations to be enforced in their current scope. Which, BTW, isn't an "anti"-AirBnB position at all.
joering2 11y ago
hmm, the company who break thru by deceptive practice of craiglist's advertising of apartments to rent that never existed in the first place (but redirected to their website), with the owner who has been on top most wanted FBI list for being a top spammer in the USA... gee this news is really shocking! I mean.. how could they??
andrewclunn 11y ago
To be fair, the fact that this was a New York City only thing could relate to NYC's particular subletting issues and housing laws.
- rubidium 11y ago
  To be fair, any company intentionally changing it's database before a public "snapshot" in order to gain public favor (and avoid possible litigation) is worth calling out as dishonest. So it's not really about NYC, it's about Airbnb.
zzleeper 11y ago
Devils advocate: Suppose your stats are biased by a % of bad listings (fake, bad, etc.) that violate some rule. Would you want to include them in your numbers? If having the correct statistics (i.e. excluding these bad listings) was important for regulatory or marketing purposes, then fixing this before the report is part of the fiduciary duty of the firm with its shareholders, so no surprise here.
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  Note that this article is a reply to the statements made by Airbnb at [1]. Specifically claiming "95% of our entire home hosts share only one listing" when this is true only because you modified those listing days previously (to remove said multi-home listings) can't be chalked-up to naive data clean-up. You present no evidence that the purged data wasn't listings that previous made money for Airbnb - there's no evidence it was "bad" in any way except making them look bad and the chart in the article seems to show it was corrected only so long as they needed to look good. [1] https://www.airbnbaction.com/data-on-the-airbnb-community-in-nyc/ https://www.airbnbaction.com/data-on-the-airbnb-community-in...
- meowface 11y ago
  My thoughts, too. Though the question is why haven't they removed these earlier? Were they waiting to do it? Or was this just a result of incompetence followed by a panicked response?
  - ars 11y ago
    Could be it never mattered before, because no one was looking, and now someone is looking.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
      > Could be it never mattered before If people could rent these properties before they were removed, how could it not matter?
    - meowface 11y ago
owlmonkey 11y ago
The implication is that people are illegally listing multiple properties that they own or rent, but this analysis doesn't rule out the cases where someone hires a professional property manager to list their place on AirBnB while they're on vacation or away. That property manager will have multiple "whole home" listings but there's nothing illegal about it. But we shouldn't expect an unbiased analysis from a site like insideairbnb.com, which is a partisan anti-airbnb advocacy project.
- jzwinck 11y ago
  A huge number of rental tenants in NYC are not legally able to sublet. Hiring someone else to do it does not absolve them.
  - JohnTHaller 11y ago
    Even if your lease allowed you to sublet, the short term whole apartment rentals when the owner is not present that Airbnb does are illegal in NY anyway. The only way to do that legally is to have a bed and breakfast license from the state. Next time you look for an Airbnb in NYC, see if that's mentioned in the listing.
  - ComteDeLaFere 11y ago
    My building in a popular area of NYC does not allow sublet, and specifically calls out AirBnB as well. Given that, I would estimate 15-20% of the units in the building are now full-time AirBnB rentals. The suspicion I've had in the back of my head, that AirBnB "businesses" are driving up rents, is gaining momentum.
dang 11y ago
That title puts a pretty heavy spin on the story, so we changed it to a factual, representative sentence from the article. If someone suggests a better title, we can change it again.
- Marazan 11y ago
  "AirBnB caught facilitating wide scale illegal activity"?
  - dang 11y ago
    That seems to suffer from the same problem as the original title.
- huhtenberg 11y ago
  Erm... so what happened to the much-touted policy of always keeping the original title? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466
  - tptacek 11y ago
    That's not the policy. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20misleading%20or%20linkbait&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20misleading%20or%...
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > We do sometimes change titles from the original when the original title is egregious linkbait, or false.
- rubidium 11y ago
  The source title was good: "How Airbnb's Data hid the Facts in New York City". This is a damning article for AirBnB and they need to respond. Let's not try to hide it.
  - 11y ago
erdojo 11y ago
This report would seem more damning if the authors had at least attempted to keep their bias out of it. I found it significantly less credible because of it. I kept wondering what info they weren't sharing in their rush to paint Airbnb as liars and cheats. Or if their own data, which has no external validation either, is true. Someone also made a good point here regarding Airbnb's motives. It is entirely feasible that Airbnb did a cleanup of bad/illegal listings before submitting data for government scrutiny.
- uxp 11y ago
  I mostly agree. A site called insideairbnb.com that is clearly not affiliated with the company looks to be simply a muckraker blog about AirBnB. But, the data does not lie. If they purged somewhere around half of all Full Home listings to make their export look like there were very few landlords that listed multiple properties, then they are manipulating data. One does not "clean up" data to be submitted to the government without providing an explanation for that purge.
- Riod 11y ago
  If they cared they would have done it long ago. They chose to make money off those listings instead
tazjin 11y ago
It's interesting that the word "photoshopped" is being used for this kind of manipulation as well.
- gedrap 11y ago
  I found it fairly odd as well, then checked the domain, insideairbnb.com, what the hell? Sounds like some corporate blog domain. But no, it's not. Tiny yet frustrating detail.
- Steuard 11y ago
  I took it as a humorous(?) play on the dual meanings of the word "snapshot". What originated as a term for a quick photograph[0] evolved to have a metaphorical meaning of "a record of something as it existed at a single moment". So using "photoshop" in this way is just a cute way of extending the metaphor (while borrowing some of the dishonest connotations of photoshopping as well). [0] Or evidently earlier as a term for a quick, roughly aimed shot from a gun. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=snapshot http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=snapshot
- thefrostytruth 11y ago
  It's just bad writing. It muddies their actual meaning, and an unfortunate metaphor that gets in the way--does more to confuse than illuminate. These guys are onto something big, but they're not great at presenting it.
  - sosborn 11y ago
    And before you know it the word is redefined in Merriam Webster. Literally.
    - thefrostytruth 11y ago
      For every "literally" there's a "really." http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the_word_we_love_to_hate.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the... http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.h...
JohnTHaller 11y ago
Given the way Airbnb portrays the average middle class family renting out a single room in their home and cooking dinner for their "guests" in their advertising in NYC while deriving most of their revenue from illegal whole-apartment-without-the-owner-present rentals... is this really a surprise?

245 points by w1ntermute 11y ago

As an outsider to the USA housing market (that seems to be very heavily regulated), could someone explain the significance of what is alleged here? More to the point, why are multi-listings of whole houses a bad thing?

pmikesell 11y ago
I think it's because it suggests that professional landlords / developers are using the platform to sidestep rent control laws, as opposed to regular people just renting out their homes while they are away on vacation.
- brcs77 11y ago
  And so what if they are? Have them pay the proper taxes then. Win-win for the property owner and the city.
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    There is issues of locals being 'displaced' in places like NYC because it often is more profitable for landlords to rent on Airbnb rather than rent traditionally. The real big deal is tenants have lots of rights whereas transients do not, so it creates even more incentives to ditch the locals in favor of Airbnb guests. Then you can argue "why shouldn't NYC turn into a city of transients?" Which is probably more of a personal opinion if that is "wrong" or not. To the GP: The other thing to mention is in the US housing regulations are incredibly local so you're going to find a huge difference in different cities in how regulated rentals are. You will read online mostly about NYC of SF which have their unique problems.
  - calbear81 11y ago
    Zoning laws are not simply about taxes. What if your neighbor decided to open a nightclub out of his garage one day, would it be okay as long as they paid taxes? The externalities imposed have to be accounted for.
    - dalke 11y ago
      Nor is it only about zoning laws. A nightclub, or under-the-table hotel, will likely be subject to laws like the ADA, additional fire codes, health inspections, and more. These are tangential to paying taxes.
  - sdoering 11y ago
    So what? Let the strongest do as they please - very democratic, indeed. Just because you could tax them and the city might profit doesn't automatically invalidate the reasoning behind the current rules banning practices like this in the first place. Maybe the reasoning is flawed. OK - then prove it, lobby for a change, but not just do as you wish and ignore the current laws because they are in the way of your business model. This kind of disruptive thinking is a slippery slope imho. And I could argue lot's of evil with this line of thought.
    - brbrodude 11y ago
      I'm at a point where I've given up arguing, and maybe hoping, too. If anything history proves that the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Now as more and more democracy is eaten by monetary power I feel only what's left to do is to wait for the big shock.. It's sad to think that even when people dedicate their time pro-bono to building tools and information medium like this, at most what it does is moderate temporarilly the recklessness of one group at the expense of very limited resources of others(like the free-time, dedication, small-money that people make available for this kind of stuff) but while there's money to make in subverting it there'll always be incentive to push the way through and put much more money, time and resources into doing it, if someone call you out you can just tone it down a bit and start over another day, seems like there's no winning. I'm brasilian and understand the the judiciary of USA is stronger and faster than in other country, but even then still this logic prevails, for elsewhere and where I'm at.. eh, dreadful.
      - conceit 11y ago
        > If anything history proves that the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must That's simply a truism, tautology, it's true by definition of the words used.
- femto113 11y ago
  To expand on this somewhat, Airbnb likes to pretend their business is about the unregulated and largely legal practice of people renting out an extra room, or perhaps every once in a while their whole vacant home for a short period of time when they happen not to be home. What everyone suspects but struggles to prove without access to the data is that most of their business is people renting out apartments they don't live in but instead rent out full time. This potentially runs afoul of many laws, in some cities rent control rules may be the main issue, in others they may be considered an unlicensed hotel which could violate tax or zoning laws.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
(Note: not taking a position in this post, just describing both positions.) Many people unhappy with AirBnB want to portray AirBnB as primarily a means for large-scale commercial landlords to circumvent regulations on hotels, renting, or subletting; such a depiction makes it easier to argue for more regulation. A large number of people posting multiple "entire home" listings would lend support to that depiction. AirBnB wants to portray themselves as primarily letting individual people rent out their own property or rooms; such a depiction makes it easier to argue against existing or additional regulations. A large number of people posting only a single "entire home" listing, or listings of individual rooms in a home, would lend support to that depiction. The site linked here claims that AirBnB removed many "entire home" listings from their site right before producing a report, and that the removed listings disproportionately reduced the number of listings by people with more than one "entire home" listing. The linked site further claims that those removals only occurred in NYC, and the graph suggests that the proportion immediately started growing again after the removals and subsequent report.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  Such a depiction makes it easier to argue for more regulation. Or for existing regulations to be enforced. (There's no need to depict Airbnb skeptics as inherently "pro"-regulation, and instinctively wanting more of it).
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    I'd intended that to be a broad statement: "more regulation" can mean either additional regulations or broader interpretation/enforcement of existing regulations. Either approach has the effect that anti-AirBnB folks want to see AirBnB more regulated, and AirBnB and pro-AirBnB folks want to see AirBnB less regulated.
    - kafkaesq 11y ago
      Then there's people who just want existing regulations to be enforced in their current scope. Which, BTW, isn't an "anti"-AirBnB position at all.

joering2 11y ago

hmm, the company who break thru by deceptive practice of craiglist's advertising of apartments to rent that never existed in the first place (but redirected to their website), with the owner who has been on top most wanted FBI list for being a top spammer in the USA... gee this news is really shocking! I mean.. how could they??

andrewclunn 11y ago

To be fair, the fact that this was a New York City only thing could relate to NYC's particular subletting issues and housing laws.

rubidium 11y ago
To be fair, any company intentionally changing it's database before a public "snapshot" in order to gain public favor (and avoid possible litigation) is worth calling out as dishonest. So it's not really about NYC, it's about Airbnb.

zzleeper 11y ago

Devils advocate: Suppose your stats are biased by a % of bad listings (fake, bad, etc.) that violate some rule. Would you want to include them in your numbers? If having the correct statistics (i.e. excluding these bad listings) was important for regulatory or marketing purposes, then fixing this before the report is part of the fiduciary duty of the firm with its shareholders, so no surprise here.

joe_the_user 11y ago
Note that this article is a reply to the statements made by Airbnb at [1]. Specifically claiming "95% of our entire home hosts share only one listing" when this is true only because you modified those listing days previously (to remove said multi-home listings) can't be chalked-up to naive data clean-up. You present no evidence that the purged data wasn't listings that previous made money for Airbnb - there's no evidence it was "bad" in any way except making them look bad and the chart in the article seems to show it was corrected only so long as they needed to look good. [1] https://www.airbnbaction.com/data-on-the-airbnb-community-in-nyc/ https://www.airbnbaction.com/data-on-the-airbnb-community-in...
meowface 11y ago
My thoughts, too. Though the question is why haven't they removed these earlier? Were they waiting to do it? Or was this just a result of incompetence followed by a panicked response?
- ars 11y ago
  Could be it never mattered before, because no one was looking, and now someone is looking.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
    > Could be it never mattered before If people could rent these properties before they were removed, how could it not matter?
  - meowface 11y ago

owlmonkey 11y ago

The implication is that people are illegally listing multiple properties that they own or rent, but this analysis doesn't rule out the cases where someone hires a professional property manager to list their place on AirBnB while they're on vacation or away. That property manager will have multiple "whole home" listings but there's nothing illegal about it. But we shouldn't expect an unbiased analysis from a site like insideairbnb.com, which is a partisan anti-airbnb advocacy project.

jzwinck 11y ago
A huge number of rental tenants in NYC are not legally able to sublet. Hiring someone else to do it does not absolve them.
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  Even if your lease allowed you to sublet, the short term whole apartment rentals when the owner is not present that Airbnb does are illegal in NY anyway. The only way to do that legally is to have a bed and breakfast license from the state. Next time you look for an Airbnb in NYC, see if that's mentioned in the listing.
- ComteDeLaFere 11y ago
  My building in a popular area of NYC does not allow sublet, and specifically calls out AirBnB as well. Given that, I would estimate 15-20% of the units in the building are now full-time AirBnB rentals. The suspicion I've had in the back of my head, that AirBnB "businesses" are driving up rents, is gaining momentum.

dang 11y ago

That title puts a pretty heavy spin on the story, so we changed it to a factual, representative sentence from the article. If someone suggests a better title, we can change it again.

Marazan 11y ago
"AirBnB caught facilitating wide scale illegal activity"?
- dang 11y ago
  That seems to suffer from the same problem as the original title.
huhtenberg 11y ago
Erm... so what happened to the much-touted policy of always keeping the original title? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466
- tptacek 11y ago
  That's not the policy. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20misleading%20or%20linkbait&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20misleading%20or%...
- DanBC 11y ago
  > We do sometimes change titles from the original when the original title is egregious linkbait, or false.
rubidium 11y ago
The source title was good: "How Airbnb's Data hid the Facts in New York City". This is a damning article for AirBnB and they need to respond. Let's not try to hide it.
- 11y ago

erdojo 11y ago

This report would seem more damning if the authors had at least attempted to keep their bias out of it. I found it significantly less credible because of it. I kept wondering what info they weren't sharing in their rush to paint Airbnb as liars and cheats. Or if their own data, which has no external validation either, is true. Someone also made a good point here regarding Airbnb's motives. It is entirely feasible that Airbnb did a cleanup of bad/illegal listings before submitting data for government scrutiny.

uxp 11y ago
I mostly agree. A site called insideairbnb.com that is clearly not affiliated with the company looks to be simply a muckraker blog about AirBnB. But, the data does not lie. If they purged somewhere around half of all Full Home listings to make their export look like there were very few landlords that listed multiple properties, then they are manipulating data. One does not "clean up" data to be submitted to the government without providing an explanation for that purge.
Riod 11y ago
If they cared they would have done it long ago. They chose to make money off those listings instead

tazjin 11y ago

It's interesting that the word "photoshopped" is being used for this kind of manipulation as well.

gedrap 11y ago
I found it fairly odd as well, then checked the domain, insideairbnb.com, what the hell? Sounds like some corporate blog domain. But no, it's not. Tiny yet frustrating detail.
Steuard 11y ago
I took it as a humorous(?) play on the dual meanings of the word "snapshot". What originated as a term for a quick photograph[0] evolved to have a metaphorical meaning of "a record of something as it existed at a single moment". So using "photoshop" in this way is just a cute way of extending the metaphor (while borrowing some of the dishonest connotations of photoshopping as well). [0] Or evidently earlier as a term for a quick, roughly aimed shot from a gun. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=snapshot http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=snapshot
thefrostytruth 11y ago
It's just bad writing. It muddies their actual meaning, and an unfortunate metaphor that gets in the way--does more to confuse than illuminate. These guys are onto something big, but they're not great at presenting it.
- sosborn 11y ago
  And before you know it the word is redefined in Merriam Webster. Literally.
  - thefrostytruth 11y ago
    For every "literally" there's a "really." http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the_word_we_love_to_hate.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the... http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.h...

JohnTHaller 11y ago

Given the way Airbnb portrays the average middle class family renting out a single room in their home and cooking dinner for their "guests" in their advertising in NYC while deriving most of their revenue from illegal whole-apartment-without-the-owner-present rentals... is this really a surprise?