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The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
91–100 of 104 posts
Re: The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When I need 3 adjoining bedrooms and a space that will take dogs, a hotel is going to cost an absolute fortune in comparison or be actually impossible to find. Board your dogs at home. It's impossible to penalize dog owners for not cleaning up after themselves when they're skipping town in a few days. This is why zoning laws prohibit renting in residential areas - because you can't threaten people who don't live th…
But that’s exactly my point. Under the current system it’s impossible to penalize bad behavior of any kind on the part of the short term tenant, except by fining the landlord. Whether it’s not cleaning up after a dog, or playing music too loud, or being rude in the hallway, or littering in the street. So what’s the solution — other than pervasive tracking — that allows good people behaving well (e.g. a middle class f…
Don't neglect the possibility that there is no solution. Market failures happen.
Re: The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It harms communities by allowing housing inventory to flow to where the demand is most intense?
There are externalities, though, to running a hotel, which is why we have taxes and rules to mitigate those things. These people are trying to bypass these mitigations, and push the externalities back on the populace. That is not ok.
One distinction I should have drawn is between running an Airbnb with a landlord's permission (or as a landlord yourself) versus doing it in violation of other agreements you have (like with your landlord or co-op board or whatever). If you're violating contracts, then yeah, you shouldn't be doing that and other people in the building have a right to be upset.
But if you own the building and are running it as an Airbnb hotel, I don't know that it's a self-evident fact that you're putting significant negative externalities onto your neighboring buildings. I can imagine negative externalities, but I can also imagine plenty of positive ones. These are exactly the kind of calculations that regulators are empirically horrible at making, even when they have the best intentions (and often they don't have even that going for them).
The ban on short-term rentals is a ban on a use of property which is provably very valuable to the people on both sides of those transactions. Banning that use destroys value for both those sides. The objection is that short-term rentals divert housing stock away from long-term renters, but that's not a problem with short-term rentals (which are, as we can see from the fact that they're so popular, an even more in-demand use of the property than long-term rentals), it's a problem with the low supply of housing. Which is a problem caused by the very regulators who are riding in to "save" renters from Airbnb.
Re: The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
How though? What is the proposal to not hit NIMBYism? I am generally very liberal with what I think homeowners should be allowed to do. But an apartment or condo next to, or above mine with a rotating crew of guests? I shouldn't need to put up with that unless I agree to it in writing before starting my lease. There IS existing space marked out for hotels. If it were a profitable business, why has no one starting bui…
No, the reason is that to-date there had not been a global platform available. AirBNB benefits from a massive global economy of scale. I can use the same platform in America, Germany, Australia, Bulgaria. First one to scale wins.
There are plenty of global apps for hotels. In theory they could also have been used for houses. So that clearly was not the differentiator
Re: The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
He violated new york regulations and an end user agreement. Nobody was hurt and from the sounds of it, he worked very hard to please his customers. There will be fines involved, because NYC wants their cut of the profits. I still don't consider what they did as 'bad things'.
> Nobody was hurt First: You don't know that. In fact the neighbours would disagree. Second: laws are intended to be preventative. Some of them are to prevent the bad outcome (manslaughter is illegal), some of them to prevent things that commonly lead to a bad outcome (campfires in my bedroom are illegal). If I build a campfire in my room and this time it doesn't destroy my building, that doesn't excuse me in law or…
"First: You don't know that. In fact the neighbours would disagree."
You don't know either. So I guess we are both speculating.
"Second: laws are intended to be preventative. "
Do you agree with all laws on the books? I sure don't.
"I build a campfire in my room and this time it doesn't destroy my building, that doesn't excuse me in law or ethics. I still did a dangerous thing, knowingly and recklessly."
Can you explain to me how having a legitimate business where nobody was scammed and the outcome was a happy customer is reckless? In addition to this, there were multiple jobs added to the economy as a result of their business venture.
"There are fines involved because NYC operates, even its own gloriously half-arsed way, under the rule of law."
The hotel lobby has lots of influence in NYC. It's a very similar situation to the taxicab unions. Some laws should be bent and broken..because they need to be changed.
Re: The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
#96I don't really thing what this guy did was a bad thing: He had positive reviews, multiple maids to cleanup after guests, and willingly broke leases and lost money when there were complaints.
It's simple, he broke the law/city regulations that are there for a reason. I'll quote the relevant bit from the article: > New York regulations are supposed to keep apartments from being pulled out of an already-tight rental market to cater to the tourist trade. They specify that it is illegal to rent an entire apartment in most buildings for fewer than 30 days unless the permanent tenant is present while the renter…
"For one guy to make millions there are many city inhabitants that have to face ever increasing rents. And this harms the city because it increases unrest and puts off people from moving in."
The article also states that these apartments were in upscale areas, so it isn't really preventing anyone from moving in.
"You would probably not enjoy renting or owning the other apartments there"
If the inhabitants of those apartments are causing problems, the landlord should have the final say.
This all really should be up to the landlord and not the government.
Re: The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
#97I don't really thing what this guy did was a bad thing: He had positive reviews, multiple maids to cleanup after guests, and willingly broke leases and lost money when there were complaints.
Sure, the people renting from him loved it; the neighbors, however, had to suffer. The reason we have hotel regulations is to help mitigate the externalities that hotel operations put on the nearby community. This guy was bypassing all of those. There are more people involved in the transaction than just the renter and the rentee.
"The reason we have hotel regulations is to help mitigate the externalities that hotel operations put on the nearby community"
Hotels have hundreds of people coming in and out of the building on a daily basis. At most of these apartments you would have at most 3 or 4 people. The difference is scale.
The only reason NYC even cares at all is because the hotel lobby is powerful and the city wants their tax money.
They should just tax it and leave it up to the landlords/property owners.
Re: The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
#98Re: The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
How though? What is the proposal to not hit NIMBYism? I am generally very liberal with what I think homeowners should be allowed to do. But an apartment or condo next to, or above mine with a rotating crew of guests? I shouldn't need to put up with that unless I agree to it in writing before starting my lease. There IS existing space marked out for hotels. If it were a profitable business, why has no one starting bui…
No, the reason is that to-date there had not been a global platform available. AirBNB benefits from a massive global economy of scale. I can use the same platform in America, Germany, Australia, Bulgaria. First one to scale wins.
Wasn’t VRBO available (globally) long before AirBnB? I thought AirBnB just stole the idea and had the VC capital to scale it
Re: The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's simple, he broke the law/city regulations that are there for a reason. I'll quote the relevant bit from the article: > New York regulations are supposed to keep apartments from being pulled out of an already-tight rental market to cater to the tourist trade. They specify that it is illegal to rent an entire apartment in most buildings for fewer than 30 days unless the permanent tenant is present while the renter…
"For one guy to make millions there are many city inhabitants that have to face ever increasing rents. And this harms the city because it increases unrest and puts off people from moving in." The article also states that these apartments were in upscale areas, so it isn't really preventing anyone from moving in. "You would probably not enjoy renting or owning the other apartments there" If the inhabitants of those ap…
> these apartments were in upscale areas, so it isn't really preventing anyone from moving in
Of course it's preventing them. It's one less apartment in an already airtight market. For every apartment not available for renting, all the other rents go up another bit. Or a big bit since you can easily charge double via Airbnb. This means without any regulation the rents could surge to at least 80% of what you can get via Airbnb. And since this would seriously hurt the city the government gets involved.
> should be up to the landlord and not the government
It's the government's duty to protect its citizens from abuse. "The government" is behind every law and regulation. So every time I hear this I wonder if the people who say it realize what it implies. How easily it turns into "it's up to the [person who shafted you] not the government". I'm sure you are protected by so many of them you don't even realize. Just because renting in NY is not an issue for you doesn't mean it's not an issue.