If AirBnB gave me the option to filter actual lived-in apartments, as opposed to professional operations, I would definitely prioritize those. I miss the original feeling of booking someone's actual apartment, sharing their history, books, way of life, even weird knock-knacks. IKEA catalog living rooms get old quickly.
Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
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Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
#32Person who bought an old triplex with a ton of deferred maintenance and has been running it as a vacation rental for a long time here.
This is not an easy side gig. It's more than a full time job, and I have been living in one of the units and only renting two and my SO helps out a lot. Bringing on a third unit and I am about at the point of needing one full time employee.
It is a never ending fight against entropy, as well as a not insignificant number of guests who will lie to get over on you.
You have to:
Manage bookings/field inquiries and sell property in these exchanges/make special offers to fill spots.
Accounting/legal/tax
Cleaning. This is very labor intensive. To properly clean a two bedroom apartment to hotel standards takes at least 3 hours and that's if guests left it clean. One stray hair in the wrong spot and you lose.
Maintenance. Decks/trim/walls need to be patched and painted each year. Things break. A very heavy-set guest will crack a toilet seat and it needs to be replaced in the 4 or 5 hour window you have between guests. You might get some animal infestation that needs to be dealt with.
Guest relations. Guests will forget things and want them mailed to them. They require handholding and strategies to keep review scores up.
People will constantly be trying to negotiate your price down, even though you offer 4 times the square footage for the same price as a nice hotel in the area.
I am working on automating and streamlining as much of this as possible, and there are gains to be made there. I have made gains with superior cleaning technology to save time as well.
FAQs and guides can help, but guests don't read them much of the time.
This is not real estate investing, its hospitality and meeting and greeting guests and chatting with the friendly ones is what gives you the good reviews where other less hands on places get the very critical ones.
Professional management is where this space needs to go in my opinion.
Vacation rentals have been a boutique industry for a long, long time. What was disruptive about AirBnB was the opening of it to spare bedrooms and the subletting of places people rent from others.
AirBnB has both made the space much more popular, and caused a lot of the ire and animosity we have seen towards the space.
Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
#33'Our members own seven apartments on average, they are not big companies' Amazing how people live in distorted realities. To the vast majority of the population, owning seven apartments definitely puts you into 'big company' territory. Plus not being 'big' doesn't mean you get any exemptions.
That's more small business category.
With a business plan and stable income, getting a small business loan isn't hard. In this case, there is an asset value risk, but that doesn't mean this is large company territory...
Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a problem for people looking for long term rentals as landlords can make more profit by listing a unit on AirBnB.
Is what the singularity feels like? Everything getting faster and faster, shorter and shorter term...
No, that's what living in a bubble feels like.
Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
#35The last Airbnb I rented was from a dude managing 28 other properties, all listed on Airbnb.
That's the kind of pluck and industriousness that made this country great.
Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's stated quite clearly in the article, but although professional landlords might be fine for AirBnB tenants (and obviously good for the landlords themselves), they're bad for cities and their residents: > Berlin, like most German cities, is experiencing an acute shortage of affordable homes. Rents are rising at a rate of nearly 10 percent a year, even though the city has a rent cap and has introduced one o…
Supply is very fixed? Most of the cities that you read about having a "rent crisis" also have a very aggressive contingent of anti-housing construction folks.
And if you dig into the anti-housing discourse, you'll find there are also several good reasons for that.
Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
#37> Rents are rising at a rate of nearly 10 percent a year, even though the city has a rent cap. Maybe that rent cap is why landlords prefer Airbnb. Rent caps are never a good idea, they have so many unforseen consequences.
There is no rent cap in Germany. The article is wrong.
Germany has only "soft" rent controls that limit YOY increases in rent and (selectively) increases in rents when changing tenants.
German economic orthodoxy relies very much on the need to build housing in order to deal with housing shortages and with rising rents due to housing shortages. The "soft" rent controls simply buy time to get housing projects underway. Without new housing being built, rents would still reach market levels, it would just take a bit longer.
Berlin's current problem is excessive urbanization driven by migration (1) from the neighbouring comparatively poor East German states and (2) of foreigners who speak only English and hence prefer a city that has already evolved to accommodate English speakers. Various and sundry NIMBY problems where locals oppose new housing projects also don't help.
Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
#38Put me in the camp that's very anti-AirBnB as a resident who doesn't want where I lived turned into a hotel. I live in NYC. It's a problem. None of this is a surprise, so much so that AirBnB seems to be aware of this and is acting in a way that's, at best, ethically challenged and, at worst, illegal eg deleting listings before giving data to the state of NY that "shows" most hosts only have one unit [1]. If people wa…
Why is it a problem, or what problems has it been causing in NYC? I understand the legality is questionable but I don't know why the laws exist in the first place.
Because it further reduces the number of homes available for people to actually live (which is why we have zoning laws), which inflates rent/housing prices. This forces the bottom rung out of the city, because they can't afford to live there, and now minimum wage jobs (which we need to run the services people want) can't be filled, artists and musicians disappear, and the city becomes a place only for tourists and the wealthy.
Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
#39This is not a problem. In my experience, professional landlords & managers offer clean, updated apartments that are a joy to check into and are a way better place to stay than hotels. I love using Airbnb for specifically this reason. It seems like in Europe, professional short-term apartment rental is a common thing anyway -- Airbnb just serves as a centralized listing platform. This is less common in the US.
I think it's stated quite clearly in the article, but although professional landlords might be fine for AirBnB tenants (and obviously good for the landlords themselves), they're bad for cities and their residents: > Berlin, like most German cities, is experiencing an acute shortage of affordable homes. Rents are rising at a rate of nearly 10 percent a year, even though the city has a rent cap and has introduced one o…
> The problem with housing is that the supply is very fixed.
This claim seems to be the root of every anti-AirBnB argument: AirBnB rentals eat into the resident housing supply.
But this is simply solved by zoning and regulation. In any given city there is some number of residents and some number of visitors, and some number of permanent and temporary beds for them to sleep in. Yes, AirBnB shifts some of the housing stock from resident to visitor - but, if that's what economic forces are commanding then the zoning & regulation should adapt, not fight it. It's not a capacity issue, just one of allocation.
Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's stated quite clearly in the article, but although professional landlords might be fine for AirBnB tenants (and obviously good for the landlords themselves), they're bad for cities and their residents: > Berlin, like most German cities, is experiencing an acute shortage of affordable homes. Rents are rising at a rate of nearly 10 percent a year, even though the city has a rent cap and has introduced one o…
Supply is very fixed? Most of the cities that you read about having a "rent crisis" also have a very aggressive contingent of anti-housing construction folks.
That, presumably, is one reason supply is restricted ("fixed"), along with other restrictive laws, like height or density limits, forced parking minimums, etc.
Another contributor is poor transportation infrastructure, which limits peoples' flexibility, creating more pressure on housing near train lines and stations, etc.