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Because it's almost impossible to purchase a house if you live and work in a large city now. Airbnb "hosts" use their ever growing stream of reverse mortgages

• Hedepig 4y ago
  Do you think this is an primarily caused by Airbnb?
  • lifeformed 4y ago
    It's not the only cause but a significant one.
  • comprev 4y ago
    It will be interesting to see what happens in Amsterdam over the next few years since they clamped down hard on AirBnB. Hosts now have to be officially registered with the city. AirBnB lost something like 90% of their hosts overnight!
    • Gareth321 4y ago
      Many major cities are clamping down hard. Mayors and politicians are under much more pressure from locals to stop their cities turning into, well, Amsterdam. Tourism is fine, but it has increasingly come at the cost of locals.
      • jfk13 4y ago
        > Tourism is fine Well... a moderate amount of tourism is fine, even beneficial; but excessive tourism in any given location becomes a blight. Airbnb has contributed to that, by facilitating short-term profits for "hosts" and the company and ignoring the negative impact.
        • bombcar 4y ago
          Tourism that overwhelms the location turns it into a tourist trap; whatever it had before becomes a veneer over the main industry, which will be tourism. In some places this is incredibly visible (think Las Vegas Strip vs Las Vegas) but you can also see it in many famous tourist destinations. Of course, large cities like Tokyo are quite resistant to tourism, just because of how big they are - certain areas and attractions may be tourist heavy but the city is still Tokyo.
  • lultimouomo 4y ago
    I live in a city that is a major tourist destination worldwide. Tourism has always been a blessing and a curse; shops always suffered a pressure to become tourist oriented; some big buildings were converted to hotels. With AirBnB the problem has expanded massively. I cannot find a 3-room office that is not miles away from the city center because everything that size is an AirBnB. An employee I just hired that moved here from a different city has been forced to live for months in an AirBnB because there are no long term rentals in the city (ah!). Since every wall-confined space can be an AirBnB, every wall-confined space becomes one. The lack of regulation makes a real difference, compared to shop and hotels.
    • renewiltord 4y ago
      Never heard of a landlord who’d rather have a string of short term rentals than one continuous long term rental unless there’s some renter protection law that makes you an effective permanent tenant. Just rent through Airbnb and then talk to the guy about a normal lease. If you want, text me where you are, I’ll put up $10k for a bet and then if I can find you a 3 room office, you give me $10k. If I can’t, I’ll give you $10k. Gotta be anglophone, though and none of this long-term rent controlled shit because no one wants to get locked into that. My French is atrocious and my German worse and I can’t speak anything else. EDIT: Fine, fuck it, give me a year to learn the Spanish and up the bet to $100k and I’ll do it. I find very often that things that are impossible for others are easy for me. But list your conditions up front here. I think I could manage anyhow.
      • spaniard89277 4y ago
        You never heard of it, but there are plenty in Spain. I don't live in a tourist city but I go ofter to Madrid and Barcelona and it's a serious problem there. It's not the primary source of the housing problem, but it definitey contributes to it.
      • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        >Never heard of a landlord who’d rather have a string of short term rentals than one continuous long term rental unless there’s some renter protection law that makes you an effective permanent tenant. or unless you can make significantly more money as a short term rental. Also if you can theoretically hide your earnings (although I guess you can't most places anymore) also, I believe most EU countries have some form of renter protection laws.
  • corford 4y ago
    In tourist heavy cities like Barcelona and Lisbon, yes. I've seen it first hand.
  • devmor 4y ago
    No, property management companies already did this to a limited extent - but airbnb has made it easy enough that it has reached a critical mass level resulting in home prices spiraling out of control to the point that homes are now relisted 6 months later at even 100% markup or greater. The problem here in Atlanta is so bad that the core city has now banned airbnb without an explicit permit. We are hoping that gets adopted across the metro area.
• JCharante 4y ago
  That's just if you live in a city with bad zoning policies or in cultures that hate high rises.
• dan-robertson 4y ago
  It seems like Airbnb is an easy scapegoat to use for the actual problem of not enough houses existing/being built. Another scapegoat is ‘foreign investors’ but I think this also isn’t true. In the US I think the people willing to make cash offers for houses in expensive cities are often the rich people who live there. There are also companies that will advance you the cash so that you can make a cash offer before going through the whole mortgage process, which seems a bit silly but if these companies exist then some people making cash offers must also be regularish wealthy home buyers who will use regular mortgages.
  • fartcannon 4y ago
    It's a symptom of viewing homes as investment properties. Building more just dilutes the value of their investments. Heavily tax or ban owning mulitple homes and watch as cities suddenly become affordable again.