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I feel like the US is far down on the victims list. Look how they massacred my boys Spain and Italy
Prague city center is basically just airbnb flats now
Same in Nashville. It’s a shame. I wish the government would regulate this more.
Just gonna leave this here. Pick your favorite city.
Jesus. I can’t find an affordable apartment in Boston but “Blue grounds” is listing fucking 372 of them on Airbnb…
EDIT: so Blueground is the biggest property holder in almost every city? Or one of the top 5 in the places it isn’t #1. What the hell?
There are whole 30 story apartment buildings which are managed and run like a hotel but with units purchased by owners for STRs. Crowd-sourced hotels. So might be that company managing a whole building.
The only thing they’ve ever done on accident was make their logo look like a ballsack.
Can’t unseen it now, thanks.
Lol
It also doesn’t help housing prices that the landlords are colluding to raise prices:
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing
It isn’t just Airbnb’s fault, it’s landlords wanting to maximize their return, no matter the method (short-term rentals or price fixing collusion).
Then explain why this is a global phenomenon?
Then explain why this is a global phenomenon?
Because the same causes are happening mostly all over the world. Meaning, buying up houses. Driving up rent, etc.
Because often it is a nightmare to evict a tenant that do not pay the rent.
I can speak for where I live where a lot of people gone to the short-rental way exactly because that way they have the certainty that when they want the house back, for every reason, they have it.
To me AirBnB is not the problem, it is the wrong solution to a real problem.
Whole home or dedicated AIRBNB should be banned… If I had a room going unused I’d AirBnb
Just a little fucksy wucksy :3
Big tech - move fast, break things, disrupt, and destroy
Mostly profit though.
Forgot the opportunity cost.
Like kudzu
Southerner here. FYI, kudzu is nowhere near as bad as this big tech shit. It doesn’t actually engulf entire forests; it just looks like it does because it covers the edges of them and that’s mostly the part that people see.
or feral swine
Maybe they should ban whole home AirBNB… i only ever do rooms.
Theyd part out a hous into multiple rooms. I stayed at one airbnb that were 3 stories and each one was another airbnb, with a kitchen on the main level that had to be shared. No one used it for the 3 days i was there, but still.
You can easily regulate against that.
No regulation is worth anything without enforcement.
Sure. That’s step two. You gotta do step one first.
I agree. It wasn’t meant to be against regulations. Problem is in my city we have plenty of regulations to avoid repurposing flats for tourist rentals without a permit, we have regulations against systematically letting flats empty to be able to sell the house or flat at a premium etc. But we only have like three dozen government employees, who are supposed to oversee a city with more than 1.5 million flats and individual homes. So even if every one of them manages to check on 2 flats every day, they manage like 15.000 flats a year, which is already a rather optimistic estimate.
It is crucial to not only demand regulation, but also that enough resources are assigned to enforce them.
How
Through the tax code. If you have a short term rental property that’s not a primary residence: shazam busted. You’d need some kind of policing for it but you could force airbnb to make a filing on it as well which would make it possible to automate.
Accidentally?
Same when NASA accidentally land on the moon
Hotels were a nightmare, cabs were a nightmare. These companies indisputably changed the game in the favour of the consumer all around the world.
Where we are now having an issue is large swaths of housing taken over by companies and investors wanting a return. As long as housing and renting are attractive for investment over and about housing and transitory renting, it will attract lots of money.
Supply must be improved to improve the housing market. This should be a continuous government function at least at the low and middle income level not just a private endeavour.
Density and public transport is the answer - not killing something that absolutely changed the game and took the hotel and cab market back to their customers begging for a chance.
What wasn’t a nightmare was bed and breakfasts. They also weren’t an excuse to keep property off the housing rental market at scale.
These companies aren’t saviours, they’re businesses who rode public tech optimism and common frustration at established industries in the same fields to stay ahead of regulation and have the public demand it. Surprise, they’re the same businesses.
Yes, bed and breakfasts rock, and I try to use them when I travel because the experience is way better.
Don’t have bed and breakfast money. They are regularly more expensive and have less choices than Airbnb
The ones I’ve been to are comparable to a hotel and include a good breakfast. So yeah, a bit more than an Airbnb, but not that far off from Airbnb + good breakfast restaurant.
Agreed on cabs but hotels haven’t changed anything significantly and they’re looking much better than AirBnB at this point.
They ripped out the carpets. It made everything better.
Sure, but AirBnB and Uber didn’t improve the hotel and taxi markets, they just joined them. They each took advantage of a tech debt and then lowered the barriers for entry to the market. In doing so, they made a shit ton of money by carving out market share from the fucked up systems you described.
Seriously? Not sure about airbnb since I use booking, but Uber was so much better than cabs it wasn’t even close. They didn’t even make that much money. They lost money last quarter
Also by doing and end run around regulations by pretending to be people just renting their house when they are away or giving rides to people going in the same directions. That is why they have names like ‘ride share’ instead of ‘contracted cabbies who drive their own cars’.
Yeah, I think the main issue is supply. Airbnb works because of a mix of supply and costs. There just aren’t many nice places to stay in resort areas, and the few that exist are extremely expensive (e.g. fancy hotels). Likewise, hotels are often more expensive and less convenient if you have a large group (e.g. my family likes to vacation together, and there’s like 20 of us).
The problem seems to be long term residents feeling the pain of increased housing costs. If you legislate against that, those tourists will still need to go somewhere, which means more hotels or more strain on transportation from the outlying areas to the tourist area. If mass transit is effective, that’s not a big issue, but far too often that’s not the case, so you’ll just end up with tons of traffic.
My proposal is to not ban it, but instead limit it to residents, so in order to do short-term rentals, you need to be physically present a majority of the year. Otherwise, you need to apply as a regular rental, which can be limited to certain areas near transit hubs to keep traffic under control. Then improve transit into the area so tourists who don’t fit in the city can easily get there.
They didn’t accidentally do shit. They ignored the consequences of their decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else. You don’t get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
They are a company with zero morals and the goal to maximize profits. That’s what capitalism is for and were it’s good at.
The government needs to create rules and laws to make sure that this profit maximizing doesn’t happen on the back of ordinary people, but since corporate america is allowed to control the government through money, this doesn’t happen.
Capitalism is a tool, can we please start to use it like that again?!
the problem is already in the word itself… capitalism
aka to capitalize on someone else’s problems\misfortunes
You don’t get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
Don’t you? I can’t think of any instance of justice truly being served to billionaires, can you?
SBF recently and Madoff before him.
Those are fair points, but I can’t help but chuckle that they were brought to justice because they stole from millionaires and other billionaires to make their ill gotten gains. Probably woulda got away with it if they just stole from the poor and middle class.
Is that so for SBF? I genuinely have no idea.
Not quite as many as Madoff, but some notable folks and investors.
I still think municipalities share a significant amount of blame here. They definitely could have at least limited vacation rental saturation, and didn’t do anything.
I live in a ski town, and have been to city hall meetings on this issue. The overwhelming amount of attendees at these are vacation homeowners or their representatives, and the prevailing attitude is, “fuck the locals, our profit is at stake here.” A number of owners have changed their primary residence to our town just to have more say that local long term renters. These meetings are held at 2pm, when locals are working. It’s about as fucked as it can get. And when we’ve had a sympathetic council person, they’re immediately recalled or replaced the following election cycle. It’s a shitshow.
During COVID, when the Airbnb boom really took off, we had a 25% resident attrition rate. That’s no typo; twenty five percent of our valley’s residents had to leave town because they were priced out (about 5000 in a population of 20,000) because either rents skyrocketed, or the owners of their homes sold out from beneath them. These days, much of our local labor force commutes at least an hour into town. It has gotten a little better, and some have been able to moved back, but the damage is done.
Even for prospective buyers, like my wife and I, prices are outrageous. Our current home, which is valued around $600k, would have been $200k pre COVID. And this is solely because of Airbnb assholes.
The government just doesn’t work for the people anymore. It works for the donors that fund them.
My office regulates airbnbs for the city and it’s very hard to do anything about it. None of the rental platforms will work with us - we’ve sent them about a million notices that they’re collecting the wrong tax amount and they don’t even bother to respond, and they just send a check every quarter but refuse to break it out by address/owner. They won’t provide any data on what addresses are being rented, either. Apparently some other cities have successfully sued airbnb, but for a small city with a correspondingly small budget, that’s an expense that’s hard to justify to taxpayers.
We have some owners that are great - they get licensed right away, get their inspections done, no problem. Then there are other people who have done things like dig out their crawlspace themselves and turn it into non-conforming bedrooms with no egress windows - no permits or inspections, of course, and an engineer basically said the entire thing was in danger of collapsing any minute. Or the person who had a buddy do a bunch of unlicensed electrical work that was so bad the city couldn’t even let the owner stay there until it was fixed. I honestly wouldn’t stay in an airbnb now, having seen what I’ve seen - people will absolutely put renters at risk to make a buck. And we can go after them but only if we know it’s happening.
I’d personally love it if rental platforms were forced to provide owner data to cities/states, and for cities to tax the shit out of rentals that aren’t also owner-occupied, but I’m not in charge and the people with money have a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t happen. It sucks.
Cops would rather beat up college students and the unhoused than go after landlords.
that’s an expense that’s hard to justify to taxpayers
Ah, yes. We don’t have money because collecting taxes would be too expensive. Classic.
EDIT:
https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-tax-audits-recover-12-dollars-for-every-dollar-spent-2023-6?op=1
I mean, paying to sue a massive company that definitely has more (and probably better) attorneys than we do in order to collect a few thousand dollars more a year in sales tax isn’t necessarily the best use of city funds. If we were a bigger city, it would make more sense, but it would take us years just for the taxes to cover what we’d spend in attorneys fees and staff time. I don’t like that that’s the reality, but I can see why the idea isn’t popular.
Also, the police aren’t involved in regulating short-term rentals. I’m no fan of cops, but this is entirely civil and they have no part in this particular issue.
Is it not tax evasion/fraud? In the US, either can bring criminal charges. For a smaller municipality, is there no assistance available from higher government?
No clue - most of that is either a department I’m not in and don’t know much about, or it’s way over my head. I’m just a mid-level peon. And politicians are the ones who have to give us the tools to actually do our jobs and all of these companies have deep pockets. That’s the biggest impediment.
I’m an activist writing a housing bill to get introduced to my state legislature. Part of it specifically addresses these platforms, but I don’t know what’s been tried against them yet. Any tips?
Unfortunately, I don’t know too much - most of the contact has been initiated by our sales tax staff to whatever department handles tax collection on the company side, but from what they’ve told me, they just don’t get a response. Our municipal code only allows us to go after owners if they fail to get licensed (and even that is a nightmare for us to try to do) but there’s nothing about the actual companies.
It’s kind of the wild west at the moment - the problem isn’t evenly distributed, so there’s not one catch-all solution. One of the mountain towns here said they have 700+ rentals and their official population is only like 500 people. We have <100 in a city of about 40k. It’s still a problem here, but nowhere near as bad as ski towns have it. Most of the laws I’ve seen are aimed at the owners, not at the companies facilitating the rentals, and they range from things designed to just make sure someone’s actually inspecting the rentals so no one dies all the way to making it unaffordable to rent multiple properties by charging a fuckton of taxes and fees. I’d kill for something forcing airbnb, vrbo, etc to actually cooperate.
Visiting my husband’s home town where this has happened and all his parent’s friends have moved into trailers because the houses where they raised their kids were bought for insane amounts but then they couldn’t afford a smaller house in the same town. Where we live now on the East Coast, we can no longer stay in our school district for less than half a million because doctors from larger urban areas keep buying the houses in our school district and we’re being forced 60+100 miles out from my hometown where we raised our young kids to even begin to afford housing.
…decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else.
-The American Dream™
Accidentally? Man these writers will suck any corporate dick.
Yeah, real hard-hitting journalism here from… arktrek.shop?
Oopsie doopsie
Oopsie poopsie…
Because everything went to shit
Remember back before Airbnb when this was just a free thing called couch surfing?
Not really. Couch surfing was only for a certain type of person.
why free when you can make money?
i mean couch surfing is guest and host being there and interacting with each other.
AirBnB is getting the flat for yourself for the time you rent it.
A big part of Airbnb used to be spending time with a host. It has since turned into just landlord via app.
That’s exactly how airBnB started though. Then they moved to renting out the whole place and now we are where we are.
Uber was originally marketed as ride-sharing, too. Just an app to find people going the same way. Of course, I’m fairly sure that their current iterations was the plan all along as anyone with enough business sense to start those companies must have predicted that there would be people who take on Uber/AirBnB as a primary source of income. But sharing your house or planning a shared trip is much more palatable than “Landlords but Worse”.
http://couchsurfing.com/ Still exists
But i can’t imagine as many people on there when they can just rent out for money
I can’t believe people trust others enough to rent their house out like a hotel. I’ve already seen so many problems from this I can’t believe it’s still legal. My neighbor moved and they turned it into an AirBnB, some kids threw a party and left some trash out that poisoned my other neighbors dog. There’s a lawsuit, but the dog is still fucking dead.
What does some kids leaving trash out have to do with air bnb?
Yeah that’s why inviting strangers into your home unsupervised is stupid.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been in an airbnb that’s actually somebody’s house. It seems like they’re mostly “investment properties” that people rent out. I’m sure that’s great for housing. \s
