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If enough people do this it will be the end of Airbnb. This is one of the patterns the state of NY is using against Airbnb while Airbnb is arguing that the serv

• dave5104 13y ago
  I'm not that familiar with the Airbnb situation in NY. Why is this a "bad" pattern that NY state has deemed to be a violation of the law?
  • shiftpgdn 13y ago
    Illegal hotels aka slums. There is a reason hotels are fairly highly regulated. My first (and only) stay at an Airbnb rental resulted in me getting bedbugs.
    • fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      You won't be safe from bedbugs just because you're in a hotel.
      • username223 13y ago
        I have been for my entire life, but YMMV.
      • rtpg 13y ago
        the likelihood of you getting bedbugs in a hotel room is smaller than from a random room in all of NYC. Granted , the rooms up on airbnb for the moment probably don't represent a uniform cut of NYC, but considering the type of people who would start running unlicensed hotels, I'd imagine it being more likely.
    • lotsofpulp 13y ago
      It is unrealistic to expect any dwelling, whether it be hotel or hostel, to be free of bed bugs, especially if you're in a region with lots of international travelers. There is no effective insecticide for them, they can be impossible to see, and they don't need to eat for months. Now, any decent hotel will be doing periodic checks for bedbugs around the box spring and headboard, and any other wooden furniture. But there will always exist a small chance that the last person to be in the room brought a couple and you will get them. Good news is they don't transmit any disease, and if they bite you, it just itches for a few days and goes away.
      • gamblor956 13y ago
        In nearly all US jurisdictions, hotels are required to maintain units free of vermin, including bedbugs. Private residences are not. Thus, if a hotel fails to keep the room free of bedbugs, they are generally (1) obligated to refund your room charges and (2) pay to replace any luggage or clothing rendered unusable by the pest infestation.
      • KingMob 13y ago
        ??? If there's no effective insecticide, how do you think we're killing them? The various -methrin-based compounds are generally pretty effective, though occasionally resistant subpopulations crop up.
        • genwin 13y ago
          A shop vac removes them from a mattress.
  • lignuist 13y ago
    Probably because it makes it harder for residents to find an apartment.
  • _delirium 13y ago
    What NY is mainly worried about (and has the strongest public support for them worrying about) is AirBnB being used as a way of de facto running unlicensed hotels. People don't like discovering that the room down the hall from where they live has essentially been converted into a hotel room, with customers coming and going regularly, no hotel tax paid, and none of the usual health/safety regulations applied (industrial-strength fabric cleaning, etc.). By comparison, someone renting out a spare room now and then is not as likely to produce social or health problems, and most of the public probably views it as benign, even if also technically a violation of your lease. I don't like this kind of thing as a customer, either. When I look for a place on AirBnB, I expect it to be someone's actual house/apt, which they treat as their own, because they also live there. If that's not the case, it should be made really clear up front.
  • jmduke 13y ago
    I'm not intimately familiar with the legal landscape, but in short I think its because a) the myriad laws governing personal property are much different than those governing commercial property b) significant part of AirBNB's model ignores consumer protection laws.
  • rll 13y ago
    There are a number of reasons. Most states have laws regarding how temporary rental properties (otherwise known as hotels) are zoned. You can't suddenly turn a building zoned for residential use into a hotel without getting it re-zoned. Also, NY specifically worries that it will change the local housing market. If investors buy up enough local properties and turn them into mini hotels, locals may be priced out of these neighbourhoods and those neighbourhoods will in turn suffer. Plus there are the complaints from the locals. Having a neighbour rent out their place to tourists a couple of times a year is not a big deal, but if it happens every single week it gets annoying. You never know who is coming and going and they aren't always all that worried about noise, garbage, etc. And just to clarify, I think the state is right to be concerned about these issues. But at the same time I would hate to lose the ability for someone to put their primary residence on a site like Airbnb a couple of times a year. This helps visitors and the residents without significantly hurting anything else in the equation. Things only start to turn sour when enough people create dedicated Airbnb properties as investments.
    • _pmf_ 13y ago
      It's a bit sad that you have to explain this to grown up people.
      • atwebb 13y ago
        I'm not sure that residential/commercial zoning laws in US states falls under the umbrella of general knowledge.
        • _pmf_ 13y ago
          There's nothing US specific about zoning laws. They most probably preceded the founding of your silly colony.
          • Symmetry 13y ago
            The first modern zoning was in 1916 in New York for height related reasons. Great Britain didn't start zoning until 1947. EDIT: I was sort of surprised that was the first zoning, when I just looked it up. I always mentally associated zoning with 1920s progressive social engineering.
  • sethhochberg 13y ago
    In general, tenant / landlord relationships are heavily regulated - legal objections to AirBnB style rentals (pretty reasonably, in my opinion) claim that anyone who has a unit that is primarily a rental for tenants is a landlord, and should be subjected to all the regulations typically defined in that relationship - a different situation than someone who is going to be away for a few weeks renting out their own personal residence during that temporary time.
  • ogig 13y ago
    NY wants to protect the classic hotel business. Hotels and building owners need to take care of all kind of legal and administrative procedures, including security considerations for their users. Airbnb apartment owners are now competing for free with those business. Not saying i agree, but that's the main motivation behind of Airbnb regulations, in NY and other places.
    • gaius 13y ago
      Not really - it's the rights of the neighbours, who didn't sign up to live in a hotel with people coming and going at all hours, partying, damage/wear and tear, etc.
      • _delirium 13y ago
        An interesting bit of evidence that resident concerns are a common motivation: in upscale buildings, which have the funds to pay for it, the crackdown on AirBnB is in even more full swing, through "free-market policing". Some condo associations actually have employees regularly scouring AirBnB ads in their area and looking at the photos to find rentals that look like units in their building (it's often not hard to spot, if you know a building well). Then the owner is identified and sent a "stop doing that" letter, and/or sued for violating their contract.
  • numbsafari 13y ago
    Because many of those who are renting out apartments in this manner are doing so without a "hotel license", charging the appropriate hotel taxes or otherwise abiding by laws put in place to preserve the rights of neighbors. You could probably argue that they are most peeved about not getting the hotel taxes.
    • jorgem 13y ago
      >> laws put in place to preserve the rights of neighbors. Sure about that?
      • numbsafari 13y ago
        If you lived in a high-rise condo and paid go money to do so, and the two places on either side of you started being rented out to random people who were there one week and gone the next, how would you feel? As others have pointed out, residential zoning laws aren't generally the product of corporate malfeasance. Usually they are there to help combat it. That's what NIMBYism is all about.
        • f7t7ft7 13y ago
          > If you lived in a high-rise condo and paid go money to do so, and the two places on either side of you started being rented out to random people who were there one week and gone the next, how would you feel? I probably wouldn't care because there would be no way to detect if it was happening, without me standing outside my door all night like a sentry. Sure, I'd be annoyed if some of the guests came and went at all hours of the night and that was waking me up regularly, but that could happen just as easily with more permanent neighbors, and I'd be able to do just as little about that.
  • klapinat0r 13y ago
    If I read your comment correct (why is it bad for NY to be against airbnb scenarios like this) then no, it's not a bad trend. To elaborate, many places (not just the US, and not just New York) has rent-control laws. By and large not everywhere, and not all parts of the cities/counties who has. But for those that do, this is in clear violation of at least that, but also - possibly - sublet laws. That is a far fetched example though. But the more worrying part is that it drives up prices as more and more do this (not talking 1-2 appartments in a neighbourhood, talking increasing). Another issue is the housing situation. In many larger cities it's a real issue that there aren't enough places to live as needed. For hotels it is bad, as it's driving business away. So, from both sides of the spectrum this is bad. For people looking to get some extra cash (not saying it's bad - as the post also mentions, it's an active investment), and for people looking for a place to rent while on vacation, it is good.
• glaugh 13y ago
  I would imagine Airbnb could at some point cap the number of nights you could let a place out, right? Certainly not ideal from their standpoint, of course, but manageable?
  • jaredsohn 13y ago
    A consequence of this could be that people who rent places out also use AirBnB's competitors. So this could perhaps help AirBnB politically, but wouldn't fully stop the problem.
  • andrewfong 13y ago
    It also prevents a legal and valid use-case -- renting out your couch every night of the the year. So long as you still live in the place yourself full-time, this isn't illegal under most municipal codes.
    • larrys 13y ago
      "So long as you still live in the place yourself " A way to game this might be to: 1) Buy a place 2) Rent out 1 room full time to someone who agrees to #3 in exchange for below market rent. 3) Rent out the other room or rooms.
      • elliottcarlson 13y ago
        This was the case at a place I stayed at in Boston - the place was a 3 bedroom apartment, 2 bedrooms were occupied by long term tenants, while the room I was in was exclusively for AirBNB.
      • MichaelGG 13y ago
        I think rooms get far less than a full apt, even if you get the same space. Just having to deal with another person there means you can't totally relax in most places. (Like walk naked from the shower to the room.)
    • untog 13y ago
      Seems pretty easily solvable - only enforce it for listings for whole apartments. People might lie, but there is going to be some immediate negative feedback when people find out they've rented out a couch...
• brightsize 13y ago
  When I was visiting Berlin last winter, I stayed at Airbnb flats and it seemed like a lot of the owners were doing exactly this. In fact, to your point, the city was, IIRC, about to forbid vacation rentals in certain neighborhoods. Berlin is rapidly gentrifying, there's a R.E. bubble going on, poorer people are being pushed out of the city, and this kind of thing intensifies that trend. I've no idea if cities in the US would be willing to step in and intervene if this became common here.
  • jseliger 13y ago
    Berlin is rapidly gentrifying, there's a R.E. bubble going on, poorer people are being pushed out of the city This is true in lots of fun cities, primarily because it's so hard to build new housing stock—which is a Bad Thing, as Matthew Yglesias describes in The Rent is Too Damn High. Britain is suffering from a variant of the "no building" problem too: http://www.buzzfeed.com/dlknowles/britains-dysfunctional-property-market-in-gi-fm44 http://www.buzzfeed.com/dlknowles/britains-dysfunctional-pro... : "Construction started on just 107,000 new homes in England last year. Excluding World War II, that’s the lowest figure since the 1920s." The solution to "gentrification" and what not is "building new dwellings," which we know how to do very effectively (elevators and steel are century-old technologies). The problem is regulatory / political.
    • drob 13y ago
      It's not quite that simple. Building up can ruin the character of the neighborhood, which is often a big part of the allure. I do think we're chronically underbuilding in a lot of places (SF being an extreme example), but the existence of steel and elevators is not a panacea for the "gentrification problem".
      • anoncowherd 13y ago
        > Building up can ruin the character of the neighborhood, which is often a big part of the allure. Well then, less allure would lead to lower prices, right? What's not to like?
• feverishaaron 13y ago
  How is this any different than VRBO, or any of the other vacation rental middlemen out there?
  • scott_karana 13y ago
    I suspect the difference (at least in the case of NY) is lack of regulation and kickbacks (sorry, taxes) for the local government.
    • jasonwocky 13y ago
      If you want to visit my city and see its sights, you can "kick back" into the damn kitty that it takes to keep those sights maintained.
      • scott_karana 13y ago
        Many cities don't charge a hotel tax. Some tourists would prefer to support the town they're visiting by directly paying shop owners, etc, instead of having "hotel taxes" of indeterminate destination tacked onto their expenses. (But you're right, using "kickback" was needlessly offensive.)
      • jrockway 13y ago
        I'd prefer the opposite. I wish tourists didn't cover any costs of running my city. Then it would be optimized for those of us that actually live here. If there's one thing I've learned in my old age, it's that I love buying things for people. Because then the power dynamic is in my favor: this is my city, enjoy your visit but leave no trace.
• pbreit 13y ago
  Perhaps in some (or even many) jurisdictions but isn't this just plain ole "Bed & Breakfast" (you know, the BnB in AirBnB) which has been around since forever?
• riggins 13y ago
  this is definitely happening in NYC. A friend of mine just told me how he was considering getting in on it. In NYC there's an enormous arbitrage. The cheapest hotel room in the city is $300/night. Meanwhile, you can rent a 1BR apt for $2,500 / month. So you rent an apt for $2,500 / month and book it out on AirBnB for $200 / night ... and you're looking at a monthly arbitrage of $3,500. The guy I know heard about it from a friend who's already doing this with 6 apartments ... so he was making something like $18K / month (less the cleaning expenses).
  • hammerzeit 13y ago
    Easily. I know at least two people clearing $100k/year by being 'airbnb slumlords.' Real estate agents are keeping apartments off the market and renting them out as hotels. Airbnb is clearly forcing a convergence between hotel prices and rents. This doesn't just mean forcing hotel prices down, it also means forcing rents up. I wish the tech community could stop reflexively defending airbnb and engage with the question of what the costs it is imposing are or might be.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • jseliger 13y ago
      Airbnb is clearly forcing a convergence between hotel prices and rents. This doesn't just mean forcing hotel prices down, it also means forcing rents up. I responded to this issue here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657242 , but the short answer is to build more units. Building the Second Ave Subway, extending express bus service, and doing similar things would also be helpful.
      • riggins 13y ago
        I agree that the way to deal with increasing rents is to build new buildings. In fact, I think that is probably Bloomberg's greatest accomplishment. He made it much easier to develop new buildings which led to a boom in development.