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Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

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Re: Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

#91

Post by URSpider94 »

_delirium wrote: post #31
gerner wrote: post #19

In some ways, this is the dark side of disrupting established industries: legal protections aren't in place yet; it's not clear what recourse people caught in never before seen corner cases have. We (e.g. HN folks) are quick to applaud people with new ideas that are shaking things up (e.g. Airbnb, Uber, etc.) I suspect this is the sort of scenario detractors (e.g. Seattle City Council re: Uber) are worried about. Ter…

I'm not sure these are "never before seen corner cases". This kind of stuff is pretty much Landlording 101, and it's standard practice for someone engaged in renting a property to know about eviction laws. This person wasn't even engaging in what you might call the new, casual-sharing-of-personal-possessions style of rental, where someone rents their own personal apartment out occasionally while they're on vacation.…

This kind of stuff is pretty much Chauffeuring 101, and it's standard practice for someone engaged in driving for hire (through Lyft or UberX) to know about hack laws.

This kind of stuff is pretty much Retailing 101, and it's standard practice for someone engaged in selling items on the open market (through eBay) to know about business laws.

What's "disruptive" about all of these services is that they enable people who wouldn't ordinarily be willing to go through all the red tape and training to enter a previously specialized business, to do so with a few mouse clicks.

One could argue that all of these services (AirBnB, Lyft, eBay) are targeted at amateurs who want to dabble, but we all know that they make a significant amount of revenue from people who are using their platforms to run full-scale businesses, in many cases without securing business licenses, liability insurance, paying relevant taxes and fees, etc.

I don't know if I'd say that the services themselves are responsible, but they are certainly happy to take profit from high-volume vendors operating outside the law.

Re: Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

#92

Post by URSpider94 »

thekevan wrote: post #89
_delirium wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really squatting in this case, which is where someone takes up residence in a property they have never had a contractual right to, like building a log cabin on your farmland, and then living in it for years. That's a different set of laws. This is rather a person who had a legitimate lease, but has violated or exceeded it. Here they clearly had a legal right to lease the apartment for the first 44 days: this…

While it is less like squatting which I should have realized and I'm glad you that pointed out, I wasn't addressing that as much as I should have been. There was an arrangement for X amount of days, which they have overstayed, so I am wondering where California law falls there. Because now they are in a default lease, one exists on the lawbooks. It's enough of a differentiation to possibly give her a little bit more…

Read the excerpts from California law that I posted in some other comments. IANAL, but the code is pretty specific to point out that the protections against harassment apply to "any lease or other tenancy or estate at will, however created, of property used by a tenant as his residence". As a landlord, I also have been told that judges have a tendency to dismiss eviction suits where there is substantiated evidence of harassment.

Re: Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

#93

Post by bane »

My god, Airbnb is such a huge liability time-bomb.

All it's going to take is some tenant slipping on a wet bathroom floor or some other nonsense.

I hope they've squirreled away a huge legal defense fund from their last fundraising round.

edit

searched and found these, tip of the iceburg

http://www.sfbg.com/2014/04/29/lawsuits-target-airbnb-rental...

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/airbnb-legal...

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/06/18/airbnb_might_have_j...

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/06/10/stabilized_tribeca_...

http://www.fastcompany.com/3027798/the-secret-to-airbnbs-fre...

Re: Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

#94

Post by jonnathanson »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #85
jonnathanson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airbnb makes it easier for naive or unsophisticated "landlords" to rent out their properties. Yes, those would-be landlords should educate themselves about what they are getting into. But you could argue that Airbnb, by dint of its existence and its success, is lowering the barriers to entry for the would-be landlords of the world -- and thus bears a social and ethical, if not necessarily a legal, responsibility to e…

If you read some of my previous comments[1] on AirBnB, you'll see that I question many of the company's practices. AirBnB has constructive knowledge that some of its "hosts" are violating the law in certain cities where it is well-publicized that short-term rentals are illegal. And it has constructive knowledge that there are virtually no apartment leases that permit renters to turn their apartments into hotel rooms…

Fair enough critique of the woman in this story. Let's temporarily put aside the nature of her failings. I'd still describe them as naiveté more than greed, per se, but regardless, we can agree she has failings. She's not a very sympathetic protagonist. But let's talk about others like her.

Do you not agree that Airbnb is probably attracting a fair number of would-be landlords to the market who would not be in the market otherwise? Yes, the vacation rental market existed long before Airbnb. No, I don't buy the implication that Airbnb is only attracting people who would have operated in the pre-Airbnb vacation market. Clearly Airbnb has expanded the supply side of this market, at least somewhat by enticing new entrants into it, many of whom are probably unversed in the laws and regulations they should be versed in. That's not Airbnb's fault, but it is Airbnb's headache.

Regardless of our sympathies toward this woman in this particular case, she might be a canary in a coal mine. There are plenty of theoretical Airbnb hosts, and perhaps actual hosts, who could very easily take the plunge on Airbnb without coming to grips with the ins and outs of rental laws. They would assume, furthermore, that because Airbnb exists and thrives, then surely it must have sorted out the fine print.

Airbnb can take actions to prevent this situation from happening again. That doesn't necessarily mean blocking 30+-day rentals, or cutting back on the range of options one can undertake on Airbnb. But it probably means providing more information, at the very least, triggered by certain actions taken when posting a listing. Not because they have to, but because they know that their business model creates an "easy button" for a lot of unsophisticated users. That's a fine business model. But if you're going to do that, then you need to design prophylactic solutions to protect people from their own stupidity [greed/arrogance/naiveté/haste/whatever we want to call it in any given case]. You can't protect them from everything, but at the very least, you can learn and adapt as you go.

Not every PR hiccup deserves a complete redesign of the UX flow, of course. And no solution fixes every potentiality. So you evaluate the problems on a case-by-case basis as they emerge, estimating the likelihood that they'll happen again, and weighing the costs of a fix against the benefits. I'm not a fan of preemptively freaking out about possible edge cases. But when something like this happens, at the very least, you need to analyze whether it's a ridiculous edge case, or whether it's likely to happen again.

And who knows? Maybe this woman's mistake serves a sorting function, and the problem solves itself. Nobody will make her mistake again. Or so we'd hope.

Re: Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

#95

Post by chaostheory »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #30

What we must have is a network that enables a peer-to-peer trust rating for individuals. Sort of like Yelp, but for people. No doubt such a system would be a huge privacy problem for people as people would say that negative reviews reveal their private facts, or that those reviews are defamation. However, if the network is decentralized, then it might be possible to keep it running even in the face of opposition from…

I don't feel these guys are scammers at least when it comes to kickstarter. They have plenty of evidence to show that they have built something (even though it's incomplete).

I feel it's more accurate to label these guys as talented people who don't know how to manage a project.

As for AirBnB, the label is accurate. They're probably mining bitcoins as well since the electricity bill is so high.

Re: Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

#96

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

jonnathanson wrote: post #94
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read some of my previous comments[1] on AirBnB, you'll see that I question many of the company's practices. AirBnB has constructive knowledge that some of its "hosts" are violating the law in certain cities where it is well-publicized that short-term rentals are illegal. And it has constructive knowledge that there are virtually no apartment leases that permit renters to turn their apartments into hotel rooms…

Fair enough critique of the woman in this story. Let's temporarily put aside the nature of her failings. I'd still describe them as naiveté more than greed, per se, but regardless, we can agree she has failings. She's not a very sympathetic protagonist. But let's talk about others like her. Do you not agree that Airbnb is probably attracting a fair number of would-be landlords to the market who would not be in the ma…

The internet has created and expanded many markets. I am sure there are folks who considered the availability of services like AirBnB when making a decision to invest in a rental property, just as I'm sure there are folks who started a new business in part because they believed internet advertising would make it easy to reach potential customers. Should Google inform unsophisticated advertisers that they might lose tens of thousands of dollars on AdWords campaigns if they don't know what they're doing or overestimate response rates?

At the end of the day, you refuse to believe the simple fact that even if AirBnB goes out of its way to inform its "hosts" that their use of its service might subject them to certain laws, risks, etc., folks like the landlord in question will continue to click on your so-called "easy button" because whether greedy or naive, many people simply don't consider the possibility that anything bad can happen to them. Until it actually happens of course.

As I pointed out, the landlord here is on record stating that she ignored her own gut feeling about her tenant from hell after there were early indications he'd be trouble. If an individual presented with clear and specific warning signs that trigger an instinctual unease is willing to ignore such signals, why do you believe such an individual would make a better decision when presented with, say, a popup containing abstract warnings?

As for the idea that this story will prevent other such stories, the landlord in question is hardly the first landlord to have to deal with a rental gone bad and she won't be the last. Situations like these are not uncommon, and today's crop of real estate newbies makes the same mistakes that real estate newbies were making 20 years ago. The only reason this got any attention at all was that the so-called victim played up the AirBnB angle, which many people correctly recognized as being a red herring.

Re: Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

#97

Post by TheCoelacanth »

darren884 wrote: post #77
_delirium wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot violently throw a tenant out of their apartment, because that is a violent crime. You can violently repel an intruder in self-defense, but if you have actually rented an apartment to someone, they are not an intruder. If, after first renting to them, you later believe they should leave—and they disagree—then you have a dispute about the terms and duration of rental. (It might be a really one-sided dispute…

I see, so she will just have to co-exist with them.

No, she will just have to formally evict them.

Re: Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

#98

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

DanBC wrote: post #61
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #30

What we must have is a network that enables a peer-to-peer trust rating for individuals. Sort of like Yelp, but for people. No doubt such a system would be a huge privacy problem for people as people would say that negative reviews reveal their private facts, or that those reviews are defamation. However, if the network is decentralized, then it might be possible to keep it running even in the face of opposition from…

Recent revelations show government agencies could manipulate online polls. It would be trivially easy for them to poison this database. > Rascals and scammers like these failed Kickstarter bros would be shut down after a single scam ... they would not be able to rent or scam another person after a single scam. Well, you don't know they're a scammer until they've been to court and proved guilty or does no-one care abo…

I don't have any problem with women or men having sex. I don't think the term slut is ever appropriate.

Bullying is always bad.

Hope I didn't piss you off too much. I just wrote that example quickly, without much thought.

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