6 ms·

It depends what you mean by 'worked'. It's certainly worked for me and the vast majority of AirBnB guests and hosts, I imagine. If you value obeying the law abo

It depends what you mean by 'worked'. It's certainly worked for me and the vast majority of AirBnB guests and hosts, I imagine. If you value obeying the law above all else then probably not, but most people don't. For instance, with unlawful subletting, I don't see who's harmed as long as guests behave responsibly, which should be ensured by the reputation system. The 'buy a whole building just to rent it out' case is a little more ethically dubious for me, but normally that kind of operation isn't too hard to spot from afar, and I can't imagine AirBnB guests being too thrilled staying there.

rayiner 14y ago
> For instance, with unlawful subletting, I don't see who's harmed as long as guests behave responsibly, which should be ensured by the reputation system. As a fellow tenant, my level of comfort with my daughter running unattended to a friend's apartment in the same building is less if I know there are lots of people running AirBnB sublets out of their apartments than if I know everyone is a resident subject to a background check and on a 6-12 month lease. Maybe the increase in risk from transient AirBnB tenants is small, but it's not zero. That loss of comfort, and that non-zero increase in risk is a harm to the other tenants in the building.
- njs12345 14y ago
  Presumably the landlord would be liable for any harm incurred by other tenants under this scenario (especially as they've broken their lease agreement), which provides them with a fairly strong incentive to check up properly. The reputation system is also designed to help them with this. EDIT: I was actually talking about the subletter (person who signed the original lease) rather than the landlord of the property itself.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Landlords of desirable properties are aren't incentivized to allow their spaces to be listed on Airbnb at all; the good properties will have naturally low vacancies, because apartments in desirable locations have effective markets already, and those markets provide much better terms to landlords than Airbnb rentals do. So you're left dealing with an unfortunate subset of landlords.
  - debacle 14y ago
    It's very likely that the liability policy that the landlord carries has an exclusion for the type of subletting that AirBnB does, putting all of the liability on an effectively uninsured landlord.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Sure you can sue the AirBnB host, but individuals rarely have the money to pay judgments for serious damage or bodily injury, nor do they have insurance for such occasions. That's the whole point of renting in a reputable apartment complex--it pushes the responsibility and and liability for security in the common areas to the building management, an insured entity with the resources to pay for any resulting damages. I think people who are proponents of AirBnB dramatically underestimate how much monetary value people attach to the kind of people they live around, especially in city apartment buildings where lots of people who barely know each other live in close proximity. A condo in a building that has some fraction of renters can sell for substantially less than an identical condo in an identical building that is 100% owner-occupied. Rents at buildings with 12-month minimum leases are higher than rents in buildings with 1-month minimum leases. People go out of their way to buy into coop buildings that have minimum down payment requirements, etc. I live in an apartment in downtown Chicago. The major businesses in the area are Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Northwestern University. Thus, most of the residents are medical residents, nurses, graduate students, etc. This tenant composition is priced into my rent. We have a lot of families that live here because it's a bit away from all the tourists on Michigan Ave and because every tenant undergoes a background check. If a bunch of tenants started illegally subletting their apartments on AirBnB to aforementioned tourists, that would upend everyone's expectations and decrease the value of the building to all of us.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      OT: Chicago, engineer, lawyer. Neat! (My office is in Printer's Row). Do you practice law, or are you in tech?
      - rayiner 14y ago
        Very cool! I was in tech (wireless), now I'm doing the law firm thing for awhile.
    - njs12345 14y ago
      Do you think the grad students in your apartment ever have family to stay? What about friends? What about couchsurfers (if there are any meaningful number of students in your apartment, it's very likely at least one an active couchsurfer)? Who do you think poses a bigger risk to other tenants, my cousin's friend who's crashing with me in Chicago while he finds a place to stay permanently, or someone with 100 positive reviews on AirBnB? 20 positive reviews on AirBnB? Where do we draw the line on what's ethical here? I think most people wouldn't see any problem with the first scenario but would with the second, but the risk is probably lower in the second scenario. (Perhaps AirBnB should purchase insurance on behalf of AirBnB landlords. I'm sure they have data on how often these kinds of problems occur and I can't imagine it being too expensive) EDIT: Looks like they already do have insurance of some kind: https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee
chollida1 14y ago
> I don't see who's harmed as long as guests behave responsibly, which should be ensured by the reputation system. I agree, but I have a feeling that it won't play out that way in practice. I would have agreed with you up until about 2 years ago. I've been a home owner for a good 10 years now, we moved a couple of years ago into a new neighbor hood. Most of hte homes are very nice and well kept up, but the ones that are the most in need of repair are the rentals. And subsequently the houses beside them take a hit in property value. We know most of the renters and they are nice hard working people who do the upkeep( cut grass, weed flower beds, etc), but the large repair items are always left undone. the painting, shingling, gutter cleaning, etc. And it makes sense for both parties not to do it. The renters don't care and the home owners don't care about their property values until they sell. Sadly though having renters in a neighborhood brings down property values. I'm pretty certain that having a high concentration of AirBnB renters would bring down values even more. So there is harm done, a fair bit of it.
- rayiner 14y ago
  My wife's uncle had a renter for a house in the woods. The renter let her dogs urinate freely in the house. My wife's uncle has totally resurfaced the floor and still can't get the smell out. He'll have to rip out all the drywall because the urine has wicked into it from the floor boards. Now obviously this is an extreme example, but stories like this aren't totally unheard of. If you know several people who rent out properties regularly, chances are that they have a couple of horror stories between them.
  - njs12345 14y ago
    Presumably your wife's uncle did everything right (credit and background checks) and still got burned. Without being snarky, he might well have had more luck with AirBnB.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - rayiner 14y ago
tptacek 14y ago
The owner of the property is harmed, when they agree with a renter on a contract with specific terms, and the renter then secretly reneges on those terms to take all the profit from the owner's increased risk for themselves.

rayiner 14y ago

> For instance, with unlawful subletting, I don't see who's harmed as long as guests behave responsibly, which should be ensured by the reputation system. As a fellow tenant, my level of comfort with my daughter running unattended to a friend's apartment in the same building is less if I know there are lots of people running AirBnB sublets out of their apartments than if I know everyone is a resident subject to a background check and on a 6-12 month lease. Maybe the increase in risk from transient AirBnB tenants is small, but it's not zero. That loss of comfort, and that non-zero increase in risk is a harm to the other tenants in the building.

njs12345 14y ago
Presumably the landlord would be liable for any harm incurred by other tenants under this scenario (especially as they've broken their lease agreement), which provides them with a fairly strong incentive to check up properly. The reputation system is also designed to help them with this. EDIT: I was actually talking about the subletter (person who signed the original lease) rather than the landlord of the property itself.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Landlords of desirable properties are aren't incentivized to allow their spaces to be listed on Airbnb at all; the good properties will have naturally low vacancies, because apartments in desirable locations have effective markets already, and those markets provide much better terms to landlords than Airbnb rentals do. So you're left dealing with an unfortunate subset of landlords.
- debacle 14y ago
  It's very likely that the liability policy that the landlord carries has an exclusion for the type of subletting that AirBnB does, putting all of the liability on an effectively uninsured landlord.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Sure you can sue the AirBnB host, but individuals rarely have the money to pay judgments for serious damage or bodily injury, nor do they have insurance for such occasions. That's the whole point of renting in a reputable apartment complex--it pushes the responsibility and and liability for security in the common areas to the building management, an insured entity with the resources to pay for any resulting damages. I think people who are proponents of AirBnB dramatically underestimate how much monetary value people attach to the kind of people they live around, especially in city apartment buildings where lots of people who barely know each other live in close proximity. A condo in a building that has some fraction of renters can sell for substantially less than an identical condo in an identical building that is 100% owner-occupied. Rents at buildings with 12-month minimum leases are higher than rents in buildings with 1-month minimum leases. People go out of their way to buy into coop buildings that have minimum down payment requirements, etc. I live in an apartment in downtown Chicago. The major businesses in the area are Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Northwestern University. Thus, most of the residents are medical residents, nurses, graduate students, etc. This tenant composition is priced into my rent. We have a lot of families that live here because it's a bit away from all the tourists on Michigan Ave and because every tenant undergoes a background check. If a bunch of tenants started illegally subletting their apartments on AirBnB to aforementioned tourists, that would upend everyone's expectations and decrease the value of the building to all of us.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    OT: Chicago, engineer, lawyer. Neat! (My office is in Printer's Row). Do you practice law, or are you in tech?
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Very cool! I was in tech (wireless), now I'm doing the law firm thing for awhile.
  - njs12345 14y ago
    Do you think the grad students in your apartment ever have family to stay? What about friends? What about couchsurfers (if there are any meaningful number of students in your apartment, it's very likely at least one an active couchsurfer)? Who do you think poses a bigger risk to other tenants, my cousin's friend who's crashing with me in Chicago while he finds a place to stay permanently, or someone with 100 positive reviews on AirBnB? 20 positive reviews on AirBnB? Where do we draw the line on what's ethical here? I think most people wouldn't see any problem with the first scenario but would with the second, but the risk is probably lower in the second scenario. (Perhaps AirBnB should purchase insurance on behalf of AirBnB landlords. I'm sure they have data on how often these kinds of problems occur and I can't imagine it being too expensive) EDIT: Looks like they already do have insurance of some kind: https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee

chollida1 14y ago

> I don't see who's harmed as long as guests behave responsibly, which should be ensured by the reputation system. I agree, but I have a feeling that it won't play out that way in practice. I would have agreed with you up until about 2 years ago. I've been a home owner for a good 10 years now, we moved a couple of years ago into a new neighbor hood. Most of hte homes are very nice and well kept up, but the ones that are the most in need of repair are the rentals. And subsequently the houses beside them take a hit in property value. We know most of the renters and they are nice hard working people who do the upkeep( cut grass, weed flower beds, etc), but the large repair items are always left undone. the painting, shingling, gutter cleaning, etc. And it makes sense for both parties not to do it. The renters don't care and the home owners don't care about their property values until they sell. Sadly though having renters in a neighborhood brings down property values. I'm pretty certain that having a high concentration of AirBnB renters would bring down values even more. So there is harm done, a fair bit of it.

rayiner 14y ago
My wife's uncle had a renter for a house in the woods. The renter let her dogs urinate freely in the house. My wife's uncle has totally resurfaced the floor and still can't get the smell out. He'll have to rip out all the drywall because the urine has wicked into it from the floor boards. Now obviously this is an extreme example, but stories like this aren't totally unheard of. If you know several people who rent out properties regularly, chances are that they have a couple of horror stories between them.
- njs12345 14y ago
  Presumably your wife's uncle did everything right (credit and background checks) and still got burned. Without being snarky, he might well have had more luck with AirBnB.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 14y ago

tptacek 14y ago

The owner of the property is harmed, when they agree with a renter on a contract with specific terms, and the renter then secretly reneges on those terms to take all the profit from the owner's increased risk for themselves.