5 ms·

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 touri

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.
  - gampleman 4y ago
    For illustration, where I am you can make up 1 month of long term rent in about 5 nights of Airbnb. The rest of the month is just pure profit.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    Well, at that point, it's that old HN adage: there's no shortage; you just refuse to pay enough. There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      well that adage is normally applied to employees under the naive assumption that you can pass the costs onto your customer (assumption generally made because you are looking for an employee because you have projects to finish with customers that pay for those projects), but when finding a place to live if you are middle class and not able to afford to live in the area it does not follow that a reasonable solution would be that you pay money that you do not possess and what, pass it on to your boss in the morning by saying 'guess what, you gotta give me a raise now!' >There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals. oh yeah, right the cost under discussion is $15 a month, forgot about that. I thought it was that the cost to rent an apartment in lots of areas took up such an exorbitant amount of a monthly income that natives to the area could not afford to do it.
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  This isn’t a Vegas poker table. Making prop bets for more money than a lot of people here can make in a year is rather uncouth.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure the claims are overstated so I'd want some skin in the game. I'd have to go learn conversational Spanish / able to read local cultural cues / travel there so that's going to cost me time. Reading it back, it does sound kind of gauche, but I'm pretty sure the stated issue is a non-problem. Like I said, people have lots of trouble getting things done and I find that the things are not that hard.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Here in a coastal south spain city, the rule is pretty much this: weekly short term rental price in summer = monthly rental price for long term resident. So if you rent for 12 weeks between late may and end of september you already make as much money than having a rental resident, and can still rent more expensively than a short term resident. For example owners typically rent a lot to tourists during the hottest months and in autumn/winter/fall a lot of digital nomad are filling the gap. They also usually have done the math and can swallow the higher rent than a local would. Having said that, I don't want to be an owner here. Administration is horrible but basically everyone you will meet are either lazy or want to defraud you in some way and they have absolutely no sense of quality work. A friend of mine is renovating a small house all by himself because he got fed up by the locals. Maybe the end result won't be , but here the pros won't give you professionnal quality job anyway so at least he won't feel screwed.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Short term rentals can have significant advantages over long term - for example, it's painless to "evict" a short term renter in almost every jurisdiction, but once it passes 30 or 90 days in some areas it becomes a multi-month process.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Oh, boy... go take a look at Greece more touristy spots. It's more profitable to keep the house closed for 8 months in the year and only rent in the season. It's much harder to avoid reporting income from normal lease, while with AirBNB you can just "forget" to report it, or even easier, just offer a small discount if they pay cash.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  In cities like NY, you can easily make more in a week of renting out your apartment via AirBnb than you would in a month via a traditional lease. I've seen entire floors of apartment buildings being converted into AirBnb flop houses. People will convert every room, besides bathrooms, in a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment into separate AirBnb rooms. Instead of renting an entire 1 bedroom apartment to one person, you can easily stick 3+ people in there as an AirBnb setup.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Yep, i live in a country with massive housing issues in our cities (well... like most other countries), and banning airbnb is mentioned a couple of times a week now in mainstream media. And if the large cities are a problem, there still are some new building projects done here, if you want to massively overpay an apartment,... the rural areas near tourist areas are even worse... 20km from the mountains and 20km from the seaside, almost nothing new is being built ("preserving the heritage" ... after being a communust country for 50 years, and most of the "heritage" was built in the 1970s in 80s), and anything already built being sold is massively overpriced (literally not worth it unless you're lending it out via airbnb). I'm usually against banning stuff, but if airbnb was banned, it would be a good thing. Tourist belong in hotels, hostels, etc. and apartment buildings are for people who actually live there. And lets not forget the additional problems airbnb brings to an otherwise residential apartment building (parties (=noise), drunk tourists, destroyed shared property, etc.).
- illiac786 4y ago
  I think banning airbnb outright is not a good idea. They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there, because otherwise it's not worth it. Might be a pain to control across multiple renting platforms, but it's possible and if you catch a couple of persons and condemn them to high fines, this will make the rounds and other short term renters will stop.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    > They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there… This! As a user of Airbnb when traveling, I've found that renting "real" homes has been a superior experience. They actually have sensible furniture and decorations. They also tend to have common-sense items available, like plungers next to toilets.

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.
- gampleman 4y ago
  For illustration, where I am you can make up 1 month of long term rent in about 5 nights of Airbnb. The rest of the month is just pure profit.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Well, at that point, it's that old HN adage: there's no shortage; you just refuse to pay enough. There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    well that adage is normally applied to employees under the naive assumption that you can pass the costs onto your customer (assumption generally made because you are looking for an employee because you have projects to finish with customers that pay for those projects), but when finding a place to live if you are middle class and not able to afford to live in the area it does not follow that a reasonable solution would be that you pay money that you do not possess and what, pass it on to your boss in the morning by saying 'guess what, you gotta give me a raise now!' >There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals. oh yeah, right the cost under discussion is $15 a month, forgot about that. I thought it was that the cost to rent an apartment in lots of areas took up such an exorbitant amount of a monthly income that natives to the area could not afford to do it.
the_lonely_road 4y ago
This isn’t a Vegas poker table. Making prop bets for more money than a lot of people here can make in a year is rather uncouth.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure the claims are overstated so I'd want some skin in the game. I'd have to go learn conversational Spanish / able to read local cultural cues / travel there so that's going to cost me time. Reading it back, it does sound kind of gauche, but I'm pretty sure the stated issue is a non-problem. Like I said, people have lots of trouble getting things done and I find that the things are not that hard.
prmoustache 4y ago
Here in a coastal south spain city, the rule is pretty much this: weekly short term rental price in summer = monthly rental price for long term resident. So if you rent for 12 weeks between late may and end of september you already make as much money than having a rental resident, and can still rent more expensively than a short term resident. For example owners typically rent a lot to tourists during the hottest months and in autumn/winter/fall a lot of digital nomad are filling the gap. They also usually have done the math and can swallow the higher rent than a local would. Having said that, I don't want to be an owner here. Administration is horrible but basically everyone you will meet are either lazy or want to defraud you in some way and they have absolutely no sense of quality work. A friend of mine is renovating a small house all by himself because he got fed up by the locals. Maybe the end result won't be , but here the pros won't give you professionnal quality job anyway so at least he won't feel screwed.
bombcar 4y ago
Short term rentals can have significant advantages over long term - for example, it's painless to "evict" a short term renter in almost every jurisdiction, but once it passes 30 or 90 days in some areas it becomes a multi-month process.
rglullis 4y ago
Oh, boy... go take a look at Greece more touristy spots. It's more profitable to keep the house closed for 8 months in the year and only rent in the season. It's much harder to avoid reporting income from normal lease, while with AirBNB you can just "forget" to report it, or even easier, just offer a small discount if they pay cash.
heavyset_go 4y ago
In cities like NY, you can easily make more in a week of renting out your apartment via AirBnb than you would in a month via a traditional lease. I've seen entire floors of apartment buildings being converted into AirBnb flop houses. People will convert every room, besides bathrooms, in a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment into separate AirBnb rooms. Instead of renting an entire 1 bedroom apartment to one person, you can easily stick 3+ people in there as an AirBnb setup.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

Yep, i live in a country with massive housing issues in our cities (well... like most other countries), and banning airbnb is mentioned a couple of times a week now in mainstream media. And if the large cities are a problem, there still are some new building projects done here, if you want to massively overpay an apartment,... the rural areas near tourist areas are even worse... 20km from the mountains and 20km from the seaside, almost nothing new is being built ("preserving the heritage" ... after being a communust country for 50 years, and most of the "heritage" was built in the 1970s in 80s), and anything already built being sold is massively overpriced (literally not worth it unless you're lending it out via airbnb). I'm usually against banning stuff, but if airbnb was banned, it would be a good thing. Tourist belong in hotels, hostels, etc. and apartment buildings are for people who actually live there. And lets not forget the additional problems airbnb brings to an otherwise residential apartment building (parties (=noise), drunk tourists, destroyed shared property, etc.).

illiac786 4y ago
I think banning airbnb outright is not a good idea. They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there, because otherwise it's not worth it. Might be a pain to control across multiple renting platforms, but it's possible and if you catch a couple of persons and condemn them to high fines, this will make the rounds and other short term renters will stop.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  > They should limit the number of days per year a place can be rented, simple. Then you only rent if it's really your home and you're not there… This! As a user of Airbnb when traveling, I've found that renting "real" homes has been a superior experience. They actually have sensible furniture and decorations. They also tend to have common-sense items available, like plungers next to toilets.