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Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

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Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#41

Post by fatbird »

stale2002 wrote: post #36
knuththetruth wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply is part of the problem, but the real culprit is that housing has been financialized and opened up as an investment vehicle for global capital. It doesn’t really matter if you change zoning laws if everything that gets built is to serve this kind of investment. Major cities in the US, such as LA and NYC, simultaneously have huge lots of vacant luxury housing stock and homelessness crises for precisely this reas…

The solution to housing being used as an investment is to build so much housing supply that this investment becomes worthless. Why SHOULDN'T we just let the Chinese build a bunch of empty buildings? It's their money and if they want to waste it building us cheap housing on an investment that will eventually go bust, I say we let them. The solution is scorched earth, "LOL, you thought your investment was going to go u…

Nihilism is never a solution.

Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#42

Post by conanbatt »

sov wrote: post #28
conanbatt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people that stay at short term rentals are also dwellers. They are taking up the time the longer term rentals aren't taking.

You'd be correct iff a) the dwelling is occupied near-100% of the time AND b) hotels, hostels and similarly-zoned dwellings are routinely at capacity OR c) the dwelling rented is the principal residence of the owner. Do you have data to support this w.r.t. Vancouver?

> a) the dwelling is occupied near-100%

That requirement is as sensible as saying that vancouver should outlaw residents from vacationing outside vancouver to ensure there are no vacant properties. Its not the goal to maximize each minute within a housing unit, thats not something you want to focus on.

> b) hotels, hostels and similarly-zoned dwellings are routinely at capacity

There is no need to look at such thing. In this case you are trying to look at each potential dwelling unit as an abstract unit and each resident as a unit, but they have their own differences and imperfections. Looking at such a metric will push you to think policies like moving long term residents to hotels!

> Do you have data to support this w.r.t. Vancouver?

I can tell you people travel a lot more because of airbnb, and that there are way more cities that don't care about airbnb at all because it doesnt affect their housing market significantly.

Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#43

Post by conanbatt »

borne0 wrote: post #29
conanbatt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no quandary at all, the visitors and the landlords agree. Only a minority disagrees. If the rate of visitors reaches a rate where where the occupancy rate of airbnbs is makes them less interesting than long term units, congratulations, you have found market equilibrium.

So people who simply want to live in a city near to where they work and their children go to school have to be subject to market corrections where a single massively financed pseudo-hotel can massively distort a major cost of living assignment? Ridiculous. This is where common-sense regulation is needed.

Why do you call it distortion? Its the opposite: the distortion is having empty properties, hotel taxes and zoning.

You make a weird argument: you mention the people that work in the city and want to live near it, and this argument has at least 2 flaws. The first one is that in a numbers game, the people that lose out on this exchange is a much smaller number than all the rest. That is, a small proportion of people see their conditions relatively worse because of how a third party does with their property. IF you put it up to a vote of all people involved, they would lose out big time.

The second is that you dont take into consideration that airbnb has made it cheaper and easier to travel for people of that socio-economic status as well. Its not only hipsters and software engineers that user airbnb. You have to weigh in the benefit of the consumer.

Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#44

Post by conanbatt »

sincerely wrote: post #33
conanbatt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no quandary at all, the visitors and the landlords agree. Only a minority disagrees. If the rate of visitors reaches a rate where where the occupancy rate of airbnbs is makes them less interesting than long term units, congratulations, you have found market equilibrium.

are you suggesting that the number of tourists and landlords combined is more than the number of people that disagree with housing units existing as permanent airbnb listings?

Yes.

Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#45

Post by toasterlovin »

msie wrote: post #35
mrgordon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally the news articles say its Chinese investors parking their money in Vancouver housing since it is likely to be stable compared to the yuan, etc.

Ah yes, the Chinese investor bogeyman. Apparently there are enough millionaires to cause problems in so many cities around the globe. Yet latest figures put foreign ownership at around 10% max. Let's ignore low interest rates and Canadians bidding against themselves in a hot market.

I also think the foreign investor thing is overblown, but it’s always the marginal demand that causes prices to go up. Take 10% of the property owners out of a market and prices will go down.

Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#46

Post by chii »

fatbird wrote: post #41
stale2002 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to housing being used as an investment is to build so much housing supply that this investment becomes worthless. Why SHOULDN'T we just let the Chinese build a bunch of empty buildings? It's their money and if they want to waste it building us cheap housing on an investment that will eventually go bust, I say we let them. The solution is scorched earth, "LOL, you thought your investment was going to go u…

Nihilism is never a solution.

That's not nihilism, but a correct free market response to over-investment in a particular asset type.

The fact that this didn't happen is due to regulation and other market distortions.

Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#47

Post by toasterlovin »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #19
eloff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this contributes, but it's not the principal problem. The core problem is supply shortage, which given the current astronomical prices has everything to do with zoning. Relax that enough and the market will solve the problem in a matter of years.

This would be a satisfying solution were it not for the fact that Vancouver's housing starts and completions graph is a giant up and to the right. Vancouver has been building supply. At this point if you're a politician in Vancouver that is promising to solve the problem in a few years you're going to get dumped. People wanted this problem solved yesterday.

Absolute growth in housing supply doesn’t matter. It’s growth in housing supply relative to growth in population.

Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#48

Post by toasterlovin »

munk-a wrote: post #16
notatoad wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In reality supply creation is constrained by real world factors such as time and labour supply and "just add more supply" is not so easy. It takes time. Ultimately, supply is constrained by cost. And in Vancouver, that's not an issue - if the regulation allows it, converting a single family home to a multi-unit dwelling is so ridiculously profitable that the solution to the housing crisis is to simply change zoning…

Vancouver has some special geographic considerations that you need to consider and within the downtown core the conversion away from single family units is AFAIK completely done[1]. Density increases in the downtown core are now being down by removing lower density apartment/condo buildings and replacing them with higher density buildings. I am aware that the nearest city (New Westminster) is developing pretty active…

Whenever I visit the greater Vancouver area, I’m struck by how much undeveloped land there is for a place with such insane house prices. Truly a head scratcher.

Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#49

Post by weirdmantis »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #18
notatoad wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In reality supply creation is constrained by real world factors such as time and labour supply and "just add more supply" is not so easy. It takes time. Ultimately, supply is constrained by cost. And in Vancouver, that's not an issue - if the regulation allows it, converting a single family home to a multi-unit dwelling is so ridiculously profitable that the solution to the housing crisis is to simply change zoning…

You're absolutely correct. Vancouver is unlike SF in that it has no issues building new residential buildings. At the moment housing starts in Vancouver are at all time highs, unprecedented for decades, and yet vacancy remains sub zero and housing is very unaffordable. This suggests that even these unprecedented levels of supply creation are unable to meet demand, and there are more issues at play than a lack of supp…

We also have unprecedented immigration with no end in sight in fact, we are rapidly increasing it. As well, we are allowing more and more temporary foreign residents (students, TFWs, illegals, etc). We need drastically more supply.

Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals

#50

Post by borne0 »

conanbatt wrote: post #43
borne0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So people who simply want to live in a city near to where they work and their children go to school have to be subject to market corrections where a single massively financed pseudo-hotel can massively distort a major cost of living assignment? Ridiculous. This is where common-sense regulation is needed.

Why do you call it distortion? Its the opposite: the distortion is having empty properties, hotel taxes and zoning. You make a weird argument: you mention the people that work in the city and want to live near it, and this argument has at least 2 flaws. The first one is that in a numbers game, the people that lose out on this exchange is a much smaller number than all the rest. That is, a small proportion of people s…

Your argument is absurd, the first sentence gives it away 'empty properties'. Vancouver has no empty properties.
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