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Senator Elizabeth Warren joins call for Airbnb probe

35 points by Jerry2 10y ago

SmellTheGlove 10y ago
While I'd agree that services like AirBNB could use some light regulation, I'm always concerned that this becomes about protecting the lodging industry. I'd really rather it not get to the point where we're restricting individuals from renting out their home, and I'd wonder how much you can really regulate that without stepping all over property rights. This seems like a fishing expedition.
- awesomerobot 10y ago
  I tend to disagree. Boston is one of the most expensive cities in the US to live in right now — we have a low housing inventory at the moment, and it's incredibly frustrating to see someone buy a property with cash, develop it, and then essentially use it as an unsanctioned hotel. There are AirBNB slumlords out there. AirBNB seems intended to give homeowners flexibility to rent out some space, but when that model starts shifting to developers creating what are essentially unregulated and unzoned hotels it creates a situation that sucks for potential homeowners and neighborhoods alike. You can suddenly have a neighbor or a apartment in the same building become a revolving door for strangers who don't care about the community, who are giving money to landlords who simply aren't present. I think in this case some light regulation can make a big difference and give more power back to smaller home/property owners.
  - bpodgursky 10y ago
    The impact on housing prices is trivial compared to the ridiculous under-supply of hotels in most major cities. To the point where it has priced-out the ability of anyone under the upper-middle class from visiting most major cities as tourists. How is a middle class family supposed to pay $400/night to rent a room in NY? Being able to travel shouldn't be artificially priced at a point where hotels are a crushing expense; visiting NYC isn't just for the 1%. You're just playing along with the hotel cartel here.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - rexaliquid 10y ago
      AirBnB is great when you can co-locate a household and a rental room. A permanent resident that rents their spare spacetime is an increase in efficiency. The problem is when landlords terminate leases to convert to full-time AirBnB properties. That isn't efficient, it's adding another hotel to the 'cartel'.
      - davidw 10y ago
        The answer to that is to dump enough supply on to the market that it no longer becomes as profitable to do that.
    - JonFish85 10y ago
      "hotel cartel here." I really don't think hotels are the ones truly at fault here. The way Airbnb competes on price is mostly due to not having to pay for things that hotels have to. The cities & states themselves are the ones who decide what sort of insurance hotels have to have, what sort of zoning rules apply, taxes to levy, rules that they have to follow. Taxes are very high on hotel stays, generally. And this is usually because it's easier for someone to raise "other people's" taxes rather than their own (e.g. tax the out-of-towners). People seem to claim things like how "hotels legislate a moat" all the time, but ultimately I really don't think it's the hotels, it's the town/city/state and the citizens thereof that have decided what they want to legislate. And that's inconvenient for a startup looking to "disrupt" things, but I find it quite scummy.
      - yellow_postit 10y ago
        Maybe at some % of occupancy an AirBnB stops being spare space and becomes more hotel-like and needs to start collecting the same types of taxes, providing insurance, etc.
        JonFish85 10y ago
  - orasis 10y ago
    In the long term, if you want lower prices, you must increase supply. To increase supply, allow profits to increase. Increased profits provides increased motivation to increase supply. Cities where people line up to make offers on houses sounds a lot like Venezuela where people are lining up for the grocery stores. The lines in Venezuela are due to price controls which reduce profits thus reducing supply.
    - ppereira 10y ago
      To increase supply, increase height limits, reduce setbacks, and get rid of zoning regulations that have nothing to do with health and safety.
      - orasis 10y ago
        Yes and ultimately limiting height and heavy regulations limit profits which limits investment.
    - spenczar5 10y ago
      It's not the same thing: people line up at grocery stores because they _need_ food to survive. If you restricted Airbnb, you'd be dampening the supply of hotels and the demand for real estate. When the demand for real estate goes down, its price will go down. The price of hotels would be expected to go up, but I think we can live with that, as its a far more elastic good than housing.
      - __jal 10y ago
        It is hard for me to imagine any notable impact on property prices even by eliminating every AirBnB rental tonight. I'd love to see people making this claim cite some numbers. Just how many residences are being "diverted" from your preferred use, and where did you get that number? Citing handwavey econ 101 principles is no more convincing when done here than it is, say, in the minimum wage debate.
  - hx87 10y ago
    > we have a low housing inventory at the moment That is the underlying problem though--you can't even build old school (but up to date code- and safety-wise) triple deckers anymore in large sections of the city and the surrounding towns, even though they are often the best compromise between retaining town character and providing a good supply of housing.
    - vkou 10y ago
      Yes, but current landowners will never repeal these zoning restrictions. Given the constraints of the problem, cracking down on illegal short-term rentals is the only knob that can be tweaked.
      - hx87 10y ago
        If zoning repeal is impossible due to entrenched landowner interests, why would cracking down on AirBnB succeed in the face of entrenched landowner interests?
        vkou 10y ago
        Most landowners don't rent their apartments out on AirBnB. In fact, most of them probably don't want their neighbors to be making money running an AirBnB.
  - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
    I think we agree. I said I was in favor of light regulation, I just don't want to step on an individual wanting to rent out their home. It's hard to draw bright lines from a legal perspective on what's OK and what isn't, and we need to think about that for sure. For instance, let's say I get an out of town job offer. I think it'd be fine for me to rent my place out on AirBNB by the week, especially since I live close to the beach. I'd have management headaches from weekly turnover versus just getting a long term tenant, but that's on me. But where's the line? If I bought the houses next door and did the same, that's probably less OK. But the key is light regulation, not protection of the lodging industry for its own sake. If your goal is to keep housing affordable, you need more housing. Going after AirBNB (barring those running large hotel-like operations) isn't addressing the supply issue.
    - brandonmenc 10y ago
      > It's hard to draw bright lines from a legal perspective on what's OK and what isn't Not really. If a community wants to ban Airbnb rentals and rewrites their zoning laws as such, the resulting line is clear. It's only a gray area because the laws haven't caught up with the fact that Airbnb exists.
      - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
        Is it, though? Do you just blanket ban AirBNB rentals in the area? Define that. Do you really mean short term rentals? Web-listed short term rentals? What's short term? Then, consider who you're impacting - this is local so they're your constituents, after all. Enforcement is a whole other matter. Try this: Define your objective, then draft the statute. EDIT: I'll add, I own exactly one home and have never rented it out by any means. I don't have a stake in this fight, but I am interested in the legal aspects.
        brandonmenc 10y ago
        The goal would be to catch people who buy a house, don't live in it, and continuously rent it on Airbnb. i.e., they are operating an unlicensed rental property, which is already often illegal. Is it hard to stop people from occasionally renting their house on Airbnb? Sure, and you'd have a hard time writing that into law because it would be difficult to differentiate between someone who Airbnb's their house one week a year and someone who lets a friend stay at their place. But it would be pretty easy to prove in court that the guy who owns the house next door doesn't actually live in it (this is probably key to enforcement), and has listed it on Airbnb a hundred times this year. Maybe a lawyer or judge can chime in, but it seems like this would be provable in court.
  - johnrob 10y ago
    I think we're all taking this too far: > Boston is one of the most expensive cities in the US to live in right now That's the real problem, and should be the focus. Short term renting is just a detail. Inventory is the solution.
    - theorique 10y ago
      Boston is building like crazy. So the inventory problem is getting solved, to some extent. Part of the challenge is that almost all of the new inventory is at the upper end of the market: studio apartments at $3000, and going up from there.
    - awesomerobot 10y ago
      Inventory is the solution, but you can tie-off the wound a bit until it heals
  - davidw 10y ago
    If there's a demand for housing with a specific use in mind, the solution is to add to the total supply of housing, rather than try and regulate everything. Regulate for safety, and genuine nuisance (rather than OMG I saw a person I don't know!), by all means. Add taxes if needs be, but add more housing if there's a market for it!
  - vvanders 10y ago
    I tend to agree. We stayed at an Airbnb only to have PSGE show up the second day to turn off the power since the owner hadn't paid the power bill in 3 months. It took 4 different calls/people to find out who the actual owner of the property was. I'm all for someone letting out their room/house but this put us in quite a scramble.
  - oky 10y ago
    "You can suddenly have a neighbor or a apartment in the same building become a revolving door for strangers who don't care about the community, who are giving money to landlords who simply aren't present." i currently live in an apartment with two full time airbnb units (out of 6); the two units are over-occupied (each advertising 16 guests in what should be a 2 or 3 person apartment). the airbnb host has an agreement with the landlord, where they pay the landlord an extra 30%/40% a month per unit and get to run their airbnb. none of the neighbors particularly like the airbnb units or the guests and our building is now known as the "airbnb building" on our block. i've talked to the landlord (who is mostly absentee), the host (who runs 5 airbnbs) and to airbnb (through their official channels) and no one will budge (on lowering the number of guests) or concede that living next to a full time airbnb with 16 guests is terrible. in the future, i will not live / rent a property that is being managed solely as an investment / way to earn money for the landlord and will pay special attention to any airbnbs nearby before moving in. aside from the noise and usual complaints you'd expect from having an airbnb as a neighbor, one particular side effect is that it reduces the neighborhood social-ness (compared to the previous places i've lived). our living space is actually more closed off because there is a steady stream of large groups of strangers in our building.
    - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
      You may have other recourse. Many local governments restrict the number of unrelated occupants in a housing unit based on size, number of bedrooms, etc. to prevent exactly this. It's a big fire safety concern in addition to being a burden on neighbors. In any case, review your local regs.
- Tiktaalik 10y ago
  Independent of the existence of the hotel industry I think there's a reasonable concern about the conversion of residential use to commercial use and the resulting impacts that has on surrounding residential property valuations, rental vacancy, city tax revenue and other things. I'm less concerned about someone occasionally renting out their home and doing what they want with their own property, and more so interested in the impacts of investors purchasing residential property to use exclusively as part of a larger commercial short term operation.
- SilasX 10y ago
  Depends on what counts as "protecting the lodging industry". There are deliberate, long-instated taxes and regulations on it, usually as a means to capture, for the government, some of the surplus value generated by tourism. It's especially popular because of the (relatively correct) belief that the taxes are borne by non-residents. [2] It's eminently understandable why governments would want all providers of lodging to play by the same rules[1] so that people can't circumvent such "tourism taxes". There are likewise considerations of zoning/deed restrictions/HOAs/condo boards to think about. You generally do not have the (legal, and usually moral) right to run arbitrary businesses in "your" unit. There are things that people expect out of their home unit's community, and which they all deliberately accepted as a condition, like "not having a major stream of randos going in and out". Communities also generally have an interest in regulating the percentage and location of buildings for permanent residents vs visitors. Generally speaking, permanents take better care of the surroundings, albeit at a "cost" of paying less for the space per unit time, and there's a quick ramp-up in social ills and livability problems when you let the ratios go out whack, or concentrate the visitors in areas not prepared for them. To the extent that Airbnb is breaking that whole model, it's reasononable to either throttle it or research ways that they can share in the burden they're bringing on without losing the upside. [1] modulo scale, of course -- it's fair to expect some exemption for sporadic, one-off arrangements, and it's fair for Airbnb to facilitate that [2] I say "relatively" because the economic incidence will never be fully on visitors, but will partially be shared by the lodging industry, in having to charge less to remain competitive with other destinations.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I'd really rather it not get to the point where we're restricting individuals from renting out their home "Get to the point"? In many of the cities AirBnB operates, that was the legal status quo long before AirBnB existed (or, at least, short-term rentals had all kinds of regulations that people usually wouldn't meet renting out a home, and still don't when renting them out on AirBnB.)
whatnotests 10y ago
FTA: "The letter, led by Schatz (D-Hawaii), was also signed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)." Hawaii - a state which is basically owned by the Hawaiian Tourism Authority. Feinstein - make your own judgement there. I don't see this going in a great direction.
- djschnei 10y ago
  Nah, they def only want to help the little.
jswny 10y ago
Sounds like they are worried about a large-scale disruption to the lodging industry similar to what Uber did/is doing in the taxi industry.
- jaboutboul 10y ago
  You mean they are worried about PROGRESS and INNOVATION in the lodging industry which gives consumers choice and funnels money away from the people who pay the lobbyists who pay them.
  - Alupis 10y ago
    > PROGRESS and INNOVATION Well, we need to be fair here. Simply because something is different, it's not automatically "progress" nor "innovation". The lodging industry has quite a lot of regulations, put into place to protect the consumer. Airbnb kind of currently operates all on their own. You have no guarantee that you're sleeping in clean sheets, you have no guarantee that carbon monoxide detectors are working, etc. Of course simply because regulations exist doesn't mean every lodging provider adheres to them the same - but it does provide recourse if caught. Applying the same regulations to Airbnb seems to be a net win for everyone involved (except Airbnb themselves).
    - ultramancool 10y ago
      > (except Airbnb themselves). And the sellers on AirBnB who don't want to deal with the complicated mess that will cause. And the buyers on AirBnB who don't want to pay the prices that dealing with that mess will cause.
      - Alupis 10y ago
        > And the sellers on AirBnB who don't want to deal with the complicated mess that will cause If you cannot guarantee clean sheets, working smoke detectors, potable water... then you really should not be offering your house as a place to stay.
DominikR 10y ago
It's not about protecting some industry, it is about the fact that people have an income with Airbnb that often isn't declared. Where ever there is money made, the government wants a cut. If it creates too much overhead because of too many small fish where it's hard to track them it will usually be outlawed.
toss1 10y ago
Of course the immediate Zeitgeist of the comments here is that this is about protection of entrenched interests and quashing of innovation. Sure, there may be some of that. However, we in the tech community need to recognize that doing something at scale creates a fundamental difference of kind, not merely of quantity. Of course, to a large degree, that is the point of much modern tech, to take something that was simply local word-of-mouth stuff ("oh, my friend's got an apartment empty next month, perhaps you two can work out house-sitting for your visit" or "oh, she needs a ride to town too") and turning it into an instant service, globally scaled. This is what creates $billions of value with minimal infrastructure. However, it is nonsense to say that there are no negative externalities, or that they are all trivial and ignore-able, or merely old incumbents protecting their ill-gotten economic territory. Consider another potential technology that could be easily scaled -- speeding tickets. Instead of relying on the local cop to manually measure your speed, chase you down, write a ticket and testify in court, they could simply get the data off your smartphone and ticket you ever time you sent over-speed. They could just argue that "this is just the same law as we've always had". But the result would be that instead of maybe one ticket every X+ years, most of us would get multiple tickets every time we drove outside of a traffic jam. It would fundamentally change everything about driving and the related economy. Similarly, it's one thing when a few people casually rent out a room for a few days a year, or get a house-sitter when they go on vacation. But, it is altogether different when the information exchange infrastructure becomes sufficiently reliable and networked that it makes sense for people to run lodging as a business, even buying houses just for that purpose. This substantially distorts the real estate market, and dumps a lot of externalities on neighbors. It is one thing to buy a house or condo on the assumption that the neighbors are all residents with investment in the neighborhood/building -- quite another to expect that all of the people around you are completely transient. And, of course, even worse when the situation changes after you've moved in. So, please think a bit before jumping on the "they're all ignorant Luddites" bandwagon... (edit - grammar/clarity)
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  > Of course the immediate Zeitgeist of the comments here is that this is about protection of entrenched interests and quashing of innovation. > So, think before jumping on the "they're all ignorant Luddites" bandwagon... The immediate reaction being to protect entrenched interests has nothing to do with the "ignorant Luddites" as far as I'm concerned. I'm thinking more, when was the last time a Federal regulator probed something in order to actually benefit the little guy? AirBNB by its nature creates very local issues. I think the appropriate place to look and regulate is at the local level. Towns and residents can take it upon themselves to restrict unwanted activities or they can choose not to, based on the impacts to their communities. Going bigger than that with anything more than light regulation would promote a one size fits all approach, which wouldn't work considering towns and cities are very different from one another.
brandonmenc 10y ago
A municipality should be able to amend their zoning laws if they don't want Airbnb operating there, correct? An FTC investigation into the effect of Airbnb on local economies is fine, but I hope it doesn't result in one-size-fits-all federal regulation.
loudin 10y ago
Hold on - a lot of these comments here are assuming that this probe will result in more regulation for AirBnb, but according to the article, it seems like these senators are only calling for the FTC to study the impact companies like AirBnB have on the short-term rental market and the housing market. How is this a bad thing? Isn't gathering more data better than not having this data?
eric_h 10y ago
OT, but holy god that website is awful. I loaded it in a background tab and 5 minutes later that tab's process was up to 10GB of ram, and I have an ad blocker and flash disabled.
pbhowmic 10y ago
The headline is really at odds with the article itself. A probe would look into evidence of wrongdoing. The article is talking about data gathering on the impact of services such as AirBnB.

35 points by Jerry2 10y ago

While I'd agree that services like AirBNB could use some light regulation, I'm always concerned that this becomes about protecting the lodging industry. I'd really rather it not get to the point where we're restricting individuals from renting out their home, and I'd wonder how much you can really regulate that without stepping all over property rights. This seems like a fishing expedition.

awesomerobot 10y ago
I tend to disagree. Boston is one of the most expensive cities in the US to live in right now — we have a low housing inventory at the moment, and it's incredibly frustrating to see someone buy a property with cash, develop it, and then essentially use it as an unsanctioned hotel. There are AirBNB slumlords out there. AirBNB seems intended to give homeowners flexibility to rent out some space, but when that model starts shifting to developers creating what are essentially unregulated and unzoned hotels it creates a situation that sucks for potential homeowners and neighborhoods alike. You can suddenly have a neighbor or a apartment in the same building become a revolving door for strangers who don't care about the community, who are giving money to landlords who simply aren't present. I think in this case some light regulation can make a big difference and give more power back to smaller home/property owners.
- bpodgursky 10y ago
  The impact on housing prices is trivial compared to the ridiculous under-supply of hotels in most major cities. To the point where it has priced-out the ability of anyone under the upper-middle class from visiting most major cities as tourists. How is a middle class family supposed to pay $400/night to rent a room in NY? Being able to travel shouldn't be artificially priced at a point where hotels are a crushing expense; visiting NYC isn't just for the 1%. You're just playing along with the hotel cartel here.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rexaliquid 10y ago
    AirBnB is great when you can co-locate a household and a rental room. A permanent resident that rents their spare spacetime is an increase in efficiency. The problem is when landlords terminate leases to convert to full-time AirBnB properties. That isn't efficient, it's adding another hotel to the 'cartel'.
    - davidw 10y ago
      The answer to that is to dump enough supply on to the market that it no longer becomes as profitable to do that.
  - JonFish85 10y ago
    "hotel cartel here." I really don't think hotels are the ones truly at fault here. The way Airbnb competes on price is mostly due to not having to pay for things that hotels have to. The cities & states themselves are the ones who decide what sort of insurance hotels have to have, what sort of zoning rules apply, taxes to levy, rules that they have to follow. Taxes are very high on hotel stays, generally. And this is usually because it's easier for someone to raise "other people's" taxes rather than their own (e.g. tax the out-of-towners). People seem to claim things like how "hotels legislate a moat" all the time, but ultimately I really don't think it's the hotels, it's the town/city/state and the citizens thereof that have decided what they want to legislate. And that's inconvenient for a startup looking to "disrupt" things, but I find it quite scummy.
    - yellow_postit 10y ago
      Maybe at some % of occupancy an AirBnB stops being spare space and becomes more hotel-like and needs to start collecting the same types of taxes, providing insurance, etc.
      - JonFish85 10y ago
- orasis 10y ago
  In the long term, if you want lower prices, you must increase supply. To increase supply, allow profits to increase. Increased profits provides increased motivation to increase supply. Cities where people line up to make offers on houses sounds a lot like Venezuela where people are lining up for the grocery stores. The lines in Venezuela are due to price controls which reduce profits thus reducing supply.
  - ppereira 10y ago
    To increase supply, increase height limits, reduce setbacks, and get rid of zoning regulations that have nothing to do with health and safety.
    - orasis 10y ago
      Yes and ultimately limiting height and heavy regulations limit profits which limits investment.
  - spenczar5 10y ago
    It's not the same thing: people line up at grocery stores because they _need_ food to survive. If you restricted Airbnb, you'd be dampening the supply of hotels and the demand for real estate. When the demand for real estate goes down, its price will go down. The price of hotels would be expected to go up, but I think we can live with that, as its a far more elastic good than housing.
    - __jal 10y ago
      It is hard for me to imagine any notable impact on property prices even by eliminating every AirBnB rental tonight. I'd love to see people making this claim cite some numbers. Just how many residences are being "diverted" from your preferred use, and where did you get that number? Citing handwavey econ 101 principles is no more convincing when done here than it is, say, in the minimum wage debate.
- hx87 10y ago
  > we have a low housing inventory at the moment That is the underlying problem though--you can't even build old school (but up to date code- and safety-wise) triple deckers anymore in large sections of the city and the surrounding towns, even though they are often the best compromise between retaining town character and providing a good supply of housing.
  - vkou 10y ago
    Yes, but current landowners will never repeal these zoning restrictions. Given the constraints of the problem, cracking down on illegal short-term rentals is the only knob that can be tweaked.
    - hx87 10y ago
      If zoning repeal is impossible due to entrenched landowner interests, why would cracking down on AirBnB succeed in the face of entrenched landowner interests?
      - vkou 10y ago
        Most landowners don't rent their apartments out on AirBnB. In fact, most of them probably don't want their neighbors to be making money running an AirBnB.
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  I think we agree. I said I was in favor of light regulation, I just don't want to step on an individual wanting to rent out their home. It's hard to draw bright lines from a legal perspective on what's OK and what isn't, and we need to think about that for sure. For instance, let's say I get an out of town job offer. I think it'd be fine for me to rent my place out on AirBNB by the week, especially since I live close to the beach. I'd have management headaches from weekly turnover versus just getting a long term tenant, but that's on me. But where's the line? If I bought the houses next door and did the same, that's probably less OK. But the key is light regulation, not protection of the lodging industry for its own sake. If your goal is to keep housing affordable, you need more housing. Going after AirBNB (barring those running large hotel-like operations) isn't addressing the supply issue.
  - brandonmenc 10y ago
    > It's hard to draw bright lines from a legal perspective on what's OK and what isn't Not really. If a community wants to ban Airbnb rentals and rewrites their zoning laws as such, the resulting line is clear. It's only a gray area because the laws haven't caught up with the fact that Airbnb exists.
    - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
      Is it, though? Do you just blanket ban AirBNB rentals in the area? Define that. Do you really mean short term rentals? Web-listed short term rentals? What's short term? Then, consider who you're impacting - this is local so they're your constituents, after all. Enforcement is a whole other matter. Try this: Define your objective, then draft the statute. EDIT: I'll add, I own exactly one home and have never rented it out by any means. I don't have a stake in this fight, but I am interested in the legal aspects.
      - brandonmenc 10y ago
        The goal would be to catch people who buy a house, don't live in it, and continuously rent it on Airbnb. i.e., they are operating an unlicensed rental property, which is already often illegal. Is it hard to stop people from occasionally renting their house on Airbnb? Sure, and you'd have a hard time writing that into law because it would be difficult to differentiate between someone who Airbnb's their house one week a year and someone who lets a friend stay at their place. But it would be pretty easy to prove in court that the guy who owns the house next door doesn't actually live in it (this is probably key to enforcement), and has listed it on Airbnb a hundred times this year. Maybe a lawyer or judge can chime in, but it seems like this would be provable in court.
- johnrob 10y ago
  I think we're all taking this too far: > Boston is one of the most expensive cities in the US to live in right now That's the real problem, and should be the focus. Short term renting is just a detail. Inventory is the solution.
  - theorique 10y ago
    Boston is building like crazy. So the inventory problem is getting solved, to some extent. Part of the challenge is that almost all of the new inventory is at the upper end of the market: studio apartments at $3000, and going up from there.
  - awesomerobot 10y ago
    Inventory is the solution, but you can tie-off the wound a bit until it heals
- davidw 10y ago
  If there's a demand for housing with a specific use in mind, the solution is to add to the total supply of housing, rather than try and regulate everything. Regulate for safety, and genuine nuisance (rather than OMG I saw a person I don't know!), by all means. Add taxes if needs be, but add more housing if there's a market for it!
- vvanders 10y ago
  I tend to agree. We stayed at an Airbnb only to have PSGE show up the second day to turn off the power since the owner hadn't paid the power bill in 3 months. It took 4 different calls/people to find out who the actual owner of the property was. I'm all for someone letting out their room/house but this put us in quite a scramble.
- oky 10y ago
  "You can suddenly have a neighbor or a apartment in the same building become a revolving door for strangers who don't care about the community, who are giving money to landlords who simply aren't present." i currently live in an apartment with two full time airbnb units (out of 6); the two units are over-occupied (each advertising 16 guests in what should be a 2 or 3 person apartment). the airbnb host has an agreement with the landlord, where they pay the landlord an extra 30%/40% a month per unit and get to run their airbnb. none of the neighbors particularly like the airbnb units or the guests and our building is now known as the "airbnb building" on our block. i've talked to the landlord (who is mostly absentee), the host (who runs 5 airbnbs) and to airbnb (through their official channels) and no one will budge (on lowering the number of guests) or concede that living next to a full time airbnb with 16 guests is terrible. in the future, i will not live / rent a property that is being managed solely as an investment / way to earn money for the landlord and will pay special attention to any airbnbs nearby before moving in. aside from the noise and usual complaints you'd expect from having an airbnb as a neighbor, one particular side effect is that it reduces the neighborhood social-ness (compared to the previous places i've lived). our living space is actually more closed off because there is a steady stream of large groups of strangers in our building.
  - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
    You may have other recourse. Many local governments restrict the number of unrelated occupants in a housing unit based on size, number of bedrooms, etc. to prevent exactly this. It's a big fire safety concern in addition to being a burden on neighbors. In any case, review your local regs.
Tiktaalik 10y ago
Independent of the existence of the hotel industry I think there's a reasonable concern about the conversion of residential use to commercial use and the resulting impacts that has on surrounding residential property valuations, rental vacancy, city tax revenue and other things. I'm less concerned about someone occasionally renting out their home and doing what they want with their own property, and more so interested in the impacts of investors purchasing residential property to use exclusively as part of a larger commercial short term operation.
SilasX 10y ago
Depends on what counts as "protecting the lodging industry". There are deliberate, long-instated taxes and regulations on it, usually as a means to capture, for the government, some of the surplus value generated by tourism. It's especially popular because of the (relatively correct) belief that the taxes are borne by non-residents. [2] It's eminently understandable why governments would want all providers of lodging to play by the same rules[1] so that people can't circumvent such "tourism taxes". There are likewise considerations of zoning/deed restrictions/HOAs/condo boards to think about. You generally do not have the (legal, and usually moral) right to run arbitrary businesses in "your" unit. There are things that people expect out of their home unit's community, and which they all deliberately accepted as a condition, like "not having a major stream of randos going in and out". Communities also generally have an interest in regulating the percentage and location of buildings for permanent residents vs visitors. Generally speaking, permanents take better care of the surroundings, albeit at a "cost" of paying less for the space per unit time, and there's a quick ramp-up in social ills and livability problems when you let the ratios go out whack, or concentrate the visitors in areas not prepared for them. To the extent that Airbnb is breaking that whole model, it's reasononable to either throttle it or research ways that they can share in the burden they're bringing on without losing the upside. [1] modulo scale, of course -- it's fair to expect some exemption for sporadic, one-off arrangements, and it's fair for Airbnb to facilitate that [2] I say "relatively" because the economic incidence will never be fully on visitors, but will partially be shared by the lodging industry, in having to charge less to remain competitive with other destinations.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> I'd really rather it not get to the point where we're restricting individuals from renting out their home "Get to the point"? In many of the cities AirBnB operates, that was the legal status quo long before AirBnB existed (or, at least, short-term rentals had all kinds of regulations that people usually wouldn't meet renting out a home, and still don't when renting them out on AirBnB.)

whatnotests 10y ago

FTA: "The letter, led by Schatz (D-Hawaii), was also signed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)." Hawaii - a state which is basically owned by the Hawaiian Tourism Authority. Feinstein - make your own judgement there. I don't see this going in a great direction.

djschnei 10y ago
Nah, they def only want to help the little.

jswny 10y ago

Sounds like they are worried about a large-scale disruption to the lodging industry similar to what Uber did/is doing in the taxi industry.

jaboutboul 10y ago
You mean they are worried about PROGRESS and INNOVATION in the lodging industry which gives consumers choice and funnels money away from the people who pay the lobbyists who pay them.
- Alupis 10y ago
  > PROGRESS and INNOVATION Well, we need to be fair here. Simply because something is different, it's not automatically "progress" nor "innovation". The lodging industry has quite a lot of regulations, put into place to protect the consumer. Airbnb kind of currently operates all on their own. You have no guarantee that you're sleeping in clean sheets, you have no guarantee that carbon monoxide detectors are working, etc. Of course simply because regulations exist doesn't mean every lodging provider adheres to them the same - but it does provide recourse if caught. Applying the same regulations to Airbnb seems to be a net win for everyone involved (except Airbnb themselves).
  - ultramancool 10y ago
    > (except Airbnb themselves). And the sellers on AirBnB who don't want to deal with the complicated mess that will cause. And the buyers on AirBnB who don't want to pay the prices that dealing with that mess will cause.
    - Alupis 10y ago
      > And the sellers on AirBnB who don't want to deal with the complicated mess that will cause If you cannot guarantee clean sheets, working smoke detectors, potable water... then you really should not be offering your house as a place to stay.

DominikR 10y ago

It's not about protecting some industry, it is about the fact that people have an income with Airbnb that often isn't declared. Where ever there is money made, the government wants a cut. If it creates too much overhead because of too many small fish where it's hard to track them it will usually be outlawed.

toss1 10y ago

Of course the immediate Zeitgeist of the comments here is that this is about protection of entrenched interests and quashing of innovation. Sure, there may be some of that. However, we in the tech community need to recognize that doing something at scale creates a fundamental difference of kind, not merely of quantity. Of course, to a large degree, that is the point of much modern tech, to take something that was simply local word-of-mouth stuff ("oh, my friend's got an apartment empty next month, perhaps you two can work out house-sitting for your visit" or "oh, she needs a ride to town too") and turning it into an instant service, globally scaled. This is what creates $billions of value with minimal infrastructure. However, it is nonsense to say that there are no negative externalities, or that they are all trivial and ignore-able, or merely old incumbents protecting their ill-gotten economic territory. Consider another potential technology that could be easily scaled -- speeding tickets. Instead of relying on the local cop to manually measure your speed, chase you down, write a ticket and testify in court, they could simply get the data off your smartphone and ticket you ever time you sent over-speed. They could just argue that "this is just the same law as we've always had". But the result would be that instead of maybe one ticket every X+ years, most of us would get multiple tickets every time we drove outside of a traffic jam. It would fundamentally change everything about driving and the related economy. Similarly, it's one thing when a few people casually rent out a room for a few days a year, or get a house-sitter when they go on vacation. But, it is altogether different when the information exchange infrastructure becomes sufficiently reliable and networked that it makes sense for people to run lodging as a business, even buying houses just for that purpose. This substantially distorts the real estate market, and dumps a lot of externalities on neighbors. It is one thing to buy a house or condo on the assumption that the neighbors are all residents with investment in the neighborhood/building -- quite another to expect that all of the people around you are completely transient. And, of course, even worse when the situation changes after you've moved in. So, please think a bit before jumping on the "they're all ignorant Luddites" bandwagon... (edit - grammar/clarity)

SmellTheGlove 10y ago
> Of course the immediate Zeitgeist of the comments here is that this is about protection of entrenched interests and quashing of innovation. > So, think before jumping on the "they're all ignorant Luddites" bandwagon... The immediate reaction being to protect entrenched interests has nothing to do with the "ignorant Luddites" as far as I'm concerned. I'm thinking more, when was the last time a Federal regulator probed something in order to actually benefit the little guy? AirBNB by its nature creates very local issues. I think the appropriate place to look and regulate is at the local level. Towns and residents can take it upon themselves to restrict unwanted activities or they can choose not to, based on the impacts to their communities. Going bigger than that with anything more than light regulation would promote a one size fits all approach, which wouldn't work considering towns and cities are very different from one another.

brandonmenc 10y ago

A municipality should be able to amend their zoning laws if they don't want Airbnb operating there, correct? An FTC investigation into the effect of Airbnb on local economies is fine, but I hope it doesn't result in one-size-fits-all federal regulation.

loudin 10y ago

Hold on - a lot of these comments here are assuming that this probe will result in more regulation for AirBnb, but according to the article, it seems like these senators are only calling for the FTC to study the impact companies like AirBnB have on the short-term rental market and the housing market. How is this a bad thing? Isn't gathering more data better than not having this data?

eric_h 10y ago

OT, but holy god that website is awful. I loaded it in a background tab and 5 minutes later that tab's process was up to 10GB of ram, and I have an ad blocker and flash disabled.

pbhowmic 10y ago

The headline is really at odds with the article itself. A probe would look into evidence of wrongdoing. The article is talking about data gathering on the impact of services such as AirBnB.