Nice, I hated feeling like I was doing something shady whenever renting AirBnBs in vancouver, they always had directions like don't talk to anyone, always mention that you were a relative from out of town, etc, so as not to attract attention.
Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
61–70 of 89 posts
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#62Earlier 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.
Let's also ignore that before the foreign investor tax over 20% of purchases were being made by foreign investors in places like Langley and Richmond. That is insane when you think that these people aren't selling at the same time, and is just pure demand.
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#63Earlier 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…
Why not? Because we've seen places where that basic series of events took place.
That takes a long time to play out, and other factors come in to play during that time.
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> 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.
You do want people living in their homes for the vast majority of the time. You want them living there, hopefully being part of the community, getting invested in their lives there. The original argument is very sensible.
> 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!
This is only sort of okay. No reasonable person who cares about housing would push to move long term residents to hotels. This is just a terrible premise to put forward.
> 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.
Do they really? Like whom? AirBnB isn't particularly expensive, and all-in costs are more often than not more expensive than hotels. I don't know _anyone_ who says they travel more because of AirBnb.
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It seems unlikely that there are no empty properties what so ever in a big city like Vancouver, surely there must be some.
Do you have any sort of data to back up your claim that there are no empty properties?
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#66As always happens in these cases, I believe that whatever public authority (the municipality, the governement, etc.) making an "agreement" with a private company does three (IMHO) terrible things:
1) undervalues its own authority (ultimately the authority of citizens/people) to simply make a Law or regulation and enforce it
2) recognizes to a private company (which big as it might be is only one of the various playes in the field) a "contractual force" that the company should not have, besides giving to it a lot of brand publicity for free
3) consequently all other companies operating in the same field are (without any particular reason) underprivileged, somehow reinforcing and helping the attempts to become a monopoly of the "big one".
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> 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.
I think you're confused about what I'm saying here. I'm not stating that this is legislation I'd hope to have passed--I'm saying that your point (short term rentals don't decrease effective housing availability in Vancouver) can only be true if certain conditions are met--your main point here, being covered in c) 'the dwelling rented is the principal residence of the owner.' This agreement with AirBnB is a step towards acknowledging this.
Mostly, though, I think your response indicates more strongly that you're just confused about Vancouver as a city. Things that work elsewhere in the world (eg: flat expansion) don't work for Vancouver due to ocean to the west, the US border on the south, and mountains/other townships already experiencing housing pains on the north and east. Things that most other places care about (eg: AirBnB tourism) don't apply so much to Vancouver, as almost all our tourists either go to Whistler or arrives on cruise ships (and thus needs no AirBnB). The hotels and hostels have more than enough capacity to handle the rest.
It's a fact of the matter that landlords buying multiple apartments to rent out temporary AirBnBs reduces housing stock, just as it's a fact that refusing to rezone certain areas of Vancouver reduces potential house stock.
> I can tell you people travel a lot more because of airbnb
I agree, but it's not pertinent to discussion w.r.t. Vancouver.
> and that there are way more cities that don't care about airbnb at all because it doesnt affect their housing market significantly.
I agree, but it's not pertinent to discussion w.r.t. Vancouver.
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#68Earlier 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.
10% foreign ownership of a major city housing market is an extraordinarily high number that will certainly change the market dramatically.
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#69Earlier 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.
Those figures are estimates. Blind trusts and proxy buyers are two ways to hide ownership.
Protest all you want, but with current available data, all the public can do is speculate, only the government has access to the data necessary to have a deeper understanding.
Re: Vancouver signs first agreement in Canada with Airbnb for short-term rentals
#70Earlier 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…
Why not? Because we've seen places where that basic series of events took place. That takes a long time to play out, and other factors come in to play during that time.
Places where the building was via foreign investment, in cash, absorbing all risk?