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I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

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Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#251

Post by curiousDog »

bradly wrote: post #145
mbreese wrote: post #108

If anyone is interested, this looks like the link to the place: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/643721 Another thing to add to the "if you're thinking of doing this" list - don't write a post about it where you and the location can be identified. This is probably against the HOA agreement (short term leases are prohibited). It also could be a safety issue if you aren't actually living there. Once someone knows the apart…

I recently bought a condo in Maui to rent and those places are sent up for this sort of thing. They even call them Condotels. Being designed for short term rentals brings a lot of benefits like resort manages check-ins/outs for you. Also, there is an echo chamber in the tech community regarding AirBnB as the standard for short term rentals. From my experience, VRBO has been much better and provided significantly more…

What's the name of the condos if you don't mind me asking? I'm looking for something similar.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#252

Post by michaelstewart »

ztnewman wrote: post #87
mmagin wrote: post #5

Does Lockitron work for someone who happens to not have mobile phone service where the rental is? As convenient as it is, it seems like short-duration travelers to a country don't always bother with having a working mobile phone where they're going. If so, I'd hope it's obvious in the listing.

Is it even available yet? I thought it was still in development

From there website looks like they're still trying to ramp up product. Maybe he has an early unit though.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#253

Post by dougabug »

jongold wrote: post #187
spokenn wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you guys in a bubble?

Maybe - I can't see prices ever dropping significantly though. Maybe 20%, but they'll always be intimidatingly expensive for first-time buyers.

Lehman Bros collapsed because their computer models excluded the possibility of a major decline in real estate prices. Investor confidence is a contrary indicator.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#254

Post by westicle »

tptacek wrote: post #179
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or having a guest house on your property and running a Craigslist ad to rent it out for the summer. At what point does somebody giving me money in return for staying on my property turn my property into a hotel? I'm not talking the legal definition, I'm talking common sense. The only working definition I can come up with is "when you reach a scale where the government can start taking a cut" Back in the old days, tha…

Easy: at the point where your sole use of the property is for short-term rentals.

The guy in question stayed in the apartment himself and let friends stay for free. So he's off the hook; short-term rental wasn't the sole use of the property.

Easy!

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#256

Post by _delirium »

andr3w321 wrote: post #133

Could someone explain to my ignorant self why zoning a property as hotel and paying hotel tax is necessary? What is it for and why was it created? It seems like a lot of these new startups are the same old business model but skirt costly taxes and regulation (Uber for taxis, Airbnb for hotels, Bitcoin for money transfers)

Part of it is that it's very different as a neighbor. My whole building is zoned residential. My neighbors are semi-stable, living here 1+ years at a time, usually longer. I recognize them, we feel reasonably comfortable about the people in the building, we have some idea about how to handle noise in a way that doesn't cause huge problems for people, etc. For example, my building at least has some informal etiquette about posting a notice that you're having a party in advance.

If the apartment next door turned into a hotel, there would be random people coming and going and I wouldn't be able to count on any of this. I would expect more problems, but even worse, rotating problems, where someone comes and goes and then another person comes. At least if it's one person you can talk to them and work things out, but if it's a new person every 2 days, it's all over again from the beginning each time, and they may not even care, because they aren't invested in living here.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#257

Post by benatkin »

thret wrote: post #218
petercooper wrote: post #4

It’s possible to find a nice apartment in a major city for less than $50,000. The place I found was in Las Vegas and it cost $40,000. Wow, I had no idea things were that good/bad. Here in the UK, I deliberately choose to live in a cheap part of the country and you'd still be talking $120k or so for an equivalent 1 bed flat. This really illustrates to me why efforts to turn various areas in the US into "mini Silicon V…

I also find this incredible. Particularly when you can spend $50k just renting a place in Vegas for three months. I realise there are slums in Vegas but the place actually looks quite nice for the money. $200/month for an unlimited cleaning lady? Those are Thailand/China prices. Crazy.

Seems like a clever way to skirt labor laws to me.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#258

Post by jessedhillon »

omonra wrote: post #237
dsl wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well seeing as you'd be obligated to collect things like hotel occupancy taxes in most cities and states, and all sorts of consumer protection laws apply to hotels, the reasonable assumption is licensing is required. At the minimum, you need a business licence.

To me the issue is scale. Just like people can hold garage sales or lemonade stand w/o a license vs running a bar. By same token - I don't mind someone renting out AN apartment. If the issue is tax - Airbnb can simply collect it on behalf of the renter. As far as consumer protection - the guest deals with AirBnB and not an individual host. If license was obtained by simply filling out a web form and paying a fee - I'…

If you live across the street from me and have a garage sale every day of the week, we're going to have a problem. Your casual dismissal of licensing and oversight, as merely protections for the entrenched, overlooks the fact that there is more than one interested party here.

I have to agree with the upstream commenter's general sentiment that this idea gets all the support here because it lends itself to an easy narrative of armchair libertarianism #winning

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#259

Post by scott_karana »

jasonwocky wrote: post #249
scott_karana wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the difference (at least in the case of NY) is lack of regulation and kickbacks (sorry, taxes) for the local government.

If you want to visit my city and see its sights, you can "kick back" into the damn kitty that it takes to keep those sights maintained.

Many cities don't charge a hotel tax.

Some tourists would prefer to support the town they're visiting by directly paying shop owners, etc, instead of having "hotel taxes" of indeterminate destination tacked onto their expenses.

(But you're right, using "kickback" was needlessly offensive.)

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#260

Post by jessedhillon »

westicle wrote: post #254
tptacek wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy: at the point where your sole use of the property is for short-term rentals.

The guy in question stayed in the apartment himself and let friends stay for free. So he's off the hook; short-term rental wasn't the sole use of the property. Easy!

This entire line of argumentation relies on the fact that there is (maybe) not a clear distinction between hotel and not-hotel.

Engineer-ish types take this to mean that the line is arbitrary and therefore irrelevant, concerns addressed by that distinction are invalid, and efforts to circumvent/exploit it are victories in the battle against analog logic. Other people understand that fuzzy definitions do not mean that the distinction therein is imaginary, merely difficult to identify.

If you've ever heard the phrase "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater," it applies here.

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