8 ms·

Again and again, people who use Airbnb to 'hack' the rental market get little sympathy from me when the chickens come to roost. If your landlord was interested

• ed209 14y ago
  "If your landlord was interested in running a tenement home/boarding house/hotel" - then he would have to staff it himself too, promote it and take the risk of no bookings. With a tenant he has someone making sure the place is looked after + he has a contracted income for the whole 12 months. By the sound of this place, the landlord could probably do quite well out of airbnb. But in that case, why not just approach the guy and cut a deal or explain that he wants him out to rent the place himself?
  • hack_edu 14y ago
    Yes, though if the landlord had a hand in the operation I'd imagine it would have to be a legal business. This means taxes, insurance, wages, administration costs, permits that probably make it more trouble than its worth.
    • fennecfoxen 14y ago
      Let's take a moment and see the amazing things that can be accomplished with AirBnB and marvel at the things that we do to ourselves with regulation which could make things like this practically impossible. Stifling business and innovation, deadweight losses to society, and all that economics jazz. Great for the traditional hotel industry, though, and whatever lobbyists they have at City Hall and in Albany...
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      • Locke1689 14y ago
        Yeah, it's amazing how one can make a lot more money by violating health and safety regulations. Upton Sinclair did a great piece about how amazing it is.
        • fennecfoxen 14y ago
          Your comment is incredibly relevant and insightful because the world is black and white and our current regime, which is perfect, is all that stands between us and _The Jungle_. So-called "sensible" reforms to hotel-related legislation and economic freedom in general will only doom us all to accidental cannibalism in our hamburgers. Seriously, this is flippin' AirBnB, not the slaughterhouse industry. I only asked you to think about the costs, not to roll everything back. Is this a knee-jerk reaction to straw-man arguments which you happen to imagine coming from your least-favorite Republicans, or what?
          • Locke1689 14y ago
            You criticized regulation in general so I criticized lack of regulation in general. It's not a hard leap. If you want a more closely related set of laws, look at tenement housing. The Jungle was not the only example of an industry that badly needed reform.
  • btilly 14y ago
    Read the article, the landlord is getting into AirBnB. Why would the landlord want a middleman in this case?
    • pajmullaney 14y ago
      It sounds like the OP was actually an excellent host, and that's worth something on AirBnB. The landlord wouldn't necessarily be able to consistently pull in the kind of high-quality guests by himself.
      • epo 14y ago
        The OP is a parasite, abusing his landlord's resources for gain. Also, if he hasn't declared his 'rental' income for tax purposes then his problems are only just beginning ...
        • z0r 14y ago
          The OP pays his rent. He abused his landlord's resources in the sense that his lease prohibited his behavior, but there's no need to label him as a parasite. His behavior is no more parasitical than the behavior of the landlord himself. If you have no moral objections to rent, your objection to someone creating value by providing rental liquidity and turning a small profit while doing so is bewildering.
          • tatsuke95 14y ago
            >"He abused his landlord's resources in the sense that his lease prohibited his behavior" He signed an agreement with another party saying he would not do what he ended up doing, for profit. How are you equating that with the landlord collecting rent? Maybe if the landlord signed an agreement with one rent price, then started charging a higher price, you could equate the two behaviours.
    • ed209 14y ago
      >Why would the landlord want a middleman in this case? for the reason I stated, someone to look after the place while multiple Airbnb guests come and go. Otherwise you'll need to pay for a cleaner and check the place every time someone stays. That middleman is taking a lot of the pain of managing a property away from the landlord.
  • chrisdannen 14y ago
    Exactly. This restraining order was the first I had heard from my landlord that he didn't want us airbnb'ing. A phone call and I would have stopped. I knew it was too good to be true.
    • parfe 14y ago
      Attached to the order was a complete printout of my Airbnb listing and all my reviews, included as evidence I had violated clauses in my lease. (Some leases, I have since learned, have evolved specific language prohibiting tenants from listing their pads on vacation-rental sites such as Airbnb.) I don't buy your innocence here. I've been leasing houses for ~10 years now during and after college. The leases have always required a mix of landlord approval for subletting, banned running a business from the house, and prohibited occupation by non-lessees. Here are two clauses from an older lease[1] I happen to have in my desk: * Tenant shall not assign this Agreement, or sub-let or grant any license to use the Premises or any part thereof without prior written consent of Landlord. * The premises shall be used and occupied by Tenant and Tenant's immediate family... exclusively, as a private single family dwelling. Your faux innocence is pretty annoying actually. You were abusing the property for commercial purposes and you're surprised he didn't give you a friendly phone call? 1 Looks like the lease was originally snatched from www.academichomes.com/downloads/ExampleLeaseAgreement2.doc
      • omonra 14y ago
        I actually find your belligerent attitude annoying. Is that helpful to note? OP would be 'abusing' the property if he were running a crack den. I see no problem with tenants doing whatever they want with the property that they are leasing - as long as no damage is done & neighbors are not troubled.
        • parfe 14y ago
          Then don't get doe-eyed when served with legal papers after signing a lease which explicitly prohibits the behavior.
        • adgar 14y ago
  • chives 14y ago
    I'm glad someone made the connection; if his landlord is going to Airbnb anyway, why not cut a deal? If I was his landlord, I would have more than enough leverage with the breech of contract to get him to sign a new similar contract, this one charging maybe 2 times more rent. The landlord gets paid more, which in turn covers his slightly higher (or possible the same) landlords insurance and then some. The landlord lets his tenant do what he's good at (maintain a sterling Airbnb profile and choose good renters) and the landlord takes a larger cut. Worst case scenario, his tenant doesn't take the deal and the landlord proceeds to kick the tenant out for breech of contract (could possibly lead to a court battle, but breech of contract is a pretty cut and dry phenomenon and the contract most likely has breech of contract clauses built into it) and do was he was going to do anyway (rent it out through Airbnb or otherwise). As it stands the landlord will be throwing money at lawyers (possibly covered by landlords insurance, but could effect the premiums later), which may not turn out favorably for the landlord in court, to ultimately do something that is outside his area of expertise (act as an Airbnb hotel himself). That's what I think at least.
• jsherry 14y ago
  I'm not even sure he was looking for sympathy. There's very little 'woe is me' in this story. I read it as a cautionary tale more than anything.
  • benastan 14y ago
    It's definitely an interesting story. The author was offering a personal experience that was enjoyable for both the guest and the host. As he said, his guests and he often established a unique connection. On the other hand: "When I delivered my rent at the beginning of the next month, I found the management company’s office under construction. It's now a hotel. The “loft-style” rooms are now listed on Airbnb for $169 a night." Is this how airbnb was intended to be used? Isn't the point of a bed and breakfast-style experience the small-scale feel that the author described? Are guests really going to get the same attention/enjoyment out of airbnb if it's more-or-less a run of the mill hotel experience? Also, aren't there different regulations in place for rentals vs. hotels? The property manager may be violating laws as well.
    • fraserharris 14y ago
      from: Paul Graham to: Fred Wilson date: Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:00 PM subject: airbnb already spreading to pros I know you're skeptical they'll ever get hotels, but there's a continuum between private sofas and hotel rooms, and they just moved one step further along it. [link to an airbnb user] This is after only a few months. I bet you they will get hotels eventually. It will start with small ones. Just wait till all the 10-room pensiones in Rome discover this site. And once it spreads to hotels, where is the point (in size of chain) at which it stops? Once something becomes a big marketplace, you ignore it at your peril. --pg http://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html http://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html
    • AJ007 14y ago
      There are lots of hotels listing on airbnb. And yes, some look like they were intended to be apartments. NYC hotel laws are strict. Its very possible what the landlord is doing is illegal. If the OP was staying in his room, may be it qualified as a bed & breakfast. I don't think the landlord would meet that qualification.
• tgrass 14y ago
  Shocked? He wrote: "My landlord had caught on..." and "The Airbnb printout looked idiotically flagrant..." He seems quite aware of his position.
• zefi 14y ago
  "Come on, the guy lives alone in a 3+ bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. We all know he signed that lease specifically to run a pseudo-hotel business under the guise of an Airbnb profile." Categorically not true. Chris is a good friend, and he had a long term roommate until recently. He took on the lease because he knew they could cover rent whether or not the third room got let out. It is an amazing apartment in an awesome building, and his involvement in airbnb is not cynical or presumptuous. His listing was great value and he is an excellent host. I met him through airbnb and am incredibly grateful for it. So, try not to presume.
  • yequalsx 14y ago
    The only part of your comment that is germane to the GP is that before his roommate left they could cover the rent without renting the third room. "Chris being a good friend" and "His listing was great value" are irrelevant.
    • calibraxis 14y ago
      Lends credibility and helpfully lets us know bias.
  • hack_edu 14y ago
    Thanks, I really appreciate the context; didn't expect it. Though he still has other options... like approaching his roommate about the financial hardship suddenly imposed upon him, leveling with his landlord to get out of the lease, or finding a new (real) roommate.
    • noahr 14y ago
      The NYC rental market is brutal, getting out of a lease is rarely the best option. If you're lucky enough to find an affordable spot in a good neighborhood with decent space, you hold onto it with white knuckles.
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• LaGrange 14y ago
  Actually, the general tone seems to be exceptionally meek: he does say he was surprised, but I got the impression that he thinks he shouldn't be surprised. It reads much more like a "look what an idiot I was, and please don't repeat my mistakes" story than "oh woe is me". There's a lot of people trying to rent out rooms on AirBnB now, and many of them think it's a "small issue," as likely to be ignored as, say, hosting a close friend for a month or two while they're looking for a flat after an explosive breakup. But it appears that a typical landlord disagrees with that opinion, and some shout-outs to that effect might be really helpful.
• sixothree 14y ago
  Also, it is unfair to the other tenants who have to deal with the coming and goings of complete strangers.
• chrisdannen 14y ago
  When I wrote this I wasn't looking for sympathy. Most hosts probably have nothing to worry about. What's interesting is that my landlord became my Airbnb rival. The internet's magic is enabling disintermediation -- as the tenant, I was the middleman, and my lease gave him a way to cut me out.
• cabalamat 14y ago
  > If your landlord was interested in running a tenement home/boarding house/hotel, they wouldn't sign you into a year-long lease. But they aren't running a hotel (their tenant is), so what're they complaining about? If I was a landlord I'd have no more problem with this than if I was a wholesaler whose customers resold the stuff retail.
  • jack-r-abbit 14y ago
    > If I was a landlord I'd have no more problem with this Until you are a landlord, you can't really say for sure what you'd do as a landlord. I just recently started renting out my house. Going into it I was all "as long as they pay the rent on time and don't trash the place, I don't really care who rents it". But then I started getting into the fine points of liability and eviction rights and all the icky stuff you never see as a renter. And then I started showing the place to prospective tenants and started to realize how critical it is for me to choose the right people to live in my house. After doing all that, I would really hate to see the tenant let someone I know nothing about rent the place. And so the lease states they can not. The wholesaler -> customer relationship is not the same as landlord -> renter.
  • jw_ 14y ago
    I don't think it's the same situation as somebody reselling goods you've sold wholesale. As other posters mention, running a commercial operation from a residential apartment brings with it a number of insurance concerns for the landlord, safety and security concerns for other tenants (which would also be the landlord's concern), and no doubt a host of other liability issues which I'm ignorant of because I'm not an NYC landlord. If you were a landlord who was an AirBnB fan, you could certainly choose to not include clauses that specifically forbade this sort of activity. This guy chose to lease somebody else's property and then go ahead and use it in a manner that was expressly forbidden by his lease agreement to line his own pockets. I have zero sympathy for him. He got slapped down for misusing somebody else's property and rightly so.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I'd concur with the folks who say that 'shocked' is over-reaching. More like surprised the owner went straight for a restraining order rather than having a chat with him at their next meeting. If I were this guy's landlord I'd probably talk first, sue later. But that's just me. It is an interesting (and good) counter story to the one of an owner having their house trashed. That the market is expanding is not surprising. There are a lot of empty bedrooms around. We've yet to see someone doing this with their foreclosed property but I'm sure that will happen too. Like Ebay, AirBnB seems to have a 'let the user do what they will and let whomever thinks they are harmed go after them.' A good example of this was the way software companies responded to people selling old copies of software on eBay or enterprise gear that normally requires a service contract. It may start a sort of 'race to the bottom' for some folks, we'll have to wait and see.
  • Spooky23 14y ago
    NYC is a very tenant-friendly environment. It's critical to the landlord to have it on the record that he was running a pseudo-roominghouse out of his apartment in order to evict him later. Otherwise, you get held up in housing court.
• eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  On the back of his landlord, really? "On the back" of a rentiering parasite?
  • zem 14y ago
    So, naturalists observe, a flea. Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite 'em; And so proceed ad infinitum. -- Jonathan Swift
• cge 14y ago
  As landlords, we obviously have language prohibiting these sorts of actions on the parts of our tenants. But that isn't just because of our own greed. Tenement homes/boarding houses get worn down quite a bit faster than rentals. It's easy to end up with the property completely trashed, it's easier to get sued or otherwise in trouble, and it's easy to end up with neighbors complaining and disliking you. In addition to all of that, often codes simply don't allow boarding houses, regardless of who is running them. One of our renters tried to run a boarding house without our knowledge, and when the police were called to one of their parties, the city threatened to levy considerable fines against us for running a boarding house, regardless of whether we were actually running it or getting any money from the tenants.