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Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

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Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#361

Post by UncleEntity »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #350
dcgudeman wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Kind of a illogical reaction to a tough situation right? What is AirBnb supposed to do if one of their hosts sells their house without notifying them and all similar listing are already booked? Would more compensation satisfy you? Honestly confused why you would want to punish a service you admit to using frequently.

Airbnb said they would help find a comparable place for us to stay. A comparable place was $2000+ more than the place we had booked initially (due to most places being booked 6 days before a holiday trip). They gave us a $200 coupon. Which meant we spent $1800 more on a place than we planed to. I expected them to have some plan to ensure users don't get fucked if someone sells their house. Dozens of similar, but more…

> I expected them to have some plan to ensure users don't get fucked if someone sells their house.

Well, they probably banned the owner from the platform, easy-peasy;)

Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#362

Post by beckman466 »

solveit wrote: post #330
cool_dude85 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Betting your life? Zuckerberg was at Harvard and I assume has well-off parents. FB could have been a total dud and I'm sure he would have done fine.

You got me curious, so from Wikipedia: > Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, on May 14, 1984,[9] the son of psychiatrist Karen (née Kempner) and dentist Edward Zuckerberg.[10] He and his three sisters (Arielle, businesswoman Randi, and writer Donna) were raised in a Reform Jewish household[11][12] in Dobbs Ferry, New York.[13] His great-grandparents were Austrian, German, and Polish Jews. Sound…

> I disagree with the possibly unintended insinuations that children of rich people can't work hard because they have a safety net, that facebook was an easy success, etc etc.

did you really just try to defend the children of billionaires?

Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#363

Post by AnthonyMouse »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #327
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really multiple factors. There was only one. Restrictive zoning. That constrained supply. Everything else is just the various parties fighting over the now-insufficient housing supply.

Single use zoning lives due to NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision. The former stays forever while the latter is in play.

It's not just "NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision." Corporations that own houses don't want their value to decline. People renting properties out on AirBNB don't want their value to decline. They're just different categories of existing property owners who want property values to stay high or increase more.

The mechanism they all use for that is restrictive zoning. To win that you have to defeat them all. That's why it's hard to do.

Having failed to actually solve the problem, some people have had the idea to foist it onto someone else. Restrict who you can rent to, so people can't buy a property and use it for vacation rentals, on the theory that it will shift supply to long-term rentals. Then that makes the problem worse for short-term rentals, creating an incentive for regulatory arbitrage by AirBNB. Then long-term renters condemn AirBNB for thwarting their attempt to shift costs onto people who can't vote in the jurisdiction with the zoning problem.

All of that is bike shedding and friendly fire. The only real solution is to increase the housing supply.

Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#364

Post by vidarh »

evgen wrote: post #348
solveit wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Maybe Lenin and Stalin had their reasons" is not a take I expected to see on HN today, but that's the lifecycle of all successful intellectually-oriented discussion forums I guess.

If you are not completely intellectually-stunted then you might actually know a bit about Russian history of the period. While few would excuse the later actions of Lenin or Stalin, the people who actually revolted against the Tsar had seriously justifiable reasons for doing so and given what I know about the time and place I would like to think that if I were in their place I would have joined them in putting the ru…

By the time of the Bolshevik coup, the Tsar had been in house arrest after the February Revolution for months. The February Revolution was justified. The Bolshevik coup was not.

Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#365

Post by heavyset_go »

simias wrote: post #150
dorchadas wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how a few individuals can flood the short-term rental market in an area. And, if it's like some cities (Dublin, Galway), they do this at the expense of the long-term rental market.

And the housing market at large, since they also buy flats to turn them into short term rentals.

Developers were building apartments that were meant for the short-term rental market, too. Even the small amount of new housing that did get built were short-term rentals.

Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#366

Post by [deleted] »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #290
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that you guys from Russia have started thinking that you're the solo holder of human sufference, I come from Southern Italy with Mafia and absent government, where rich get richer, kids play on the street surrounded by heroin needles, all with few castles of rich people being the kings among the shit, so yeah I won't dare to tell you how entitled you are to your ideas, but probably if the people that too…

The proper solution is not to rob the rich under the cheering applause of people like you, but to make poor people more wealthy.

[deleted]

Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#367

Post by rsj_hn »

bencollier49 wrote: post #159
rsj_hn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buy to let. I'd like to see buy to let severely curtailed within the city, as it's certainly driving up already high prices. I'm familiar with the argument that AirBnB reduces rental stock by devoting it to tourism. But I rarely encounter someone who is mad that more rental stock is being added. Wouldn't you want rental prices to fall by increasing the availability of rental stock? Is a big gap between the cost of…

In the UK housing market, the availability of cheap credit in the buy-to-let market has driven the cost of a home up to levels of unaffordability for the average person. It's made worse by the treatment of housing as an asset class, which means that the traditional solution (build more) has been shown to be ineffective. There is a whole class of people who buy house after house, and make a lot of money out of it, and…

> In the UK housing market, the availability of cheap credit in the buy-to-let market has driven the cost of a home up to levels of unaffordability for the average person.

Let's say you borrow at 0% interest and with zero down. And you take out an interest-only loan -- that's the loosest possible lending standard, right?

Still you would not pull the trigger and buy to let unless:

rent > interest + maintenance + cost of dealing with tenants.

That means that lax lending standards can at most drive the price of ownership up to the price of renting (but not really, since there are gaps between renters). At the same time, the more rental stock is added, the more rents fall, making housing cheaper in the area.

So I disagree that low mortgate rates can allow rental investment to create a bubble. Rental investment is the one place where you are guaranteed there isn't going to be a bubble, because they are approaching this as a cashflow decision.

Where you see bubbles is in people buying homes for themselves to occupy, so there is no sanity check to see if it pencils out our not in terms of rental cash flows.

So cheap credit can absolutely cause high prices as a result of owner-occupants, but not as a result of buy to let. When that happens, you see rental stock being taken out of the market and used for owner occupancy.

This is why nations with a large share of renters, like Germany, are also nations with the fewest housing bubbles. Housing bubbles are a phenomena for owner-occupants, because the value of living in a place is so subjective and can be devoid of actual incomes. Rent, on the other hand, must be paid with income.

Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#368

Post by anm89 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #266

I'm a power user of Airbnb. I have never disliked a service as much that I pay continue to pay for other than LinkedIn. Both of these are because I have/had little choice. What it all comes down to is getting a shitting experience and paying a premium for it. I have a 30+ day stay that had been booked close to 6 months in advanced canceled 7 days before my stay because the user sold their house. Airbnb said they woul…

Looking for long term stays on airbnb is an absolute minefield.

Yeah the owner should be forced to pay to put you up in a hotel of your choice if they optionally choose to cancel on short notice.

> I'm a power user of Airbnb. I have never disliked a service as much that I pay continue to pay for other than LinkedIn

As someone who has more or less been living out of Airbnbs for 5 years as as digital nomad I couldn't agree more. There is however a secret code language for talking to there support where you can generally get them to treat you fairly by being very selective in the language you use to describe situations to make sure you never fall outside the boundries of their insane policies.

Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#369

Post by lotsofpulp »

namdnay wrote: post #354
lotsofpulp wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air travel via private jet is better than the early days though.

Yes, that’s what I said: general aviation == “private jets”

I was trying to make a tongue in cheek comment about life getting better for those at the top and worse for the middle.

Re: Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation

#370

Post by iso1631 »

dundarious wrote: post #278
jupp0r wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion here is centered around very desirable centralized locations. Out in the countryside things look very different. You can buy surprisingly cheap houses 2h outside of Berlin. Nobody does.

You also need an income to live.

Buy a house 40 years ago, pay your mortgage like a good workerbee

Finish paying mortgage, use the equity to buy a house 20 years ago and rent it out. Rent income > mortgage interest (and capital too)

House price increases, use equity to buy a few more houses.

Fast forward to today, you have 3 million in equity and 10k/month coming in after costs.

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