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Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

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Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#181

Post by tdb7893 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #157
jseliger wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put me in the camp that's very anti-AirBnB as a resident who doesn't want where I lived turned into a hotel. I live in NYC. It's a problem. The real problem here is not Airbnb, which is a symptom; it's zoning, which forbids market-clearing prices and a sufficient number of units to satisfy demand for living in and visiting the city. For more on this, see e.g. Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High : https://www.am…

> it's zoning, which forbids market-clearing prices and a sufficient number of units to satisfy demand for living in and visiting the city. lol tourists and rich investors/other rich undesirables are ALWAYS going to outprice the lower and middle tiers, you need massive amounts of regulation to prevent rich-people-only city areas.

I'm not sure what regulations can keep the price down without having lots of weird scenarios and adverse effects. If you can then that's great but I haven't seen it work in practice yet. It makes more sense to me to try to increase the supply of housing

Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#182

Post by lotsofpulp »

santoshalper wrote: post #79
ricardobeat wrote: post #27

'Our members own seven apartments on average, they are not big companies' Amazing how people live in distorted realities. To the vast majority of the population, owning seven apartments definitely puts you into 'big company' territory. Plus not being 'big' doesn't mean you get any exemptions.

Owning seven rental properties puts you squarely in the "small business" category by any definition. Big companies like Marriott have well over a million hotel rooms spread over thousands of properties.

The vast, vast majority of "Marriott's" hotel rooms are actually owned by investment funds, or smaller investors/groups who own 2, 5, 10, 15 hotels. Marriott/Hilton/IHG/Choice/Wyndham are all similar to Airbnb in this aspect, they do not own the real estate, they just provide the platform to the real estate owners to rent the rooms on and provide the branding support in exchange for 7% to 15% royalty fees.

Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#183

Post by tptacek »

IanDrake wrote: post #179
tptacek wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: you can be evicted over persistent noise complaints.

Evicted being the key word. That is a very long process.

What's your point? Being evicted is a big deal. It's can be difficult to get a next nice apartment if you've been evicted before, especially if you were evicted from your immediate previous apartment.

There is no deterrent whatsoever for Airbnb guests, who have no stake in the lease or the local market.

Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#184

Post by jaclaz »

Let us try to look at the matter in another way.

Take a city/place.

Calculate how many people visited it before AirBNB.

Let's say 1,000,000 stays per year, with an average expense of US$ 180 each, including night at US$ 120 at the hotel and some drinks/meals/souvenirs/whatever another 60 US$ .

The city/place (globally) has had an "income" of 180,000,000.

How many more people visited the city place after AirBNB became popular?

Let's say 1,200,000, i.e. a 20% increase, and let's say that not only these 200,000 more stays are at AirBNB's (i.e. people that wouldn't have come if AirBNB's were not available), but that also a part of the same people that would have take a hotel room passed to AirBNB's, let's say 100,000.

Now, the hotels will have lowered their prices because of the competition, and - more generally - an AirBNB user (with of course the usual exceptions) is probably less prone to spend money.

So we have 900,000 nights at a "discounted" price of (say) 110 US$ i.e. 99,000,000 plus 900,000 at the same US$ 60 54,000,000 and some 300,000 AirBNB's at (say) 60 US$ , i.e. 18,000,000, plus 300,000 at a lower US$ 40, that is 12,000,000.

From the 18,000,000 you have to subtract the commission AirBNB takes, which should be on average (both guest and host commission) around 15% that "goes elsewhere", i.e. 2,700,000.

The city/place received (globally) 99+54+18+12-2.7=180,3 millions, i.e. roughly the same as before, while having (still globally), the increases of traffic, garbage, noise, etc. due to the 200,000 more visits.

In the meantime, hotels and other trades had a roughly 10% decrease of income, apartments/flats were not available to local population at "fair" long term rent prices, the increased income from the rentals of the AirBNB's and connected services very likely went in a lower tax bracket.

I would say that it is not a particularly good deal for the city and for the locals.

Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#185

Post by closeparen »

tptacek wrote: post #175
closeparen wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but Airbnb is (from one angle) just a weird and hacky way of adding more hotel rooms to a city's supply. Zoning that permitted more and taller hotels could meet demand with fewer negative externalities. Similarly, relaxed zoning for residential buildings could lower the size of the effect on the housing market when a unit is converted to Airbnb use.

You're fleeing to abstraction. I'm making a simple point, derived from the specific complaint that my NYC friends have about Airbnb: there is no plausible change to hotel regulation that would ever allow people to open up single-room hotels in apartment and condo buildings.

Sure. There is a plausible change that would remove the impetus to do so. I don't think anyone is suggesting that zoning should endorse Airbnb-style "hotels," but that maybe it should fix the underlying problems instead of just patching the loophole.

Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#186

Post by tptacek »

closeparen wrote: post #185
tptacek wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fleeing to abstraction. I'm making a simple point, derived from the specific complaint that my NYC friends have about Airbnb: there is no plausible change to hotel regulation that would ever allow people to open up single-room hotels in apartment and condo buildings.

Sure. There is a plausible change that would remove the impetus to do so. I don't think anyone is suggesting that zoning should endorse Airbnb-style "hotels," but that maybe it should fix the underlying problems instead of just patching the loophole.

That's a false dilemma. The problem we're discussing here is easily fixed by making short-term rentals in apartment and condo buildings unlawful, which is probably what will end up happening. There's nothing that says that can't happen independent of any other regulatory changes.

Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#187

Post by bogomipz »

jseliger wrote: post #94
cletus wrote: post #17

Put me in the camp that's very anti-AirBnB as a resident who doesn't want where I lived turned into a hotel. I live in NYC. It's a problem. None of this is a surprise, so much so that AirBnB seems to be aware of this and is acting in a way that's, at best, ethically challenged and, at worst, illegal eg deleting listings before giving data to the state of NY that "shows" most hosts only have one unit [1]. If people wa…

Put me in the camp that's very anti-AirBnB as a resident who doesn't want where I lived turned into a hotel. I live in NYC. It's a problem. The real problem here is not Airbnb, which is a symptom; it's zoning, which forbids market-clearing prices and a sufficient number of units to satisfy demand for living in and visiting the city. For more on this, see e.g. Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High : https://www.am…

>"The real problem here is not Airbnb, which is a symptom; it's zoning, which forbids market-clearing prices and a sufficient number of units to satisfy demand for living in and visiting the city."

Maybe you haven't been to NYC in a while? This is not the case at all. New York City has undergone a hotel boom over the last 7-8 years, so much so that it has actually driven down the price of hotels:

See: https://ny.curbed.com/2016/4/20/11471644/new-york-city-hotel...

and

http://www.wnyc.org/story/new-york-citys-hotel-boom-keeping-...

Zoning a problems in NYC? The amount of condos and pace of real-estate development in NYC is head spinning. I can't think of another city that is more developer friendly. In fact developers have even been entitled to tax subsidies for their efforts. See:

https://ny.curbed.com/2016/1/15/10846176/everything-you-need...

Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#188

Post by komaromy »

jaclaz wrote: post #184

Let us try to look at the matter in another way. Take a city/place. Calculate how many people visited it before AirBNB. Let's say 1,000,000 stays per year, with an average expense of US$ 180 each, including night at US$ 120 at the hotel and some drinks/meals/souvenirs/whatever another 60 US$ . The city/place (globally) has had an "income" of 180,000,000. How many more people visited the city place after AirBNB became…

It seems like you should take into account the cut that a hotel chain extracts from each franchise to make a fair comparison.

I don't have a good sense of how much that is.

Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#189

Post by BMorearty »

wanderr wrote: post #164
BMorearty wrote: post #70

Airbnb employee here. (Software engineer; I don't speak for the company.) Personally, I like staying in listings that are owned and operated by the resident. It's more personal and it lets me connect more with some locals. One of my favorite nights at an Airbnb was a dinner with the delightful couple who rented out a room in their Paris apartment. Much less enjoyable was a night in a Seattle room--it was very clean a…

As an Airbnb employee I hope you don't mind feature requests. ;) I have severe animal allergies, so using Airbnb is quite annoying for me, there's a way to filter for places that allow pets but not the inverse. Every time I try to use Airbnb I have to look at tons of places to find one that doesn't have or allow pets. It would be really awesome to be able to just eliminate pet places from my search.

I don't mind at all. ;-)

That sounds like it would be helpful to a lot of people. I'll pass that suggestion to the right team. You can also suggest it yourself since suggestions directly from customers mean a lot. Go to https://www.airbnb.com/help/feedback and choose "Traveling / Finding a place" as your feedback category.

Re: Airbnb dominated by professional landlords

#190

Post by jackcosgrove »

mschuster91 wrote: post #169
jackcosgrove wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments mainly value people as taxpayers, because taxpayers pay into the public coffers, which can then be emptied to ameliorate social disputes and ease reelection. If you don't pay taxes and do consume services at the same time, as a squatter does, you're making your leaders' lives harder and they will find a way to get rid of you.

A squatter pays his/her share of taxes: VAT on everything he/she buys, income tax on any kind of employment or other income sources. The only tax that a squatter does not pay in contrast to an owner or renter (indirect there) is "ground tax", which is a negligible amount anyway.

There is also the opportunity cost of the owner not living in the domicile and not paying those same taxes, at probably higher amounts than the squatter. The owner is probably wealthier than the squatter and thus will pay more taxes.
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