4 ms·

This is not a problem. In my experience, professional landlords & managers offer clean, updated apartments that are a joy to check into and are a way better pla

by trevyn 9y ago

This is not a problem. In my experience, professional landlords & managers offer clean, updated apartments that are a joy to check into and are a way better place to stay than hotels. I love using Airbnb for specifically this reason. It seems like in Europe, professional short-term apartment rental is a common thing anyway -- Airbnb just serves as a centralized listing platform. This is less common in the US.

kohanz 9y ago
I agree that I don't really see what the problem is. Curious that AirBnB would deny it though. Does it hurt their brand?
- Symbiote 9y ago
  AirBnB market the idea that someone rents out a spare room/apartment for a couple of while they're on vacation. In general, this isn't something people would complain about. The reality, of professionals renting out multiple apartments for the whole year, is when the neighbours will complain: there's the noise of 50-100 people clunking their wheelie suitcases in and out, not knowing where to take their rubbish and leaving it in the stairwell, having a noisy party, etc. Plus, a feeling of reduced security when there are unfamiliar people in the building all the time.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
yalogin 9y ago
Isn’t that what a family owned hotel/inn is?
- trevyn 9y ago
  No, Airbnb typically lists actual, real everyday apartments, so you feel like you're living in the city like a local, not in a hotel. If you haven't tried it, it's a great feeling.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    On the other hand, if you're in the same building as an AirBnB rental, it may feel like a hotel. So, from me: please don't try it.
  - chii 9y ago
    That's not the real selling point of airbnb, but rather that it's much cheaper than hotels in a similar area.
nerdponx 9y ago
It is a problem because it abuses/avoids zoning laws and is generally disingenuous, making it hard to conduct public policy and regulate markets.
- trevyn 9y ago
  Ah, ok, so it's a problem for some people. It's a problem for me that regulation and zoning increases the cost of living. Now we're even. :-)
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    AFAIK, uncontrolled AirBnB usage is directly contributing to rising rents in SF and Toronto. It cuts both ways.
hendzen 9y ago
It's a problem for people looking for long term rentals as landlords can make more profit by listing a unit on AirBnB.
- trevyn 9y ago
  Is what the singularity feels like? Everything getting faster and faster, shorter and shorter term...
  - hendzen 9y ago
    No, that's what living in a bubble feels like.
- sisyphusprotege 9y ago
  That is definitely not always true, and I would say its only true in the minority of cases. To make more money renting short term than long term you have to be in a very desirable location in a town/city with a lot of tourist traffic, and you have to keep your labor and energy costs down ruthlessly. Most cleaning companies want $30 an hour. You need to pay $120 to do a turnover. Plus you need to buy many things and replace them regularly. And you need to pay for utilities. Unless you can book for high prices, at least $250 a night and more like $399 a night on weekends in season, and keep the calendar pretty full, its not worth it.
- idrios 9y ago
  My own personal anecdote: I moved to San Jose last year and could not find an affordable place to live long term. I got incredibly lucky finding a place on craigslist for $600/mo but discovered one month later that it was because the landlord was kicking everyone out in another 2 months so he could give the house to his mother. There was so much competition for places to live that I couldn't find another apartment for under $1000. I ended up moving to an Airbnb that was $25/d. At any time I was living with 6-12 other people, host included. 14 beds total -- 4 bedrooms with 1 or 2 bunkbeds in each room and the host's (and gf's) room with a double bed, which he would occasionally share with a guest. I would have never expected that to be a good experience and would not have signed up for long-term housing like that, but I actually loved it and stayed for a year. Point is, Airbnb lets you cram more people into a small living space than someone renting might be willing to do, so in big cities you can make the argument that though Airbnb reduces supply of housing, it also reduces demand for housing so there might be a total sum of more housing available
762236 9y ago
Although not a problem for people staying overnight, it is a problem for the people that live in the community, as it dilutes their community by taking housing units out of the rental market. The cities are popular for overnight stays because their communities made the cities attractive places. It is a negative feedback loop.
- trevyn 9y ago
  And industrialization diluted the agricultural way of life. The market will steamroll you one way or another.
  - 1_2__4 9y ago
    According to neoliberalism yes. The rest of us don't believe that markets are both the best and inevitable answer to every human endeavor. Some of us even believe in weird stuff like human rights and self governance.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      The real problem is those concerns are orthogonal. One should not think of the market as the best answer to every human endeavour - but it's also important to recognize just how powerful a force it is. Managing the market is hard - most of the time too hard for even most wealthy and powerful people.
    - Applejinx 9y ago
      Indeed, it's looking like we've got some experimental evidence that markets are a poor way to deal with some kinds of things. Plus, they're hardly inevitable: they're created by humans along with whatever rules and mechanisms they operate by, and they're administered by humans. What self-organizing features markets have are confined to a subset of what they functionally mean: they scale because they semi-efficiently find optimal answers through working on populations rather than centralized control. What does 'optimal' mean? That's sometimes in open conflict with the very rules we want to see honored. It's a neat hack, but horribly inappropriate to some aspects of life. And we get in real trouble when we start redefining everything in life circularly, as 'what is produced by markets is optimal'. Human extinction is an optimal market solution to some things, including maximization of capital as an abstract measure.
brandur 9y ago
I think it's stated quite clearly in the article, but although professional landlords might be fine for AirBnB tenants (and obviously good for the landlords themselves), they're bad for cities and their residents: > Berlin, like most German cities, is experiencing an acute shortage of affordable homes. Rents are rising at a rate of nearly 10 percent a year, even though the city has a rent cap and has introduced one of the strictest bans on holiday apartments - many other European cities also have some kind of regulation. The problem with housing is that the supply is very fixed. A unit that's taken off the market to become a full time AirBnB is one that's not available as a rental for a resident of the city anymore. There's an argument to be made for private property rights, but the further trouble with real estate is that it's often made as an investment, and like other capital, it tends to be reallocated disproportionately over time. While it might seem obvious for someone to be able to rent out their vacation home part time, it's much less so that an owner of 15 units in downtown San Francisco should be able to hire a property manager and rent them all on AirBnB full time — given a sufficiently enticing city for business/tourism, eventually there won't be enough stock for the locals anymore (or more accurately, the upwards pressure on price will make it unaffordable for nearly everyone).
- woah 9y ago
  Supply is very fixed? Most of the cities that you read about having a "rent crisis" also have a very aggressive contingent of anti-housing construction folks.
  - ricardobeat 9y ago
    And if you dig into the anti-housing discourse, you'll find there are also several good reasons for that.
    - Rjevski 9y ago
      Like what?
      - ricardobeat 9y ago

by trevyn 9y ago

kohanz 9y ago

I agree that I don't really see what the problem is. Curious that AirBnB would deny it though. Does it hurt their brand?

Symbiote 9y ago
AirBnB market the idea that someone rents out a spare room/apartment for a couple of while they're on vacation. In general, this isn't something people would complain about. The reality, of professionals renting out multiple apartments for the whole year, is when the neighbours will complain: there's the noise of 50-100 people clunking their wheelie suitcases in and out, not knowing where to take their rubbish and leaving it in the stairwell, having a noisy party, etc. Plus, a feeling of reduced security when there are unfamiliar people in the building all the time.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

yalogin 9y ago

Isn’t that what a family owned hotel/inn is?

trevyn 9y ago
No, Airbnb typically lists actual, real everyday apartments, so you feel like you're living in the city like a local, not in a hotel. If you haven't tried it, it's a great feeling.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  On the other hand, if you're in the same building as an AirBnB rental, it may feel like a hotel. So, from me: please don't try it.
- chii 9y ago
  That's not the real selling point of airbnb, but rather that it's much cheaper than hotels in a similar area.

nerdponx 9y ago

It is a problem because it abuses/avoids zoning laws and is generally disingenuous, making it hard to conduct public policy and regulate markets.

trevyn 9y ago
Ah, ok, so it's a problem for some people. It's a problem for me that regulation and zoning increases the cost of living. Now we're even. :-)
- nerdponx 9y ago
  AFAIK, uncontrolled AirBnB usage is directly contributing to rising rents in SF and Toronto. It cuts both ways.

hendzen 9y ago

It's a problem for people looking for long term rentals as landlords can make more profit by listing a unit on AirBnB.

trevyn 9y ago
Is what the singularity feels like? Everything getting faster and faster, shorter and shorter term...
- hendzen 9y ago
  No, that's what living in a bubble feels like.
sisyphusprotege 9y ago
That is definitely not always true, and I would say its only true in the minority of cases. To make more money renting short term than long term you have to be in a very desirable location in a town/city with a lot of tourist traffic, and you have to keep your labor and energy costs down ruthlessly. Most cleaning companies want $30 an hour. You need to pay $120 to do a turnover. Plus you need to buy many things and replace them regularly. And you need to pay for utilities. Unless you can book for high prices, at least $250 a night and more like $399 a night on weekends in season, and keep the calendar pretty full, its not worth it.
idrios 9y ago
My own personal anecdote: I moved to San Jose last year and could not find an affordable place to live long term. I got incredibly lucky finding a place on craigslist for $600/mo but discovered one month later that it was because the landlord was kicking everyone out in another 2 months so he could give the house to his mother. There was so much competition for places to live that I couldn't find another apartment for under $1000. I ended up moving to an Airbnb that was $25/d. At any time I was living with 6-12 other people, host included. 14 beds total -- 4 bedrooms with 1 or 2 bunkbeds in each room and the host's (and gf's) room with a double bed, which he would occasionally share with a guest. I would have never expected that to be a good experience and would not have signed up for long-term housing like that, but I actually loved it and stayed for a year. Point is, Airbnb lets you cram more people into a small living space than someone renting might be willing to do, so in big cities you can make the argument that though Airbnb reduces supply of housing, it also reduces demand for housing so there might be a total sum of more housing available

762236 9y ago

Although not a problem for people staying overnight, it is a problem for the people that live in the community, as it dilutes their community by taking housing units out of the rental market. The cities are popular for overnight stays because their communities made the cities attractive places. It is a negative feedback loop.

trevyn 9y ago
And industrialization diluted the agricultural way of life. The market will steamroll you one way or another.
- 1_2__4 9y ago
  According to neoliberalism yes. The rest of us don't believe that markets are both the best and inevitable answer to every human endeavor. Some of us even believe in weird stuff like human rights and self governance.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    The real problem is those concerns are orthogonal. One should not think of the market as the best answer to every human endeavour - but it's also important to recognize just how powerful a force it is. Managing the market is hard - most of the time too hard for even most wealthy and powerful people.
  - Applejinx 9y ago
    Indeed, it's looking like we've got some experimental evidence that markets are a poor way to deal with some kinds of things. Plus, they're hardly inevitable: they're created by humans along with whatever rules and mechanisms they operate by, and they're administered by humans. What self-organizing features markets have are confined to a subset of what they functionally mean: they scale because they semi-efficiently find optimal answers through working on populations rather than centralized control. What does 'optimal' mean? That's sometimes in open conflict with the very rules we want to see honored. It's a neat hack, but horribly inappropriate to some aspects of life. And we get in real trouble when we start redefining everything in life circularly, as 'what is produced by markets is optimal'. Human extinction is an optimal market solution to some things, including maximization of capital as an abstract measure.

brandur 9y ago

I think it's stated quite clearly in the article, but although professional landlords might be fine for AirBnB tenants (and obviously good for the landlords themselves), they're bad for cities and their residents: > Berlin, like most German cities, is experiencing an acute shortage of affordable homes. Rents are rising at a rate of nearly 10 percent a year, even though the city has a rent cap and has introduced one of the strictest bans on holiday apartments - many other European cities also have some kind of regulation. The problem with housing is that the supply is very fixed. A unit that's taken off the market to become a full time AirBnB is one that's not available as a rental for a resident of the city anymore. There's an argument to be made for private property rights, but the further trouble with real estate is that it's often made as an investment, and like other capital, it tends to be reallocated disproportionately over time. While it might seem obvious for someone to be able to rent out their vacation home part time, it's much less so that an owner of 15 units in downtown San Francisco should be able to hire a property manager and rent them all on AirBnB full time — given a sufficiently enticing city for business/tourism, eventually there won't be enough stock for the locals anymore (or more accurately, the upwards pressure on price will make it unaffordable for nearly everyone).

woah 9y ago
Supply is very fixed? Most of the cities that you read about having a "rent crisis" also have a very aggressive contingent of anti-housing construction folks.
- ricardobeat 9y ago
  And if you dig into the anti-housing discourse, you'll find there are also several good reasons for that.
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    Like what?
    - ricardobeat 9y ago