9 ms·

Legalize Airbnb

49 points by impendia 14y ago

mibbitier 14y ago
> "But letting people stay temporarily in unoccupied rooms or houses is the opposite of harmful" Until some of those guests get murdered, raped, videocammed in the shower, have their possessions stolen, etc etc etc. We have regulation on this type of thing for a reason. Allowing anyone to just suddenly decide they are now a hotel, is a recipe for disaster.
- replicatorblog 14y ago
  I think that is the first response most people have, but they've booked something like 5MM nights with no adverse events like you've described. Also, VBRO and Homeaway are both older companies with similar business models and neither has had a huge PR disaster like you describe.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    While I'm not aware of anything happening to the guests, I think that people should be wary before they open their home to Internet strangers. See: http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travelers-lost-faith-difficult.html http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travele...
    - koide 14y ago
      The more things you do with strangers of any kind, the higher the risk of both harm and wonderful encounters. That, attached to the fact that most people is not crazy or evil, would give you the right path to pick.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    > I think that is the first response most people have, but they've booked something like 5MM nights with no adverse events like you've described. You apparently missed last year's PR debacle after someone had folks demolish her apartment to build a meth lab. Airbnb initially refused to pay up. http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/0803/Airbnb-apologizes-after-member-robbery-PR-debacle http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/0803/Airbnb-apologize...
- mustpax 14y ago
  I've first hand experienced bait and switch scams, thieving cleaning staff, and made up fees in cheap hotels from around the world. NYC hotels are particularly bad offenders even though they are thoroughly regulated. If anything an AirBnB host infinitely more trackable and accountable than a hotel you book directly or through an oblivious intermediary (travel agent). Not to mention the countless minimum wage staff working for these hotels that are also much harder to thoroughly vet and trust individually than a single host. Just because something is more familiar (hotels) doesn't mean it's safer.
  - mibbitier 14y ago
    I'm more likely to buy a new iPod from a reputable, regulated shop, from a random guy on eBay/craigslist. You're talking about small individual regulated hotels, which obviously would be a bit hit and miss with regard to quality/safety, just like buying an iPod from a small shop called the "eyeStore" is going to entail more risk than buying it from Apple or BestBuy etc.
  - adgar 14y ago
    Ah, the "Republican" argument: If regulation is so great, why hasn't it been perfect? Clearly the solution is less regulation.
    - mustpax 14y ago
      I'm not making any blanket statements about regulation, I'm simply stating that in this particular case the safeguards provided to guests by the structure of AirBnB's business are superior to those provided by municipal hotel operation regulations. If you'd care to address this point directly I'm all ears.
- ed209 14y ago
  People get murdered in hotels [1] and raped in hotels [2] and no doubt have things stolen. We should really judge this on the data and see if the incidence of crime is higher in Airbnb cases. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-18333584 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-18333584 [2] http://portsmouth-nh.patch.com/articles/woman-raped-in-hotel-room http://portsmouth-nh.patch.com/articles/woman-raped-in-hotel...
- chollida1 14y ago
  Another issue is fire/damage and house insurance in general. In my old house we had a legal rental suite. OUr home insurance went way up when we told them we had a tenant. We thought about not mentioning this, until it was pointed out that if a fire was started by the tenant and the insurance company found out there was a tenant then we'd get nothing. And insurance companies are very good about finding out things like this.
mapleoin 14y ago
One thing that has always puzzled me about AirBNB is that there's no mention anywhere about taxes. All this money changing hands without being taxed sure seems weird. Renters usually pay taxes for the rent they get, shouldn't people doing this on AirBNB do the same?
- thatjoshguy 14y ago
  When it comes tax time, isn't it the individuals responsibility to report all their income?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pcopley 14y ago
  This is no different. The onus is on the person renting out their property/room to declare rental income and remit the appropriate taxes. On a side note, it breaks my heart to read "all this money changing hands without being taxed sure seems weird."
  - untog 14y ago
    On a side note, it breaks my heart to read "all this money changing hands without being taxed sure seems weird." Why? Because you don't like taxes on money changing hands? That debate aside, it doesn't matter- taxes are due, they should be paid.
    - cglace 14y ago
      Do you report All the items you bought online and that you didn't pay state sales tax on? You are supposed to.
      - Symmetry 14y ago
        On my state income tax form there's an "add this small amount to your taxes and we won't care about you buying normal stuff online" box, which I check each year. So sort of.
jpeg_hero 14y ago
Great, allow my neighbors in my shared hallway apartment to rent out their rooms to strangers on the Internet. Glad I am not a single female.
- yen223 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure your neighbours can already rent out their rooms to strangers on the Internet.
  - jasonlotito 14y ago
    Actually, more likely they cannot. Most renters contracts I've seen explicitly forbid this.
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      >Most renters contracts I've seen explicitly forbid this. "Can't" and "contractually prohibited from" are two different things...
    - toomuchtodo 14y ago
      "Heh look! Craigslist still takes my ad for my spare room even though my lease says I can't do this!"
      - rprasad 14y ago
        "Hey look! My landlord just evicted me for leasing out my spare room in violation of my lease!" There is nothing stopping you from putting an ad on Craiglist. However, if you violate the terms of your lease, you can get evicted. Moreover, these sorts of violations are usually not covered by tenant protection laws, so you would not be entitled to the normal eviction procedure protections.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Yeah course renters are only renting in the hope that they can go rape the neighbor. Seriously, stop with the sexism already.
seiji 14y ago
What if we continue this trend of just doing technically illegal things on a massive scale? New sites we can make: food2u - browse local bored people with kitchens and have them make then deliver food to you; movr - rent (unlicensed, uninsured) people with large vehicles to transport your stuff; qwikcut - find people who cut hair at home; friendzzzz (four Z's) - substitute someone bored instead of a licensed home care nurse; bugoot - find people with excess bugspray to treat your residence; talkerr - find a non-licensed person to share your problems with instead of a school'd therapist. I wouldn't be surprised if half of those are billion dollar companies waiting to happen.
- roc 14y ago
  > "What if we continue this trend of just doing technically illegal things on a massive scale?" Judging from history: the wronged-customer stories will pile up until the public demands some form of regulation. Keep in mind that the laws that make airbnb illegal, are the ones that were created as a reaction to business operating in the prior regulation-free environments. Building codes and fire safety regulations exist as a result of a history of preventably-tragic fires and building failures. Food safety regulations exist as a result of a litany of preventable food-borne illnesses, ingredient fraud, etc.
  - seiji 14y ago
    Key words: massive scale Regulations/rules/laws require oversight. You can fine a giant hotel. You can verify conditions in restaurants. You can ticket illegal food trucks. Can you stop a guy from making experimental taco flavored cereal at home then delivering it to people who ordered it online? That's a horrible example. The new rule of startups seems to be: We'll do what we want. You can't stop us.
    - _delirium 14y ago
      You can't stop small-time, independent cottage industry, and traditionally many governments turn a blind eye to it--- people selling small amounts of baked goods and such is not a new thing, and prosecuted rarely enough that it actually makes the news when it happens. What's new, and is much easier to stop, is centralized brokers turning at-scale aggregation of such cottage industry into a business plan. It's hard to stop me from privately arranging to sublet my apartment for $30/day with someone I met online, but it's much easier to shut down AirBnB doing it with thousands of properties. Basically I agree that the internet will change much of this, but I disagree that there are billion-dollar companies waiting to happen, unless they get the law to (at least tacitly) go along with them. Billion-dollar companies are juicy targets that can't sneak under the radar in the way that individuals can.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
What the internet is doing is taking our private lives and making them public. If I sell an apple to you from my lunchbox, am I a food vendor and need to get a license? What if I sell 100 apples? A thousand? Government has created these boxes around what it considers employees, restaurants, hotels, businesses, and so forth. Then the industry has waddled up to the trough and helped create a web of laws that prevent just any random schmuck from getting into one of these official categories. Now that we have this ton of innovation, expect a lot of pushback. This article only scratches the surface. If you are acting in the capacity of a hotel, should you have health inspections? Carry a certain kind of insurance? Or are you a landlord, but just for a day? In that case you have all sorts of tenant rights and landlord responsibilities to consider. And the key question behind all of this is: do we want government to apply the same kinds of broad solutions we needed to safeguard consumers in 1850 (I exaggerate for effect) in the hotelling business to one guy who rents his house for a couple of weeks a year? If not, what is the difference? We're going to have to choose: either accept massive government intrusion into every small detail of our lives (monitored by the internet) such that we still fit into this concept of a 1950 economy or deal with a world where these risks we used to not have to worry about are commonplace. Like I've always said, SOPA and such are just the beginning of the battle. Lots more to come. It's not just big industry protecting it's turf; there'll be a lot of that. It's the problem that the structure of the governmental system doesn't match up to the actual way people are beginning to live their lives. That's a much more fundamental issue. I don't think legalizing AirBnb is going to help internet entrepreneurs any more than brandishing a squirt gun is going to save you from an armed robbery. The best it will do is cause an imperceptible delay in the oncoming storm.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I think your dichotomy is a bit too stark, and the result will end up having to be some mixture of traditional regulation and exemptions for small-scale activity. With AirBnB, the guy renting his house a couple weeks a year I agree is not a model that makes sense to shoehorn into 1950s hotel regulation. But what's causing problems is that a number of AirBnB renters are literally unlicensed hotels, of the slummy, bug-infested, inadequate-fire-escapes sort that the original hotel regulation was intended to put an end to. They're not any sort of new 2012 problem, but exactly the same 1950s problem (and in NYC, often quite literally in the same old buildings). The problem isn't you or me renting out our apartments, but the guy in NYC who's converting an apartment block into a full-time commercial hotel without meeting the proper safety/health standards. So far, I think this is a minor problem on AirBnB except in NYC, where slum-hotel listings are starting to proliferate, often dishonestly listed as if they were someone personally renting out their private apartment (though the review system does help limit this after the first few people are fooled).
sammyo 14y ago
Does a broker of services have an explicit legal responsibility to monitor tax issues of the clients? Wouldn't that put an absurd onus onto services like craigslist?
- Nutella2 14y ago
  No, because Craigslist is not a broker. They're an advertiser. AirBnB is a broker because all the financial transactions go through them so their legal and tax responsibilities are different.
- rprasad 14y ago
  Possibly, depending on the jurisdiction. Most VRBO's provide this service to the home owners. Indeed, it seems that one of AirBNB's primary cost advantages over other VRBO's is that they don't cover tax withholding. This may not matter much if you know how to handle tax payments yourself, but it could become a significant issue when a lot of AirBnB users get audited for underreporting taxes (AirBnB reports payments to the IRS, which makes it easier to spot underreporting). Note: income tax payments must be made at least quarterly, not annually. The annual payment is intended to cover shortfalls based on estimated taxes following short of actual taxes and yearly tax items (i.e., credits/deductions).
hef19898 14y ago
What I missed is a clear anser to the question wether AirBnB is illegal or not. And if yes, in which countries. The only constraint I see in Germany come from your rental contract in case the room / appartment you rented out via AirBnB is not your own property. In this case technically you would need the OK from your land lord. If it's owned by yourself, you would have a legal contract with the person staying over. But I'm not a legal expert on that. EDIT: What puzzles me are some of the comments here. I rather expected them to be along the line of "of course it is, WTF are you thinking it souldn't be???? And "how I like it, great product". But maybe it's just me, I really had a... weird day today! :-)
- jellicle 14y ago
  Hotels are regulated at the state and municipality levels, so the answer is different in many thousands of different jurisdictions. In most cases it isn't that "AirBNB is illegal" it's that people using AirBNB aren't complying with all local regulations.
  - subpixel 14y ago
    Another comment makes a great point re: insurance. If a tenant burns your house down, or floods your basement, or invites someone over who falls and breaks their leg in your home, you may be in for a world of hurt.
- kephra 14y ago
  One note, is that common clause to disallow subletting is not legal in Germany. But the law in Germany has an other trap. You need to file a book, with passport numbers and name of your tenants, if you are running a hotel like business.
gautamc 14y ago
I haven't used airbnb but after reading some of the comments here, I looked up the airbnb site to check if they have tools/features which try to address the "I am renting to a total stranger/I am renting a strange place" issue - http://www.airbnb.com/safety#reputation http://www.airbnb.com/safety#reputation - I guess these tools could be improved/enhanced. But, just because something doesn't follow an established pattern, doesn't mean its illegal. It would make sense if a community decided to add a "no airbnb" clause to their bylaws/rules - but the govt picking and deciding what is abuse of resources and what is not doesn't sound practical - esp when the resource usage of an airbnb unit is no different when it is rented out versus the owner(s) occupying it themselves. If there can be things like credit-default-swaps, I don't see why the insurance industry should not come up with instruments for this kind of a market - where there is a market, there must be a way.
- Spooky23 14y ago
  The issue isn't that an unconventional pattern is illegal. The issue is that the risk models of residential mortgages, many apartment leases and insurance are designed for people living in a home. That distinction is important, because people generally treat their home with more care. And insurance/mortgages are priced accordingly. An apartment tenant generally doesn't leave the door open or unlocked -- they don't want their stuff to be stolen or destroyed. But a hotel guest or AirBNB renter has no skin in the game. Have you ever worked at a hotel? People routinely leave patio doors open or prop entry doors when they leave the room.
Spooky23 14y ago
AirBNB isn't illegal -- it's analogous to the "personal services" sections in newspapers that are almost certainly including advertisements for prostitution. The problem is, the people renting out their rooms on AirBNB are in many cases violating local law, lease terms or insurance contracts. They're also in moral hazard -- they are paying for homeowners/renters insurance while running a roominghouse. AirBNB's legal position has to be "buyer (ie. landlord) beware". But their marketing position is that it's easy to cover your expenses by renting out your apartment. That paradox is a variation of Napster's old "people are just sharing music like they always have" line.
- subpixel 14y ago
  One of my family members in Charleston, SC was making $30k+ annually with Airbnb, until the city threatened her (and everyone else in town offering space on Airbnb) with steep fines and even jail. She chose to pull her listing, and most others in town did as well.
  - rprasad 14y ago
    Ironically, it would have been acceptable if she had used a normal VRBO service (like HomeAway), as those services usually take care of any licensing and taxes associated with renting out one's home.
shek 14y ago
I wonder what is the impact of AirBnB on rents. If landlords see that (despite their leases prohibiting them) their renters are making money through AirBnB, they would want to jack up rents to get a piece of the action.

49 points by impendia 14y ago

> "But letting people stay temporarily in unoccupied rooms or houses is the opposite of harmful" Until some of those guests get murdered, raped, videocammed in the shower, have their possessions stolen, etc etc etc. We have regulation on this type of thing for a reason. Allowing anyone to just suddenly decide they are now a hotel, is a recipe for disaster.

replicatorblog 14y ago
I think that is the first response most people have, but they've booked something like 5MM nights with no adverse events like you've described. Also, VBRO and Homeaway are both older companies with similar business models and neither has had a huge PR disaster like you describe.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  While I'm not aware of anything happening to the guests, I think that people should be wary before they open their home to Internet strangers. See: http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travelers-lost-faith-difficult.html http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travele...
  - koide 14y ago
    The more things you do with strangers of any kind, the higher the risk of both harm and wonderful encounters. That, attached to the fact that most people is not crazy or evil, would give you the right path to pick.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  > I think that is the first response most people have, but they've booked something like 5MM nights with no adverse events like you've described. You apparently missed last year's PR debacle after someone had folks demolish her apartment to build a meth lab. Airbnb initially refused to pay up. http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/0803/Airbnb-apologizes-after-member-robbery-PR-debacle http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/0803/Airbnb-apologize...
mustpax 14y ago
I've first hand experienced bait and switch scams, thieving cleaning staff, and made up fees in cheap hotels from around the world. NYC hotels are particularly bad offenders even though they are thoroughly regulated. If anything an AirBnB host infinitely more trackable and accountable than a hotel you book directly or through an oblivious intermediary (travel agent). Not to mention the countless minimum wage staff working for these hotels that are also much harder to thoroughly vet and trust individually than a single host. Just because something is more familiar (hotels) doesn't mean it's safer.
- mibbitier 14y ago
  I'm more likely to buy a new iPod from a reputable, regulated shop, from a random guy on eBay/craigslist. You're talking about small individual regulated hotels, which obviously would be a bit hit and miss with regard to quality/safety, just like buying an iPod from a small shop called the "eyeStore" is going to entail more risk than buying it from Apple or BestBuy etc.
- adgar 14y ago
  Ah, the "Republican" argument: If regulation is so great, why hasn't it been perfect? Clearly the solution is less regulation.
  - mustpax 14y ago
    I'm not making any blanket statements about regulation, I'm simply stating that in this particular case the safeguards provided to guests by the structure of AirBnB's business are superior to those provided by municipal hotel operation regulations. If you'd care to address this point directly I'm all ears.
ed209 14y ago
People get murdered in hotels [1] and raped in hotels [2] and no doubt have things stolen. We should really judge this on the data and see if the incidence of crime is higher in Airbnb cases. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-18333584 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-18333584 [2] http://portsmouth-nh.patch.com/articles/woman-raped-in-hotel-room http://portsmouth-nh.patch.com/articles/woman-raped-in-hotel...
chollida1 14y ago
Another issue is fire/damage and house insurance in general. In my old house we had a legal rental suite. OUr home insurance went way up when we told them we had a tenant. We thought about not mentioning this, until it was pointed out that if a fire was started by the tenant and the insurance company found out there was a tenant then we'd get nothing. And insurance companies are very good about finding out things like this.

mapleoin 14y ago

One thing that has always puzzled me about AirBNB is that there's no mention anywhere about taxes. All this money changing hands without being taxed sure seems weird. Renters usually pay taxes for the rent they get, shouldn't people doing this on AirBNB do the same?

thatjoshguy 14y ago
When it comes tax time, isn't it the individuals responsibility to report all their income?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pcopley 14y ago
This is no different. The onus is on the person renting out their property/room to declare rental income and remit the appropriate taxes. On a side note, it breaks my heart to read "all this money changing hands without being taxed sure seems weird."
- untog 14y ago
  On a side note, it breaks my heart to read "all this money changing hands without being taxed sure seems weird." Why? Because you don't like taxes on money changing hands? That debate aside, it doesn't matter- taxes are due, they should be paid.
  - cglace 14y ago
    Do you report All the items you bought online and that you didn't pay state sales tax on? You are supposed to.
    - Symmetry 14y ago
      On my state income tax form there's an "add this small amount to your taxes and we won't care about you buying normal stuff online" box, which I check each year. So sort of.

jpeg_hero 14y ago

Great, allow my neighbors in my shared hallway apartment to rent out their rooms to strangers on the Internet. Glad I am not a single female.

yen223 14y ago
I'm pretty sure your neighbours can already rent out their rooms to strangers on the Internet.
- jasonlotito 14y ago
  Actually, more likely they cannot. Most renters contracts I've seen explicitly forbid this.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    >Most renters contracts I've seen explicitly forbid this. "Can't" and "contractually prohibited from" are two different things...
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    "Heh look! Craigslist still takes my ad for my spare room even though my lease says I can't do this!"
    - rprasad 14y ago
      "Hey look! My landlord just evicted me for leasing out my spare room in violation of my lease!" There is nothing stopping you from putting an ad on Craiglist. However, if you violate the terms of your lease, you can get evicted. Moreover, these sorts of violations are usually not covered by tenant protection laws, so you would not be entitled to the normal eviction procedure protections.
tomjen3 14y ago
Yeah course renters are only renting in the hope that they can go rape the neighbor. Seriously, stop with the sexism already.

seiji 14y ago

What if we continue this trend of just doing technically illegal things on a massive scale? New sites we can make: food2u - browse local bored people with kitchens and have them make then deliver food to you; movr - rent (unlicensed, uninsured) people with large vehicles to transport your stuff; qwikcut - find people who cut hair at home; friendzzzz (four Z's) - substitute someone bored instead of a licensed home care nurse; bugoot - find people with excess bugspray to treat your residence; talkerr - find a non-licensed person to share your problems with instead of a school'd therapist. I wouldn't be surprised if half of those are billion dollar companies waiting to happen.

roc 14y ago
> "What if we continue this trend of just doing technically illegal things on a massive scale?" Judging from history: the wronged-customer stories will pile up until the public demands some form of regulation. Keep in mind that the laws that make airbnb illegal, are the ones that were created as a reaction to business operating in the prior regulation-free environments. Building codes and fire safety regulations exist as a result of a history of preventably-tragic fires and building failures. Food safety regulations exist as a result of a litany of preventable food-borne illnesses, ingredient fraud, etc.
- seiji 14y ago
  Key words: massive scale Regulations/rules/laws require oversight. You can fine a giant hotel. You can verify conditions in restaurants. You can ticket illegal food trucks. Can you stop a guy from making experimental taco flavored cereal at home then delivering it to people who ordered it online? That's a horrible example. The new rule of startups seems to be: We'll do what we want. You can't stop us.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    You can't stop small-time, independent cottage industry, and traditionally many governments turn a blind eye to it--- people selling small amounts of baked goods and such is not a new thing, and prosecuted rarely enough that it actually makes the news when it happens. What's new, and is much easier to stop, is centralized brokers turning at-scale aggregation of such cottage industry into a business plan. It's hard to stop me from privately arranging to sublet my apartment for $30/day with someone I met online, but it's much easier to shut down AirBnB doing it with thousands of properties. Basically I agree that the internet will change much of this, but I disagree that there are billion-dollar companies waiting to happen, unless they get the law to (at least tacitly) go along with them. Billion-dollar companies are juicy targets that can't sneak under the radar in the way that individuals can.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

What the internet is doing is taking our private lives and making them public. If I sell an apple to you from my lunchbox, am I a food vendor and need to get a license? What if I sell 100 apples? A thousand? Government has created these boxes around what it considers employees, restaurants, hotels, businesses, and so forth. Then the industry has waddled up to the trough and helped create a web of laws that prevent just any random schmuck from getting into one of these official categories. Now that we have this ton of innovation, expect a lot of pushback. This article only scratches the surface. If you are acting in the capacity of a hotel, should you have health inspections? Carry a certain kind of insurance? Or are you a landlord, but just for a day? In that case you have all sorts of tenant rights and landlord responsibilities to consider. And the key question behind all of this is: do we want government to apply the same kinds of broad solutions we needed to safeguard consumers in 1850 (I exaggerate for effect) in the hotelling business to one guy who rents his house for a couple of weeks a year? If not, what is the difference? We're going to have to choose: either accept massive government intrusion into every small detail of our lives (monitored by the internet) such that we still fit into this concept of a 1950 economy or deal with a world where these risks we used to not have to worry about are commonplace. Like I've always said, SOPA and such are just the beginning of the battle. Lots more to come. It's not just big industry protecting it's turf; there'll be a lot of that. It's the problem that the structure of the governmental system doesn't match up to the actual way people are beginning to live their lives. That's a much more fundamental issue. I don't think legalizing AirBnb is going to help internet entrepreneurs any more than brandishing a squirt gun is going to save you from an armed robbery. The best it will do is cause an imperceptible delay in the oncoming storm.

_delirium 14y ago
I think your dichotomy is a bit too stark, and the result will end up having to be some mixture of traditional regulation and exemptions for small-scale activity. With AirBnB, the guy renting his house a couple weeks a year I agree is not a model that makes sense to shoehorn into 1950s hotel regulation. But what's causing problems is that a number of AirBnB renters are literally unlicensed hotels, of the slummy, bug-infested, inadequate-fire-escapes sort that the original hotel regulation was intended to put an end to. They're not any sort of new 2012 problem, but exactly the same 1950s problem (and in NYC, often quite literally in the same old buildings). The problem isn't you or me renting out our apartments, but the guy in NYC who's converting an apartment block into a full-time commercial hotel without meeting the proper safety/health standards. So far, I think this is a minor problem on AirBnB except in NYC, where slum-hotel listings are starting to proliferate, often dishonestly listed as if they were someone personally renting out their private apartment (though the review system does help limit this after the first few people are fooled).

sammyo 14y ago

Does a broker of services have an explicit legal responsibility to monitor tax issues of the clients? Wouldn't that put an absurd onus onto services like craigslist?

Nutella2 14y ago
No, because Craigslist is not a broker. They're an advertiser. AirBnB is a broker because all the financial transactions go through them so their legal and tax responsibilities are different.
rprasad 14y ago
Possibly, depending on the jurisdiction. Most VRBO's provide this service to the home owners. Indeed, it seems that one of AirBNB's primary cost advantages over other VRBO's is that they don't cover tax withholding. This may not matter much if you know how to handle tax payments yourself, but it could become a significant issue when a lot of AirBnB users get audited for underreporting taxes (AirBnB reports payments to the IRS, which makes it easier to spot underreporting). Note: income tax payments must be made at least quarterly, not annually. The annual payment is intended to cover shortfalls based on estimated taxes following short of actual taxes and yearly tax items (i.e., credits/deductions).

hef19898 14y ago

What I missed is a clear anser to the question wether AirBnB is illegal or not. And if yes, in which countries. The only constraint I see in Germany come from your rental contract in case the room / appartment you rented out via AirBnB is not your own property. In this case technically you would need the OK from your land lord. If it's owned by yourself, you would have a legal contract with the person staying over. But I'm not a legal expert on that. EDIT: What puzzles me are some of the comments here. I rather expected them to be along the line of "of course it is, WTF are you thinking it souldn't be???? And "how I like it, great product". But maybe it's just me, I really had a... weird day today! :-)

jellicle 14y ago
Hotels are regulated at the state and municipality levels, so the answer is different in many thousands of different jurisdictions. In most cases it isn't that "AirBNB is illegal" it's that people using AirBNB aren't complying with all local regulations.
- subpixel 14y ago
  Another comment makes a great point re: insurance. If a tenant burns your house down, or floods your basement, or invites someone over who falls and breaks their leg in your home, you may be in for a world of hurt.
kephra 14y ago
One note, is that common clause to disallow subletting is not legal in Germany. But the law in Germany has an other trap. You need to file a book, with passport numbers and name of your tenants, if you are running a hotel like business.

gautamc 14y ago

I haven't used airbnb but after reading some of the comments here, I looked up the airbnb site to check if they have tools/features which try to address the "I am renting to a total stranger/I am renting a strange place" issue - http://www.airbnb.com/safety#reputation http://www.airbnb.com/safety#reputation - I guess these tools could be improved/enhanced. But, just because something doesn't follow an established pattern, doesn't mean its illegal. It would make sense if a community decided to add a "no airbnb" clause to their bylaws/rules - but the govt picking and deciding what is abuse of resources and what is not doesn't sound practical - esp when the resource usage of an airbnb unit is no different when it is rented out versus the owner(s) occupying it themselves. If there can be things like credit-default-swaps, I don't see why the insurance industry should not come up with instruments for this kind of a market - where there is a market, there must be a way.

Spooky23 14y ago
The issue isn't that an unconventional pattern is illegal. The issue is that the risk models of residential mortgages, many apartment leases and insurance are designed for people living in a home. That distinction is important, because people generally treat their home with more care. And insurance/mortgages are priced accordingly. An apartment tenant generally doesn't leave the door open or unlocked -- they don't want their stuff to be stolen or destroyed. But a hotel guest or AirBNB renter has no skin in the game. Have you ever worked at a hotel? People routinely leave patio doors open or prop entry doors when they leave the room.

Spooky23 14y ago

AirBNB isn't illegal -- it's analogous to the "personal services" sections in newspapers that are almost certainly including advertisements for prostitution. The problem is, the people renting out their rooms on AirBNB are in many cases violating local law, lease terms or insurance contracts. They're also in moral hazard -- they are paying for homeowners/renters insurance while running a roominghouse. AirBNB's legal position has to be "buyer (ie. landlord) beware". But their marketing position is that it's easy to cover your expenses by renting out your apartment. That paradox is a variation of Napster's old "people are just sharing music like they always have" line.

subpixel 14y ago
One of my family members in Charleston, SC was making $30k+ annually with Airbnb, until the city threatened her (and everyone else in town offering space on Airbnb) with steep fines and even jail. She chose to pull her listing, and most others in town did as well.
- rprasad 14y ago
  Ironically, it would have been acceptable if she had used a normal VRBO service (like HomeAway), as those services usually take care of any licensing and taxes associated with renting out one's home.

shek 14y ago

I wonder what is the impact of AirBnB on rents. If landlords see that (despite their leases prohibiting them) their renters are making money through AirBnB, they would want to jack up rents to get a piece of the action.