The government is more than capable of fining the tenant.
How would the government know who the tenant is? I don't know how it works elsewhere, but where I live (Florida), there is no legal registration of tenants for leased properties.
Ask the property owner. If the owner can produce a signed contract proving there is a tenant and who the tenant is, then the fine goes to the tenant.
This will, of course, motivate owners to use contracts when leasing their properties.
I have had bad experience with AirBnB. For me, it was a rental agency posing as a family. The listing had photo of a family which I hoped to meet when I rented. After checking in, I called the phone number and it was picked by a receptionist with the usual courtesy. I asked if I could meet the family, she said "there is no family sir" we are a rental agency. After some days, talking with the next door neighbors, I fo…
Property ownership is public information that can be verified with the town. Furthermore, I didn't see any reason to jump to such conclusions given in the article. These people seem like professional swindlers so they could have presented false documents when signing the lease.
Most false documents can generally be detected by reference checks, particularly if it includes a credit check. The landlords in the article did not sound like they'd bothered. Property ownership is not trivial to check: not only does the registrar vary by location, with varying availabilities of information, but who is to say that person X asking airbnb to do / not do something is the X on the title? Further, lots o…
I have had bad experience with AirBnB. For me, it was a rental agency posing as a family. The listing had photo of a family which I hoped to meet when I rented. After checking in, I called the phone number and it was picked by a receptionist with the usual courtesy. I asked if I could meet the family, she said "there is no family sir" we are a rental agency. After some days, talking with the next door neighbors, I fo…
> Now I know, there is a reason why hotels charge more, you pay for the safety, the standards and a 24 hours reception desk.
Yup. I've pretty much only ever had bad experiences with AirBnB. At this point I've just stopped using them. There's a lot to be said for the predictability, comfort and service of a good hotel.
> I'm interested to hear more about how Uber behaviour is inconsiderate. Certainly, and I think I can sum up why you and I have different experiences in another quote: > In the U.K. Your government didn't bend to the "but they're just shaaaaaaring so being licensed is haaaaard " bullshit that many governments here did. (Austin, Texas tried to pull it off and the Legislature of the State of Texas smacked them, hard.)…
Try that bus lane blocking stud fin the uk and you'll find the bus has taken a picture of you, and a hefty fine will land on the door of the registered keeper of the car. For some reason in London, black cabs (racist drivers with low standards, high fares, and cash only for tax evasion) have lobbied for their drivers to be included in the "public transport" group, meaning bus lanes are full of buses and rich business…
Thankfully, at least SF Muni has traffic enforcement cameras
on the buses and trains and they issue tickets when folks are in the bus lane & bus stops.
"Changing the locks and sorting it out later" is incredibly illegal. Your "advice" is useless.
It's not illegal to keep out trespassers. Maybe one wouldn't change the locks on the first day, but after seeing one group of carousing teenagers with whom one had no contractual relationship replaced by a different such group, it would be pretty safe to shut the whole thing down.
In most jurisdictions, housing courts are heavily, heavily, heavily biased towards tenants over landlords. Landlords can't change the locks without a valid eviction order. Doing so is likely to delay their eventual success in court - if the scammers can focus the judge on an illegal lock-out, that's going to be the first issue decided.
There's a widely accepted concept in land ownership: essentially the land belongs to the person that tills it. You cannot buy 1000 acres, ignore it and expect that your grandson can show up 60 years later with the deed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession Maybe the homeowners should pay more attention to their properties? Not to mention that in most cases they are the ones posting the listings. If the te…
Yeah, I was struck by how both examples in the article were property owners living out of state who never even met their tenants? One of them thought she was renting to a family with two kids, but it was actually some scammers. Meeting your renters in-person once would have cleared that up. These people are buying a property, renting it to cover the mortgage, and planning to sell it at a profit. All without doing any…
>Meeting your renters in-person once would have cleared that up.
Most false documents can generally be detected by reference checks, particularly if it includes a credit check. The landlords in the article did not sound like they'd bothered. Property ownership is not trivial to check: not only does the registrar vary by location, with varying availabilities of information, but who is to say that person X asking airbnb to do / not do something is the X on the title? Further, lots o…
Yes it is an API lookup to verify the LLC's authorized persons, for Florida: http://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/ByName These people sound like professional swindlers, you can buy someone's identity on the darknet for a couple hundred dollars at the most. They almost certainly filled out the rental application using someone else's information. That was implied in TFA. Property ownership is very trivial…
You skipped entirely over trusts. Property managers are regularly not named members of an LLC. To wit, I'm a manager of an apartment building that I (quite unfortunately) don't have any ownership interest in. Building a state-by-state, or county-by-county lookup system; verifying person X is authorized to make decisions for a property; then detecting updates is decidedly non-trivial. You can skip googling since I already know the answer: there's very limited information available in many states on corporations. See eg Delaware. Other states don't require updates, or require updates only on very long periods. Many small LLCs simply skip even required annual updates. There's also complications such as the address used by the building and even the postal service is quite possibly not the recorded address. In 2015, [1] claims there were 550k property listings in the US alone. None of this can't be done, but trivial it isn't. I happen to know much of this because I used to work on address information.
It isn't trespassing. They had the permission of the tenants. It was violation of lease but that is not a crime.
If I give you permission to walk into the Y Combinator offices, you're still trespassing. The tenants had no ability to grant legally meaningful permission.
Criminal trespass doesn't work that way. For the most part, you have to have clear knowledge that you are on someone else's property without permission - for example, climbing over a fence, or walking past a "No Tresspassing" sign. If someone invites you into the Y Combinator offices and gives you the door code, you're not trespassing.
I have had bad experience with AirBnB. For me, it was a rental agency posing as a family. The listing had photo of a family which I hoped to meet when I rented. After checking in, I called the phone number and it was picked by a receptionist with the usual courtesy. I asked if I could meet the family, she said "there is no family sir" we are a rental agency. After some days, talking with the next door neighbors, I fo…
> Now I know, there is a reason why hotels charge more, you pay for the safety, the standards and a 24 hours reception desk. Yup. I've pretty much only ever had bad experiences with AirBnB. At this point I've just stopped using them. There's a lot to be said for the predictability, comfort and service of a good hotel.
Agree, when I go for a vacation, its my hard earned vacation. I wont and I dont have time to deal with a myriad of AirBnB problems. Hotels are predictable and guaranteed. Another upcoming is Turo. I used it once and discontinued. The owner cancelled my reservation 4 days before my vacation. So I went back to my old faithful Enterprise. The gist of my experience is, if you value your vacation & time, do yourself a favor and go old school. Let AirBnB and Turo make money for their investors, but they can count me out. The only service that I never had a bad experience is Uber.