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Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thoughts, too. Though the question is why haven't they removed these earlier? Were they waiting to do it? Or was this just a result of incompetence followed by a panicked response?
Could be it never mattered before, because no one was looking, and now someone is looking.
If people could rent these properties before they were removed, how could it not matter?
That title puts a pretty heavy spin on the story, so we changed it to a factual, representative sentence from the article. If someone suggests a better title, we can change it again.
Erm... so what happened to the much-touted policy of always keeping the original title? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20misleading%20or%...
That title puts a pretty heavy spin on the story, so we changed it to a factual, representative sentence from the article. If someone suggests a better title, we can change it again.
Erm... so what happened to the much-touted policy of always keeping the original title? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And so what if they are? Have them pay the proper taxes then. Win-win for the property owner and the city.
Zoning laws are not simply about taxes. What if your neighbor decided to open a nightclub out of his garage one day, would it be okay as long as they paid taxes? The externalities imposed have to be accounted for.
This report would seem more damning if the authors had at least attempted to keep their bias out of it. I found it significantly less credible because of it. I kept wondering what info they weren't sharing in their rush to paint Airbnb as liars and cheats. Or if their own data, which has no external validation either, is true. Someone also made a good point here regarding Airbnb's motives. It is entirely feasible tha…
But, the data does not lie. If they purged somewhere around half of all Full Home listings to make their export look like there were very few landlords that listed multiple properties, then they are manipulating data. One does not "clean up" data to be submitted to the government without providing an explanation for that purge.
Devils advocate: Suppose your stats are biased by a % of bad listings (fake, bad, etc.) that violate some rule. Would you want to include them in your numbers? If having the correct statistics (i.e. excluding these bad listings) was important for regulatory or marketing purposes, then fixing this before the report is part of the fiduciary duty of the firm with its shareholders, so no surprise here.
Generally speaking, altering your statistics to report to regulators will open you up to a lot of potential legal trouble as the regulators might well decide to take the view that you're deliberately giving them misleading information. If you need to massage the date to represent what you believe to be a realistic view of your data then you still need to start off with your 'bad' data and explain why you don't believ…
Now regulators can and in many cases often choose to believe that companies act in good faith when they clean up their data profile before handing it to investigators.
Without clear data, regulators can also assume that a company is trying to obscure the truth by throwing everything and the kitchen sink into a data set while internally only using a subset of the data because it knows X part is patently false.
The implication is that people are illegally listing multiple properties that they own or rent, but this analysis doesn't rule out the cases where someone hires a professional property manager to list their place on AirBnB while they're on vacation or away. That property manager will have multiple "whole home" listings but there's nothing illegal about it. But we shouldn't expect an unbiased analysis from a site like…
A huge number of rental tenants in NYC are not legally able to sublet. Hiring someone else to do it does not absolve them.
Devils advocate: Suppose your stats are biased by a % of bad listings (fake, bad, etc.) that violate some rule. Would you want to include them in your numbers? If having the correct statistics (i.e. excluding these bad listings) was important for regulatory or marketing purposes, then fixing this before the report is part of the fiduciary duty of the firm with its shareholders, so no surprise here.
"No similar event took place in other cities in North America or elsewhere."
If this were them legitimately cleaning up their listings, and not misleading regulators, you'd imagine they'd have taken similar action across their entire database. The fact that they only "corrected" their NYC listings before releasing their NYC report is rather telling, assuming that the data presented here is correct.
It's interesting that the word "photoshopped" is being used for this kind of manipulation as well.
[0] Or evidently earlier as a term for a quick, roughly aimed shot from a gun. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=snapshot