8 ms·

Airbnb Listings Mostly Illegal, NY State Contends

64 points by lr 12y ago

cookiecaper 12y ago
Everyone knows this, and has known this. Airbnb knew it too. Hopefully they used their runway to develop a better plan than the denial that's been ongoing up to this point, since it's been obvious since its inception that Airbnb would have to deal with these regulatory problems if it ever reached critical mass.
msoad 12y ago
I wondering if we are living in a short era of cheap and semi-legal sharing economy and eventually all these sharing economy companies will get relegated and become too expensive to make sense. I'm saying this because from what I experienced using Uber and Airbnb, none of people who provided the service were "sharing" their own stuff. They were doing business. The Uber driver usually is a full time driver. The Airbnb landlord had multiple apartments to rent. So they are the same old taxi drivers and motel owners. We are just paying less because it's illegal.
- ljk 12y ago
  coming from someone who's interested in trying it out, but have used neither product, why is it bad that it's cheaper?
  - colechristensen 12y ago
    Part of the reason it's cheaper is because many sharing-economy services don't pay the taxes or follow the regulations the established competition must. Part of the reason it's cheaper is because regulations have set up stagnant non-competing businesses who have no incentive to innovate or compete. Flaunting the law and making a large set of people make light of the rule of law is a bad thing, and nobody should celebrate the savings from this. There are places where sharing-economy companies and regulating local governments have worked together to make them legal and open up competition stimulating innovation. New York and the Bay Area, despite their reputations as innovators, haven't managed to do these things.
    - ljk 12y ago
      > Part of the reason it's cheaper is because regulations have set up stagnant non-competing businesses who have no incentive to innovate or compete. all those reasons are so obvious now, thanks! OTOH, it's interesting that from what I've seen a lot of people are "celebrating" the success of uber and lyft because of the lack of incentive to innovate or compete from the taxi/government side
    - logicchains 12y ago
      >Flaunting the law and making a large set of people make light of the rule of law is a bad thing, and nobody should celebrate the savings from this. This assumes the law is in some way just in the first place. Many here would for instance argue that marihuana-prohibition laws are unjust, and that ignoring and bringing ridicule to such laws is a good thing. The same applies to laws prohibiting gay marriage, and many others. Acting morally is a good thing, but what's legal isn't necessarily what's moral.
- nyolfen 12y ago
  frankly i hope so, 'sharing economy' startups are leeches even if their contractors do well in the short term. economic models should always be critically approached from the perspective of the exploited. http://www.mrteacup.org/post/the-cult-of-sharing.html http://www.mrteacup.org/post/the-cult-of-sharing.html
  - eru 12y ago
    > [...] economic models should always be critically approached from the perspective of the exploited. Why? Also, who's getting exploited here?
    - rtpg 12y ago
      Uber drivers are potentially getting exploited because they don't get the protections of regular worker. You could say that they could just go over to another service, but there are only so many of these new-age taxi operators. Unless the number of drivers is extremely limited, the same thing will happen to them as to people in other industries (say, cleaning houses): The customer wants lower prices, the business wants higher margins, so the business squeezes the (badly-positioned) workers. There's already been protestation with Uber's "misleading" ( it was heavily subsidised at first, but stopped recently) wages given to the drivers. This is just another example of why the labor market is really not an efficient free market.
      - eru 12y ago
        Thanks. How high is the barrier to market exit for Uber drivers?
        rtpg 12y ago
        well, if you've been a taxi driver for a while, pretty high I imagine. You might have other marketable skills, but you might not.
    - anon1385 12y ago
      When it comes to Airbnb - neighbours who now live next to a hotel room, communities that are now full of transitory people and tourists rather than stable long term residents, landlords who had no-subletting clauses in their contracts. That last one is the thing that makes me most surprised that Airbnb has so many libertarian supporters. It's the biggest attack on basic property rights and contracts in quite a while. Personally I don't have much sympathy for landlords, but I do think that if we are going to regulate to no longer allow such clauses in contracts it has to be applied universally, not just for people using Airbnb.
- nugget 12y ago
  Another perspective is that it's cheaper because it lowered the barrier to entry so that the smallest of entrepreneurs could enter the market. Rather than purchase a hotel, you can rent out a studio apartment. You can start with one studio and then expand over time. You don't need much (if any) additional capital. Airbnb is your entire marketing department and you only pay them when they deliver a client. Handy cleans for you and fixes the shower if it breaks. Brands are very lucrative assets. Maybe part of this shift is an Airbnb brand tax of 6% in place of a Hilton, Marriot, or SPG tax of 30%. How much of the old model was there to protect monopolies and how much of it was there to provide for consumer safety? How do we incorporate the latter and eliminate the former? That's the real question in my mind.
  - damian2000 12y ago
    Yeah, when it comes to small B&B operators, there's actually not much difference between what airbnb does and the services of a listing provider like wotif.com or booking.com. Both take payment from the customer upfront and charge a percentage on bookings. Airbnb doesn't require you to be a business though to sign up.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - trhway 12y ago
    >How much of the old model was there to protect monopolies and how much of it was there to provide for consumer safety? when medallion costs $200K-$600K is it to protect monopoly or to provide for consumer safety? Tough question :)
    - rtpg 12y ago
      the medallions are distributed in auction, to align with the great american myth that those who can pay the most deserve it the most. Granted, alternatives would probably involve taxi companies wining and dining to get preferred treatment. Once we've decided on having some sort of system to limit the number of taxis, there's going to be some form of selection. Apparently people thought auction was the "least worst" way (compared to some other selection method).
- damian2000 12y ago
  Another way to look at it is that they're providing a better "user experience" via an app and website to businesses that were just lower profile or invisible before. For example, I believe many traditional B&Bs also operate in some legally grey areas, in terms of council approvals, business registration, tax & insurance.
- trhway 12y ago
  >So they are the same old taxi drivers and motel owners. We are just paying less because it's illegal. No. We're paying because we need taxi service and a nice/convenient place to stay. The old system has been very strained and limited with regard to availability and service options - hour long waits for a cab and only very limited hotel/motel options with regard to the room/suite type/format and location.
- quadrangle 12y ago
  It's eBay all over again… first it was regular people, then it gets taken over by full-time professionals, changes focus, and divides into two completely distinct groups of business and customers instead of a social platform.
- slowmotiony 12y ago
  Absolutely disagree. Right now I am in a major german city, and I can get an Uber ride in exactly 6 minutes. Perfect service, everything is done through the app, I don't even need to speak german. Last time I got a regular cab, I waited 30 minutes for a middle-eastern guy who did not speak a word in english and tried to rip me off since I'm a foreigner. It's even worse in my country - Poland - where taxi drivers can very well be considered gangs, fighting for territories and being involved in illegal activities. They are absolutely not "same old taxi drivers and motel owners", is the point I am trying to make here.
  - msoad 12y ago
    I just spoke about price. BTW mentioning ethnicity of the taxi driver wasn't necessary.
    - slowmotiony 12y ago
      If he was Polish or Irish I would mention it also. Lay off me with the PC bullshit please, I was being descriptive.
      - linuskendall 12y ago
        No, you were being racist.
        logicchains 12y ago
        Would you then argue that if a specific racial group were statistically much more likely to offer poor taxi service in a particular country, this fact should not be disseminated as it would constitute racism? Or do you consider it racism because you believe he was making an unfounded generalisation, implying that all middle-eastern taxi drivers were unreliable when in fact he only had a sample size of one?
  - CalRobert 12y ago
    Aber jetzt sie können Deutsch übung! Really, though, I know it's awesome that the world (mostly) speaks at least some English, but it's hard to knock somebody living in Germany for not speaking it.
- sveme 12y ago
  I'm always wondering whether the people that I stayed with when I used airbnb declared the rent I paid as additional income and paid the taxes. In Germany at least I guess they would have to get a tax number from the authorities and pay local and federal taxes. There is actually an article on taxes on airbnb (https://en.airbnb.com/help/article/481 https://en.airbnb.com/help/article/481), but I guess most hosts conveniently forget that they have to pay taxes. Otherwise there would most likely be far less people offering rooms in their flats if they would have to handle all the red tape. Many guesses, no numbers, unfortunately. I'd need some numbers to really make up my mind.
- abalone 12y ago
  > So they are the same old taxi drivers and motel owners. We are paying less precisely because they are new drivers and BNB owners on the market. I think you're oversimplifying. Not all regulations have to inexorably converge on the taxi/hotel model. Cities could ban non-resident Airbnb rentals and there would still be enough supply to have a major impact on the market. They could impose safety & insurance regulations on Uber/Lyft but stop short of the medallion system, which is the main bottleneck on supply & pricing. In fact that's exactly what they've done: [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-makes-airbnb-legal-at-last-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-makes-airbnb-le... [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/18/us-california-lawmaking-ridesharing-idUSKBN0HD01420140918 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/18/us-california-lawm...
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  >The Airbnb landlord had multiple apartments to rent. So they are the same old taxi drivers and motel owners. We are just paying less because it's illegal. I've never been to San Francisco but AIUI Uber's main innovation in its original market was in being a taxi service that would actually come if you booked them. This has come up multiple times, from multiple people; it's like Google not having customer service or Amazon having no non assholes in management, except maybe in AWS.
- CalRobert 12y ago
  Well, there's still Couchsurfing and Zimride/Craigslist. My experience as a consumer and provider on these services has been that people are genuinely sharing what they have. Of course, it's not as polished an experience.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
pbreit 12y ago
The right answer seems to be somewhere in the middle but neither side has put forth anything reasonable. For one thing, HOAs and landlords should have pretty liberal abilities to forbid short-term rentals and pretty much all have. Renting out a room where the owner/tenant is present should be allowed on a limited basis (perhaps several weeks/months per year). Renting out a full residence in a non-zoned area should be allowed on a more limited basis (perhaps up to 1 month per year). Just like on Ebay, et al, "casual sellers" should be able to execute some limited amount of quasi-business activity before triggering all the business rules. Finally, AirBnB-style rentals should be regulated more like BnBs (duh!) than hotels. The question is, what's the right answer for these situations? And no kudos to AirBnB, et al for offering up no suggestions.
- kijin 12y ago
  If you own a property (or have the owner's permission), why does it matter whether you actually live in it or rent it out to other people? Should we be prohibited from lending our physical books to other people just because publishers would rather we didn't? Why does it matter who you rent out your property to? Why does it matter whether you rent it out for 30 days a year or 300 days a year? Why does it matter whether you rent it out for 30 days to one person or one day each to 30 people? The last one is especially arbitrary, and the only reason it means anything at all is because the hotel industry uses it as a threshold for market segmentation. Is it safety that matters? If so, let's drop all the "up to X days" bullshit and actually focus on safety. How can we check whether an AirBnB listing is "safe", whatever that means in this context, how do we compensate victims of "unsafe" listings, and how do we come up with a good incentive structure to encourage "safe" listings and weed out "unsafe" ones? Is it taxation that matters? Of course people should pay taxes on all of their income. In fact, AirBnB income should be easier to track down than the proceeds from that MacBook you just sold on Craigslist. AirBnB keeps excellent records of all of your income (and their fees), after all. Then it's just a matter of getting those records into the hands of the IRS. Is it zoning that matters? If so, why do we care about zoning at all? Over the last few decades, the only thing that zoning achieved in the United States is the complete segragation of residential areas from all other areas of modern life, so that everyone needs to drive a dozen miles to work and another dozen miles to get their groceries. Many cities are now beginning to toy with the idea of vibrant mixed zones, where people can live, work, shop, and play all within easy walking or cycling distances. A hostel next door suddenly doesn't seem like a bad idea after all. (Oh, it's not properly managed and people are shooting crack up their arms in the backyard? Well, that's a problem with poor management, not a problem with the mere fact that it's a hostel. Would you ban houses with basements because some basements have meth labs in them?) So I refuse to believe that the right answer has anything to do with how long you should be able to rent out a property. It's your property, you should be able to do whatever you want with it within reasonable bounds (like paying taxes and keeping your property safe for other users). As long as we keep focusing on peripheral issues that are framed by existing business models with conflicts of interest, we'll never get to ask the really pressing questions, such as reasonable safety and insurance standards for small-time landlords. And yes, I agree with you that AirBnB's reactive (as opposed to proactive) attitude toward this issue isn't helping, either. /rant
jschlesser 12y ago
Suppose it is mostly "professionals" 1. is it bad for individual "professionals" to invest capital on a small scale to provide services that people want at a greater or lesser price? Be it cars or houses. 2. If it is bad, why, and who for? Is it bad for consumers or bad for existing businesses?
- URSpider94 12y ago
  It's complicated. On one hand, traditional regulation keeps small or part-time players out of the market, because regulatory overhead is too high. The relative burden of regulation on large companies is much less, because they can amortize the cost across more business. On the other hand, this only works if these smaller players get relief from regulations -- which means that they are operating outside the laws and regulations. For instance, turning an apartment building into a hotel via Airbnb sidesteps rules around zoning, tax collection, housing policy, etc. You could decide that these regulations are just annoying red tape, but they were put in place for legitimate purposes in the past and it seems like we ought to at least consider the impact before we throw the baby out with the bath water. A third argument is that peer to peer marketplaces are changing the balance of power between producer and consumer. As a consumer, this sounds great -- but the person at the other end of the line is now an individual, not a giant corporation. When I have a bad cab ride, I go on Facebook and bitch about it, and life goes on. When I have a bad Uber ride, I give the driver one star and they may very well get fired -- and Uber will just replace them with one of the teeming masses hoping to make it rich driving strangers around for a living.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    On one hand, traditional regulation keeps small or part-time players out of the market, because regulatory overhead is too high. I suppose it discourages some, but it's not like there aren't small or part-time players in property rental. There are a lot of them! Small-time landlords who own a few rental units are everywhere; I know two such people in my circle of friends who do that. You can either do it as a part-time job, or hire a management company for a fee to oversee the actual management. The difference is that they do it legally. They own apartments in buildings where it's legal to rent out the units, and they rent them out legally.
JacobAldridge 12y ago
Interesting that the AG's report is titled AirBnB in the City, likely a reference to the classic NYC tv show Sex and the City[1]. Interesting, in that many people incorrectly call that program Sex IN the City, which the producers object to. They point out that the AND is deliberate - the City of New York is an integral character in the story, not just a location where the story (and sex) occurs. In this dispute, the government is making a similar gambit - arguing that they need to be part of the conversation, via regulation and enforcement etc, not just the location in which the lettings take place. In other words, the report title seems to mis-quote the name of the TV show. And in doing so it missed the opportunity to position the State more strongly as a central actor in this drama. [1] And lest anyone observe the title may be a coincidence, note that Eric Schneiderman is the AG of New York State, not just the city.
secabeen 12y ago
AirBNB also provides a product that was very hard to find before. Although most of the NYC housing market consists of units kitchens and living spaces, it was very hard to find a two-bedroom apartment to rent short term before AirBNB. As someone with a family, the ability to rent a traditional apartment for a short time is a significant improvement in the market.
csense 12y ago
With the Internet, you can't stop people with spare rooms and people who need a place to stay from finding each other. We now stand at a crossroads. Down one road we recognize this is a new kind of interaction enabled by technology, which leads to legalization, with light regulation to deal with new patterns of abuse that aren't handled effectively by existing rules. Reasonable taxes and fees so the new industry covers the additional costs it's imposing on government and pays its fair share to the city, state, and country. Down the other road is heavy-handed regulation, and punitive taxes and fees that drive small entrepreneurs and the websites that enable their business model out of the legitimate market and into the shadows. AirBNB is legitimate, but if they stop servicing an area due to regulation, I'm sure a sketchier copycat will try to take over that market. The government misses out on taxes and fees from the grey/black-market transactions. Hosts / guests that have been abused or scammed will be reluctant to seek recourse through the legal system if it will mean admitting their own illegal conduct, and will have to either endure their suffering or try to self-help. It's really the same story as abortion, drugs, or Bitcoins.
pyrophane 12y ago
> But the attorney general’s report says rentals in three areas in Manhattan — Lower East Side/Chinatown, Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village/SoHo — accounted for 40 percent of private stay revenue, or $187 million. This surprised me not at all. I live in the Lower East Side and see an almost non-stop parade of groups of tourists with suitcases waiting to get let into apartments here. I know friends-of-friends who have four or five apartments that they rent out for this purpose. People who operate these illegal hotels are attracted to neighborhoods like LES/EV/Chinatown, aside from them being trendy, is because there are a lot of non-doorman buildings that have relatively inexpensive rent. Unfortunately, those buildings are a critical source of semi-affordable housing in Manhattan, and more and more of it is getting snatched up by hoteliers. I'm glad that NY is not taking the same approach as SF. People should absolutely be allowed to rent out a room or a couch, but the illegal full-time, full-apartment listings are terrible for residents who aren't aspiring hoteliers.
jgalt212 12y ago
It must be nice to have friends in high places. I know if the NY Attorney General said 75% of my business was illegal, I'd be shut down tomorrow. Yet, Airbnd can fight these charges (mostly in the court of public opinion and somewhat in the court system).

64 points by lr 12y ago

Everyone knows this, and has known this. Airbnb knew it too. Hopefully they used their runway to develop a better plan than the denial that's been ongoing up to this point, since it's been obvious since its inception that Airbnb would have to deal with these regulatory problems if it ever reached critical mass.

msoad 12y ago

I wondering if we are living in a short era of cheap and semi-legal sharing economy and eventually all these sharing economy companies will get relegated and become too expensive to make sense. I'm saying this because from what I experienced using Uber and Airbnb, none of people who provided the service were "sharing" their own stuff. They were doing business. The Uber driver usually is a full time driver. The Airbnb landlord had multiple apartments to rent. So they are the same old taxi drivers and motel owners. We are just paying less because it's illegal.

ljk 12y ago
coming from someone who's interested in trying it out, but have used neither product, why is it bad that it's cheaper?
- colechristensen 12y ago
  Part of the reason it's cheaper is because many sharing-economy services don't pay the taxes or follow the regulations the established competition must. Part of the reason it's cheaper is because regulations have set up stagnant non-competing businesses who have no incentive to innovate or compete. Flaunting the law and making a large set of people make light of the rule of law is a bad thing, and nobody should celebrate the savings from this. There are places where sharing-economy companies and regulating local governments have worked together to make them legal and open up competition stimulating innovation. New York and the Bay Area, despite their reputations as innovators, haven't managed to do these things.
  - ljk 12y ago
    > Part of the reason it's cheaper is because regulations have set up stagnant non-competing businesses who have no incentive to innovate or compete. all those reasons are so obvious now, thanks! OTOH, it's interesting that from what I've seen a lot of people are "celebrating" the success of uber and lyft because of the lack of incentive to innovate or compete from the taxi/government side
  - logicchains 12y ago
    >Flaunting the law and making a large set of people make light of the rule of law is a bad thing, and nobody should celebrate the savings from this. This assumes the law is in some way just in the first place. Many here would for instance argue that marihuana-prohibition laws are unjust, and that ignoring and bringing ridicule to such laws is a good thing. The same applies to laws prohibiting gay marriage, and many others. Acting morally is a good thing, but what's legal isn't necessarily what's moral.
nyolfen 12y ago
frankly i hope so, 'sharing economy' startups are leeches even if their contractors do well in the short term. economic models should always be critically approached from the perspective of the exploited. http://www.mrteacup.org/post/the-cult-of-sharing.html http://www.mrteacup.org/post/the-cult-of-sharing.html
- eru 12y ago
  > [...] economic models should always be critically approached from the perspective of the exploited. Why? Also, who's getting exploited here?
  - rtpg 12y ago
    Uber drivers are potentially getting exploited because they don't get the protections of regular worker. You could say that they could just go over to another service, but there are only so many of these new-age taxi operators. Unless the number of drivers is extremely limited, the same thing will happen to them as to people in other industries (say, cleaning houses): The customer wants lower prices, the business wants higher margins, so the business squeezes the (badly-positioned) workers. There's already been protestation with Uber's "misleading" ( it was heavily subsidised at first, but stopped recently) wages given to the drivers. This is just another example of why the labor market is really not an efficient free market.
    - eru 12y ago
      Thanks. How high is the barrier to market exit for Uber drivers?
      - rtpg 12y ago
        well, if you've been a taxi driver for a while, pretty high I imagine. You might have other marketable skills, but you might not.
  - anon1385 12y ago
    When it comes to Airbnb - neighbours who now live next to a hotel room, communities that are now full of transitory people and tourists rather than stable long term residents, landlords who had no-subletting clauses in their contracts. That last one is the thing that makes me most surprised that Airbnb has so many libertarian supporters. It's the biggest attack on basic property rights and contracts in quite a while. Personally I don't have much sympathy for landlords, but I do think that if we are going to regulate to no longer allow such clauses in contracts it has to be applied universally, not just for people using Airbnb.
nugget 12y ago
Another perspective is that it's cheaper because it lowered the barrier to entry so that the smallest of entrepreneurs could enter the market. Rather than purchase a hotel, you can rent out a studio apartment. You can start with one studio and then expand over time. You don't need much (if any) additional capital. Airbnb is your entire marketing department and you only pay them when they deliver a client. Handy cleans for you and fixes the shower if it breaks. Brands are very lucrative assets. Maybe part of this shift is an Airbnb brand tax of 6% in place of a Hilton, Marriot, or SPG tax of 30%. How much of the old model was there to protect monopolies and how much of it was there to provide for consumer safety? How do we incorporate the latter and eliminate the former? That's the real question in my mind.
- damian2000 12y ago
  Yeah, when it comes to small B&B operators, there's actually not much difference between what airbnb does and the services of a listing provider like wotif.com or booking.com. Both take payment from the customer upfront and charge a percentage on bookings. Airbnb doesn't require you to be a business though to sign up.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- trhway 12y ago
  >How much of the old model was there to protect monopolies and how much of it was there to provide for consumer safety? when medallion costs $200K-$600K is it to protect monopoly or to provide for consumer safety? Tough question :)
  - rtpg 12y ago
    the medallions are distributed in auction, to align with the great american myth that those who can pay the most deserve it the most. Granted, alternatives would probably involve taxi companies wining and dining to get preferred treatment. Once we've decided on having some sort of system to limit the number of taxis, there's going to be some form of selection. Apparently people thought auction was the "least worst" way (compared to some other selection method).
damian2000 12y ago
Another way to look at it is that they're providing a better "user experience" via an app and website to businesses that were just lower profile or invisible before. For example, I believe many traditional B&Bs also operate in some legally grey areas, in terms of council approvals, business registration, tax & insurance.
trhway 12y ago
>So they are the same old taxi drivers and motel owners. We are just paying less because it's illegal. No. We're paying because we need taxi service and a nice/convenient place to stay. The old system has been very strained and limited with regard to availability and service options - hour long waits for a cab and only very limited hotel/motel options with regard to the room/suite type/format and location.
quadrangle 12y ago
It's eBay all over again… first it was regular people, then it gets taken over by full-time professionals, changes focus, and divides into two completely distinct groups of business and customers instead of a social platform.
slowmotiony 12y ago
Absolutely disagree. Right now I am in a major german city, and I can get an Uber ride in exactly 6 minutes. Perfect service, everything is done through the app, I don't even need to speak german. Last time I got a regular cab, I waited 30 minutes for a middle-eastern guy who did not speak a word in english and tried to rip me off since I'm a foreigner. It's even worse in my country - Poland - where taxi drivers can very well be considered gangs, fighting for territories and being involved in illegal activities. They are absolutely not "same old taxi drivers and motel owners", is the point I am trying to make here.
- msoad 12y ago
  I just spoke about price. BTW mentioning ethnicity of the taxi driver wasn't necessary.
  - slowmotiony 12y ago
    If he was Polish or Irish I would mention it also. Lay off me with the PC bullshit please, I was being descriptive.
    - linuskendall 12y ago
      No, you were being racist.
      - logicchains 12y ago
        Would you then argue that if a specific racial group were statistically much more likely to offer poor taxi service in a particular country, this fact should not be disseminated as it would constitute racism? Or do you consider it racism because you believe he was making an unfounded generalisation, implying that all middle-eastern taxi drivers were unreliable when in fact he only had a sample size of one?
- CalRobert 12y ago
  Aber jetzt sie können Deutsch übung! Really, though, I know it's awesome that the world (mostly) speaks at least some English, but it's hard to knock somebody living in Germany for not speaking it.
sveme 12y ago
I'm always wondering whether the people that I stayed with when I used airbnb declared the rent I paid as additional income and paid the taxes. In Germany at least I guess they would have to get a tax number from the authorities and pay local and federal taxes. There is actually an article on taxes on airbnb (https://en.airbnb.com/help/article/481 https://en.airbnb.com/help/article/481), but I guess most hosts conveniently forget that they have to pay taxes. Otherwise there would most likely be far less people offering rooms in their flats if they would have to handle all the red tape. Many guesses, no numbers, unfortunately. I'd need some numbers to really make up my mind.
abalone 12y ago
> So they are the same old taxi drivers and motel owners. We are paying less precisely because they are new drivers and BNB owners on the market. I think you're oversimplifying. Not all regulations have to inexorably converge on the taxi/hotel model. Cities could ban non-resident Airbnb rentals and there would still be enough supply to have a major impact on the market. They could impose safety & insurance regulations on Uber/Lyft but stop short of the medallion system, which is the main bottleneck on supply & pricing. In fact that's exactly what they've done: [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-makes-airbnb-legal-at-last-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-makes-airbnb-le... [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/18/us-california-lawmaking-ridesharing-idUSKBN0HD01420140918 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/18/us-california-lawm...
barry-cotter 12y ago
>The Airbnb landlord had multiple apartments to rent. So they are the same old taxi drivers and motel owners. We are just paying less because it's illegal. I've never been to San Francisco but AIUI Uber's main innovation in its original market was in being a taxi service that would actually come if you booked them. This has come up multiple times, from multiple people; it's like Google not having customer service or Amazon having no non assholes in management, except maybe in AWS.
CalRobert 12y ago
Well, there's still Couchsurfing and Zimride/Craigslist. My experience as a consumer and provider on these services has been that people are genuinely sharing what they have. Of course, it's not as polished an experience.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

pbreit 12y ago

The right answer seems to be somewhere in the middle but neither side has put forth anything reasonable. For one thing, HOAs and landlords should have pretty liberal abilities to forbid short-term rentals and pretty much all have. Renting out a room where the owner/tenant is present should be allowed on a limited basis (perhaps several weeks/months per year). Renting out a full residence in a non-zoned area should be allowed on a more limited basis (perhaps up to 1 month per year). Just like on Ebay, et al, "casual sellers" should be able to execute some limited amount of quasi-business activity before triggering all the business rules. Finally, AirBnB-style rentals should be regulated more like BnBs (duh!) than hotels. The question is, what's the right answer for these situations? And no kudos to AirBnB, et al for offering up no suggestions.

kijin 12y ago
If you own a property (or have the owner's permission), why does it matter whether you actually live in it or rent it out to other people? Should we be prohibited from lending our physical books to other people just because publishers would rather we didn't? Why does it matter who you rent out your property to? Why does it matter whether you rent it out for 30 days a year or 300 days a year? Why does it matter whether you rent it out for 30 days to one person or one day each to 30 people? The last one is especially arbitrary, and the only reason it means anything at all is because the hotel industry uses it as a threshold for market segmentation. Is it safety that matters? If so, let's drop all the "up to X days" bullshit and actually focus on safety. How can we check whether an AirBnB listing is "safe", whatever that means in this context, how do we compensate victims of "unsafe" listings, and how do we come up with a good incentive structure to encourage "safe" listings and weed out "unsafe" ones? Is it taxation that matters? Of course people should pay taxes on all of their income. In fact, AirBnB income should be easier to track down than the proceeds from that MacBook you just sold on Craigslist. AirBnB keeps excellent records of all of your income (and their fees), after all. Then it's just a matter of getting those records into the hands of the IRS. Is it zoning that matters? If so, why do we care about zoning at all? Over the last few decades, the only thing that zoning achieved in the United States is the complete segragation of residential areas from all other areas of modern life, so that everyone needs to drive a dozen miles to work and another dozen miles to get their groceries. Many cities are now beginning to toy with the idea of vibrant mixed zones, where people can live, work, shop, and play all within easy walking or cycling distances. A hostel next door suddenly doesn't seem like a bad idea after all. (Oh, it's not properly managed and people are shooting crack up their arms in the backyard? Well, that's a problem with poor management, not a problem with the mere fact that it's a hostel. Would you ban houses with basements because some basements have meth labs in them?) So I refuse to believe that the right answer has anything to do with how long you should be able to rent out a property. It's your property, you should be able to do whatever you want with it within reasonable bounds (like paying taxes and keeping your property safe for other users). As long as we keep focusing on peripheral issues that are framed by existing business models with conflicts of interest, we'll never get to ask the really pressing questions, such as reasonable safety and insurance standards for small-time landlords. And yes, I agree with you that AirBnB's reactive (as opposed to proactive) attitude toward this issue isn't helping, either. /rant

jschlesser 12y ago

Suppose it is mostly "professionals" 1. is it bad for individual "professionals" to invest capital on a small scale to provide services that people want at a greater or lesser price? Be it cars or houses. 2. If it is bad, why, and who for? Is it bad for consumers or bad for existing businesses?

URSpider94 12y ago
It's complicated. On one hand, traditional regulation keeps small or part-time players out of the market, because regulatory overhead is too high. The relative burden of regulation on large companies is much less, because they can amortize the cost across more business. On the other hand, this only works if these smaller players get relief from regulations -- which means that they are operating outside the laws and regulations. For instance, turning an apartment building into a hotel via Airbnb sidesteps rules around zoning, tax collection, housing policy, etc. You could decide that these regulations are just annoying red tape, but they were put in place for legitimate purposes in the past and it seems like we ought to at least consider the impact before we throw the baby out with the bath water. A third argument is that peer to peer marketplaces are changing the balance of power between producer and consumer. As a consumer, this sounds great -- but the person at the other end of the line is now an individual, not a giant corporation. When I have a bad cab ride, I go on Facebook and bitch about it, and life goes on. When I have a bad Uber ride, I give the driver one star and they may very well get fired -- and Uber will just replace them with one of the teeming masses hoping to make it rich driving strangers around for a living.
- _delirium 12y ago
  On one hand, traditional regulation keeps small or part-time players out of the market, because regulatory overhead is too high. I suppose it discourages some, but it's not like there aren't small or part-time players in property rental. There are a lot of them! Small-time landlords who own a few rental units are everywhere; I know two such people in my circle of friends who do that. You can either do it as a part-time job, or hire a management company for a fee to oversee the actual management. The difference is that they do it legally. They own apartments in buildings where it's legal to rent out the units, and they rent them out legally.

JacobAldridge 12y ago

Interesting that the AG's report is titled AirBnB in the City, likely a reference to the classic NYC tv show Sex and the City[1]. Interesting, in that many people incorrectly call that program Sex IN the City, which the producers object to. They point out that the AND is deliberate - the City of New York is an integral character in the story, not just a location where the story (and sex) occurs. In this dispute, the government is making a similar gambit - arguing that they need to be part of the conversation, via regulation and enforcement etc, not just the location in which the lettings take place. In other words, the report title seems to mis-quote the name of the TV show. And in doing so it missed the opportunity to position the State more strongly as a central actor in this drama. [1] And lest anyone observe the title may be a coincidence, note that Eric Schneiderman is the AG of New York State, not just the city.

secabeen 12y ago

AirBNB also provides a product that was very hard to find before. Although most of the NYC housing market consists of units kitchens and living spaces, it was very hard to find a two-bedroom apartment to rent short term before AirBNB. As someone with a family, the ability to rent a traditional apartment for a short time is a significant improvement in the market.

csense 12y ago

With the Internet, you can't stop people with spare rooms and people who need a place to stay from finding each other. We now stand at a crossroads. Down one road we recognize this is a new kind of interaction enabled by technology, which leads to legalization, with light regulation to deal with new patterns of abuse that aren't handled effectively by existing rules. Reasonable taxes and fees so the new industry covers the additional costs it's imposing on government and pays its fair share to the city, state, and country. Down the other road is heavy-handed regulation, and punitive taxes and fees that drive small entrepreneurs and the websites that enable their business model out of the legitimate market and into the shadows. AirBNB is legitimate, but if they stop servicing an area due to regulation, I'm sure a sketchier copycat will try to take over that market. The government misses out on taxes and fees from the grey/black-market transactions. Hosts / guests that have been abused or scammed will be reluctant to seek recourse through the legal system if it will mean admitting their own illegal conduct, and will have to either endure their suffering or try to self-help. It's really the same story as abortion, drugs, or Bitcoins.

pyrophane 12y ago

> But the attorney general’s report says rentals in three areas in Manhattan — Lower East Side/Chinatown, Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village/SoHo — accounted for 40 percent of private stay revenue, or $187 million. This surprised me not at all. I live in the Lower East Side and see an almost non-stop parade of groups of tourists with suitcases waiting to get let into apartments here. I know friends-of-friends who have four or five apartments that they rent out for this purpose. People who operate these illegal hotels are attracted to neighborhoods like LES/EV/Chinatown, aside from them being trendy, is because there are a lot of non-doorman buildings that have relatively inexpensive rent. Unfortunately, those buildings are a critical source of semi-affordable housing in Manhattan, and more and more of it is getting snatched up by hoteliers. I'm glad that NY is not taking the same approach as SF. People should absolutely be allowed to rent out a room or a couch, but the illegal full-time, full-apartment listings are terrible for residents who aren't aspiring hoteliers.

jgalt212 12y ago

It must be nice to have friends in high places. I know if the NY Attorney General said 75% of my business was illegal, I'd be shut down tomorrow. Yet, Airbnd can fight these charges (mostly in the court of public opinion and somewhat in the court system).