How is that practically different from how any modern beehive apartment complex operates today? In a building with hundreds of units, neighbor tenant stability is rarely found.
The apartment building and its tenants have recourse against abusive tenants: they can break the lease and eject the tenant. That recourse doesn't exist with short-term renters, who are going to leave soon anyways.
Tenants have no direct recourse against bad neighbors - their only recourse is to complain to management and pray they do something about it. As for management, they'll have similar, if not identical, recourse in the form of (a) deposit withholding and (b) negative feedback on AirBNB. The ability to provide negative feedback actually gives them greater power, incidentally, than the power innkeepers typically have over ill-behaving guests.
I do not believe feedback on renters does anything to meaningfully curb abuse, especially because abusive renters will be the ones least likely to groom a profile of positive reviews.
Every thing you say about Airbnb can be applied to uber too. Why should there be unregulated cab drivers all over the city? What are legal means for handling abuse by drivers? Why should other cars on the roads deal with every car being a potential taxi?
But its funny how this free market thing works though, the hypocrisy is the same people who scream innovation and disruption when it comes to Uber are crying disgust and malpractice when it comes to Airbnb.
You can't have these selectively applied to what you like and dislike. If disrupting taxi unions and license issuers was fair, so is this.
I don't follow your logic. If abusive renters are not "groom[ing] a profile of positive reviews," and offerers are rejecting their applications as a consequence, that suggests to me that the system is working as we'd like it to.
Offerers aren't rejecting their applications, because the modal Airbnb renter has no meaningful reviews to begin with. Try it yourself sometime: make a new Airbnb account and see if you can rent a place with no history. Spoiler: you can.
Even when there's no such thing as AirBNB, tenants who rent have absolutely, positively ZERO recourse against bad neighbors.
Zilch. Nada. Absolutely nothing. They can accept it, or find somewhere else.
It's great that a landlord is saying, fine, you can sublease the place short term. But we have to regulate that, you have to pay us to do so, and if you can't hold up your end we have the right to put an end to it.
This is the only reasonable way I can see to solve the problem of short term rentals.
You seem very certain about this, but I don't think you've done much research on it.
Not only do boilerplate leases include "quiet enjoyment" clauses that contractually bind landlords into ensuring that tenants aren't disruptive, but state laws also include implied covenants of quiet enjoyment, meaning that there are large areas where it doesn't even matter if you edit that out of your lease.
A landlord that fails to ensure quiet enjoyment can be sued by their tenants.
Yes, those laws exist. Do they protect the tenant's interest more effectively than penalties against short-term renters? Difficult to say; the verdict isn't in yet and data is scarce. Your mere beliefs are not sufficient.
Even with the laws and implied covenants, it takes a significant amount of time to go through eviction proceedings in many states. In California it can take months (unless you stop paying rent altogether, in which case there's a fast-track procedure).
Yes, a tenant can sue their landlord as well. Again, however, that can take months and significant expense.
When considering these things, we must take into account the actual reality of how rights are exercised, not merely what rights exist in law.
Completely agree here. At least in California, there are strong laws that protect a tenant from their landlord. The only way to be evicted quickly is if you commit a serious violent felony, a sex crime ( I guess that IS a serious felony ), or you stop paying rent ( Ask me how I know !)
In just about every other situation, there is a list of 16 reasons you can evict someone, and all of them can lead to a lengthy expensive trial, in which at the end the landlord has spent a significant amount of money and probably regrets every doing anything with their life.
What the fuck would make you write something like that? I live on a block with S8 renters. They're real people with families who want a safe bed and decent schools for their kids just like everyone else.
Why do you think that short-term middle-to-upper-class renters are preferable neighbours to medium-to-long-term lower-class renters? I saw your comment elsethread about ease of punishment, which makes some sense, but in my experience small landlords simply don't care.
Living above a pair of end-stage alcoholics who importuned people on the sidewalk and called the ambulance for health care every few weeks was far, far more annoying than the flophouse a few doors down. Then there was the poor family with 9 people in a two-bedroom unit, with a couple of teenagers who vandalised and may have been thieves as well (not that upper-class teenagers aren't hoodlums, of course: many of them are too). Then there was the prostitute with the shady clientele.
You appear to be opposed to short-term renters, but appear to applaud Section 8. Why the difference?
Yes, that is exactly what I think, and also what the zoning commissioners in virtually every city think, which is why cities have limitations on short-term rentals in residential properties and special zoning rules for where you can put hotels!
No, the equivalence you've drawn between long-term renters who happen to qualify for housing vouchers and people who stay for a few nights in a house while traveling is the illogical argument.
> No, the equivalence you've drawn between long-term renters who happen to qualify for housing vouchers and people who stay for a few nights in a house while traveling is the illogical argument.
They are both groups of people who some folks wish to exclude as neighbours, and others wish to include as neighbours, in both cases presumably based on desirability or undesirability qua neighbours.
I've explained my reasoning (which is that I think short-term renters are more likely to be of a similar social class as their neighbours than are those who qualify for housing vouchers, and that I view local class homogeneity as a social good); it's hardly illogical, although you are of course free to disagree with it.
If the neighbors are harmed, a landlord with means accepts responsibility for either stopping the harm or compensating them in exchange. That's way better than the current situation. What are the neighbors going to get from a tenant who sub leases in violation of the lease agreement?
It's the landlord who offers (within the limits of local law) the terms of the lease. I've never seen a lease agreement that allows subleasing without at least right of refusal on reasonable grounds by the landlord. The landlord is within its rights prohibit the tenant from entering into any kind of sub lease entirely. It could (again, within the limits of local law) evict the tenant for even advertising a possible sublease without its written permission.
But no, the landlord is very graciously offering to actively support subleasing via AirBnB. If the landlord executes properly, that's a win for the tenant, a win for the landlord, and a win for the neighbors.
Saying the neighbor is ipso facto harmed by short term subleasing is like saying that the value of currency is ipso facto damaged by creating more or it so that the share value of a company is ipso facto damaged by issuing more shares.
It's certainly true that if these things are done irresponsibly then bad things happen. And bad things do often happen, I'll give you that. But it's not necessarily true. How it's managed is what determines whether the outcome is good or bad and for whom.
When short term renters well behaved, then the neighbors aren't harmed at all. If any lease holder has the ability to sublet easily with support of the landlord then that is something of value. A landlord that gets involved like this is going to create an environment with incentives for good short term tenants.
I'd rather lease from a company that allows me to do that and also supports me in doing so. I'd rather lease from a company that actively manages subleases than one that sticks its head in the sand that pretends that isn't happening all the time.
Short term subleases are here to stay. Trying to stop them is like trying to stop piracy or illicit drug use. It's just not going to happen.
edit: also: To call what happens on airbnb an "unregulated hotel" is profoundly misguided. Have you ever lived for a significant period of time out of airbnb??
There are restrictions on short-term rentals and on the places you can build hotels in virtually all cities precisely because the assumption you are making here about the impact of hotel tenants is faulty.
I'm not sure why I'm meant to care that there are people that use Airbnb for long-term living arrangements. The modal Airbnb renter does not do that.
There are certain restrictions on illicit drugs too, but they don't work very well in practice. Everyone involved in such transactions has every incentive to do what they wanna do anyway.
What this landlord is doing is the equivalent of saying, "People are going to do drugs. OK. You can sell drugs and you can consume drugs, I'm not going to stop you. I only demand to test their purity first. And if you hurt unrelated parties I'm going to hold the guilty party accountable."
Now everyone has something to gain by playing by the rules. Sure, they have to give up something, but they get more than they give if they're honest. Once someone in a legal position of authority can get the parties to agree to play by the rules, that authority can do a lot to reduce, if not completely mitigate, the negative side effects.
So what's an argument for this being a public policy win that would be persuasive to people who don't reject the whole concept of zoning as the real estate analog to the drug war?
You gain in that you previously didn't have the right to turn your apartment or house into a hotel, and now you do.
Of course, you may not like that trade-off. You may, like me, have kids in those bedrooms, and enjoy having other families with kids around you who form lifelong friendships with your kids. You may not really want to see an investor buy the 3 bedroom apartment next to you and pay his or her own mortgage and profit by bringing a never ending stream of strangers into the house or apartment next door - even if these strangers are very well behaved.
In short, you may wish to trade your right to turn your house into a hotel in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that your neighbors won't do this either. Or, alternatively, you may be ok with it in a more limited way, that perhaps you don't really mind people doing this occasionally, when they are on vacation, say for a limited number of days a year.
If this is the case, then you would gain none of the benefits but experience all the negatives of disruption.
As you can probably tell from the way I set this up, I feel it is immensely reasonable to zone certain sections of a city as residential with strong restrictions on short term rentals, as a way of protecting residents from the externalities of short term rentals, as well as a way of protecting long term housing stock.
No, you've misread the thread. People who want to rent their places out on Airbnb clearly gain. I said, upthread, that this was a loss for those peoples neighbors, and it remains unclear to me how it could be otherwise.
Newish, I think they added it a few months ago. I remember dang mentioning it but I can't remember if it was a dedicated post or something similar to my comment above.
My landlords live in a small one bedroom home behind the house my family is in and I was thinking about doing this with them.
Essentially, I'd still pay my rent like normal and then have them manage the Airbnb while we're out of town and they'd get a cut of the proceeds. I'd need to check the lease to see if I'm allowed to do it anyway, I assume not, but it seems like a reasonable way for all three parties to win:
They collect more rent, I cover some travel expenses, ad someone gets to stay in a cute place close to downtown Santa Barbara.
I'm not the person you asked it of, but I suspect that what the person means is that you can amend a lease as long as it fits the legal requirements of the location. If you're in a city that doesn't allow short-term subleases, then you presumably can't amend your lease to specifically allow short-term subleasing.
I specifically had it written into my condo agreement that Airbnb is illegal, even though it is illegal anyways. It's illegal in lots of places, but people still do it--having it written explicitly in the lease probably makes it more easily enforceable. This is just added protection that holds even if the laws are changed.
I think it would be unwise for your landlord to allow this. They have little to gain but a lot to lose.
My wife and I rent two vacation homes on AirBnb and other websites. We started with a one night minimum in the off-season and then quickly change to 3 nights. This essentially means we book fewer off-season weekend rentals.
Here's why we did that: It takes 1 night to trash a house. So do you want someone to pay you $200 to trash your house or $600 to trash your house?
You're also playing Russian roulette where every new guest is a trigger pull. The fewer trigger pulls, the less likely you are to take a bullet.
We'd rather a higher vacancy rate with an overall fewer number of guests. In the end this means we might reduce our revenue by 10% to have 50% fewer guests.
Your landlord would have to decide that couple extra thousand dollars a year would be worth hosting 20 random visitors. If that's how the numbers break down the risk isn't worth the reward IMO.
In my case I believe our city recently (or might soon) change the rules of short-term rentals to only allow for rentals longer that 30 days.
What I was specifically thinking of doing was taking my family to another country for a month and renting the place out for the duration to help cover the expenses. Hopefully the longer term rental would weed out many of the types of people that might trash a place.
Sounds like you need to take a larger deposit. Then you could rent it out for 1-2 nights at a time, assuming a cleaning fee that covers your costs, without worrying about damage. Not that the $1 million in insurance wouldn't cover you either way
In my experience insurance will never make you whole.
Stress + time spent managing the debacle @ my bill rate + lost income during repairs + items insurance fails to cover, etc...
We've really only had one group trash a house and it was really just a big mess with no real physical damage. Took about $800 of extra cleaning and was handled by the deposit.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. As a landlord I would just evict you if you tried to do this with my property. My lease and most other leases say no subleases for this reason. On what planet would I manage my own property for a renter and hand over all the revenue to them?
Yeah, the landlords live 30 feet from us and we have a great relationship with them. So I would just ask them and if they said no, then I wouldn't do it.
As I mentioned in another comment, I was thinking of taking my family to another country for a month and renting the place out for that entire month to a single renter to help reduce some of the costs.
Not all landlords are the same. I have a friend who rents a place in Venice and the landlord told them they could airbnb the in-law addition if they had no use for it. Presumably the person on the lease is on the hook for any damages anyways.
It was only a few sentences long, how did you miss all the facts? OP stated that he would have landlord be part of it ("have them manage the Airbnb") and they would do this because they would make money ("and they'd get a cut of the proceeds"), but before proceeding with asking about it the OP will check the lease ("I'd need to check the lease to see if I'm allowed to do it anyway").
OP said he'd get the landlord's permission. Besides, OP is already paying rent for the entire property, for the entire month. The way you use the term "my property" makes it sound like you can walk into your tenant's homes without their permission because, well, it's your property.
This is even more ominous than renters violating their leases to let places out on Airbnb, because it means the landlord is incentivized to screw over the rest of the tenants in the building by allowing Airbnb hotels in it; not only that, but they're disincentivized to respond to complaints about it!
Not really. The main landlord could operate one or multiple units on Airbnb now. The reasons they don't likely have to do with their risk at being brought up for violations of hotelling laws where applicable, and their increased need for maintenance and maid service would eat into their easy monthly income from a standard tenant.
It's not that simple. When a renter lets out their place on Airbnb, they do the work of marketing the place on Airbnb and of dealing with subtenants. Landlords could be doing that same work, but most aren't. Very few of them, however, are likely to refuse "free money".
But what is the marginal cost of doing that work? Could the landlord hire someone to do it for multiple apartments? How much would the value of that service be vs. what people are willing to pay on Airbnb?
Let's be honest; marketing the place on Airbnb and dealing with renters aren't a huge value-add. The majority of the value is generated by the ownership of the building, and the building owners want to capture as much of that as they can.
Airbnb is a slippery slope: it mixes the hotel markets (which tend to be much higher priced) with the rental markets. This brings the prices of rental markets up, and many renters may feel the only way they can afford their apartment is if they rent it out. It's also how you get $1 million studio apartments in Manhattan - the monthly payment on a $1 million loan isn't bad when you consider you can rent it out at $350/night for half the year (hotels in the same area are ~$500/night) and still turn a profit.
There are also some interesting incentives that go the other way. By getting the big property managers involved, tenants or regulators that are upset by how things are going have a new target for their wrath that:
- is making money from the deal (unlike landlords now)
- unequivocally knows the subletting is going on (unlike landlords now)
- has an explicit contractual responsibility to aggrieved tenants (unlike AirBnB or other tenants)
- has a lot of money that can be taken away if they lose a lawsuit (unlike other tenants), and
- has valuable unmovable property located in the jurisdictions where the harm is being done (unlike other tenants and AirBnB).
I'm not really sure whether these issues outweigh the points you made or not, but if this happens, it probably makes legal action against bad actors using AirBnB much easier.
I've always thought that if you rent your place out on Airbnb, your neighbors should get a cut too.
The logistics are difficult, but maybe it could work like this:
- Airbnb stores landlord info for each rental (where applicable)
- A certain percentage is set aside for the other tenants in that building and paid directly to the landlord of that building
- The landlord then distributes the amount they received from Airbnb to tenants via deductions in their monthly rent
As much as I love Airbnb, I still feel like i'm doing something sketchy when I use it and i've had some awkward run-ins with landlords because it's clear the person doesn't have permission to sublet. So I would definitely like to see the service become more legitimate and move out of the shadows.
Not surprising. That's all standard clauses in a lease. For a long list of reasons you can't treat a rented propert like it's your own and just start renting it out without having the real landlord in the loop.
Also doesn't get around the usual "hotel" regulations in many cities that forbid short term rentals, also for a long list of reasons.
As someone who rents from Equity Residential in NYC I will move to another apartment if they open my building up to this.
It is illegal in NYC to rent an apartment for less than 30 days and is enforced by many landlords. If Airbnb is trying to convince landlords to look the other way, I find that disgusting.
I don't want my building to be a hotel. I don't want random people in my building. The idea that landlords can rationalize steeply raising rents with the expectation that tenants will find the money by letting someone crash on their couch for a few days every month to make it up is dehumanizing.
Will this be exploited by the 20% of affordable housing units in these buildings paying well below market rates?
> I don't want my building to be a hotel. I don't want random people in my building.
Here's the thing... it's not your building.
I totally understand it being wrong to AirBnB a rental without the landlord's approval. But if the landlord is ok with it... they own the building, that's their call. If you don't like it, find a different apartment.
In a lease agreement, it is a common convention to pay a rental rate for one dwelling or "unit" in the building. Not the "entire building " containing said dwelling. If you dont like what other people do with their dwellings, pay their rent for them in exchange for agreements governing what they do therein.
nemo44x may not own the building, but her/his home is there. A home has greater meaning than its enclosing walls and a roof. It's the difference between a "home" and a "house". The home transcends ownership; the home goes beyond the physical space. Homes provide privacy, intimacy, personal expression, retreat. They are a place to love, to cry, to heal. They are a basic piece of the human experience. And all modern societies value them beyond their economic and materialistic dimensions.
In high density areas, local governments have codified the value of "home" into law. NYC has housing laws that offer protection for people across the spectrum. From rent stabilization and eviction laws for the homes of those in lower income brackets, to Co-op and condo laws that protect the home of some of the wealthiest residents.
A child comment was deleted that called nemo44x's opinion "dehumanizing" because it didn't account for the extremely limited supply of housing. My response is below:
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The assertion that, for residential rental, anything that is not a free market is "dehumanizing" to "everyone who came after you" is not self-evident.
Consider this: when someone gets an apartment, they put down roots. Their utility curve is biased towards them wanting to stay where they are. They arguably should not be asked to swap the location of where they live as easily as a day trader would sell stocks. Think about commuting for a person already making ends meet with multiple jobs; think about the disruption to a child's schooling. Rent control is designed to account for this, to dampen the dynamic system of the housing market as an attempt for greater overall utility.
Whether it is optimal, whether it is overapplied - since utility can't easily be quantified, that's something that everyone will have a different opinion on. Quoth the Dude, "That's just, like, your opinion, man." [0] You're certainly entitled to call someone else's opinion "dehumanizing," and they are equally entitled to downvote you in return.
In fact, a free market is dehumanizing because whether or not some entities participate in free market exchange has nothing to do with whether or not they are human. The concept of a free market only takes into account motivations to trade and subsequent evaluations, which has nothing to to with being human. Robots can engage in a free market with aliens. In a free market, your human attributes are set aside as irrelevant, except to the extent that being human gives you human-specific needs and desires that are relevant to the trade.
Well unfortunately intentions are not consequences. Rent control has very visibly benefits (grandma gets to keep her apartment at close to the same rent as she has been paying for decades) but distorts the market in very subtle but destructive ways (landlords not paying for any maintenance and harassment and dehumanization of tenants paying below market rates).
There are transaction costs to everything. You think a landlord wants to go through the process of finding a new tenant and moving him in, ideally with no difference between your move out day and the new tenants move in date? Also, the protections you receive are priced into the cost. Would you take a slightly lower rent if the landlord could kick you out at any time?
> Putting down roots
This is very sentimental but that argument can be used to justify many policies that are meant to favor the recipients of a current system. In America there has been a huge transfer of wealth from the young and relatively poor to the old and relatively wealthy.
> Whether it is optimal, whether it is overapplied - since utility can't easily be quantified, that's something that everyone will have a different opinion on.
Yes, that's why we have a market and people are willing to trade based on their own utility (e.g. I signed a two year lease at a higher net effective rent)
Getting an apartment at a fraction of the market rate is not capitalism. It wouldn't be right for someone given this type of apartment to exploit it for profit considering there are thousands of other people who would qualify for these apartments and not take advantage of it.
It has happened in Queens already and I believe the tenants have been evicted. Such a foolish choice considering the money they would have saved over the years.
What do "white people" have to do with anything here?
The place I live has recently announced that they are furnishing and renting out the vacant units to people now. Though they seem to imply its meant for families of residents for visiting holidays and such. But it still feels a little like my place is becoming a hotel. Not sure if it will be discontinued past holidays or if non family will occur.
A problem I see here is that participating landlords are given incentive have their properties or portions "straw rented" by people who will Airbnb the unit in order to avoid hotel regulations and side step rent control (because a unit will supposedly Airbnb at a market rate).
93 comments
[ 102 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadBut its funny how this free market thing works though, the hypocrisy is the same people who scream innovation and disruption when it comes to Uber are crying disgust and malpractice when it comes to Airbnb.
You can't have these selectively applied to what you like and dislike. If disrupting taxi unions and license issuers was fair, so is this.
Zilch. Nada. Absolutely nothing. They can accept it, or find somewhere else.
It's great that a landlord is saying, fine, you can sublease the place short term. But we have to regulate that, you have to pay us to do so, and if you can't hold up your end we have the right to put an end to it.
This is the only reasonable way I can see to solve the problem of short term rentals.
Not only do boilerplate leases include "quiet enjoyment" clauses that contractually bind landlords into ensuring that tenants aren't disruptive, but state laws also include implied covenants of quiet enjoyment, meaning that there are large areas where it doesn't even matter if you edit that out of your lease.
A landlord that fails to ensure quiet enjoyment can be sued by their tenants.
Even with the laws and implied covenants, it takes a significant amount of time to go through eviction proceedings in many states. In California it can take months (unless you stop paying rent altogether, in which case there's a fast-track procedure).
Yes, a tenant can sue their landlord as well. Again, however, that can take months and significant expense.
When considering these things, we must take into account the actual reality of how rights are exercised, not merely what rights exist in law.
In just about every other situation, there is a list of 16 reasons you can evict someone, and all of them can lead to a lengthy expensive trial, in which at the end the landlord has spent a significant amount of money and probably regrets every doing anything with their life.
https://www.sftu.org/justcauses/
Is that particularly worse than tenants having to deal with Section 8 tenants in their midst?
Your own comment some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623102
Why do you think that short-term middle-to-upper-class renters are preferable neighbours to medium-to-long-term lower-class renters? I saw your comment elsethread about ease of punishment, which makes some sense, but in my experience small landlords simply don't care.
Living above a pair of end-stage alcoholics who importuned people on the sidewalk and called the ambulance for health care every few weeks was far, far more annoying than the flophouse a few doors down. Then there was the poor family with 9 people in a two-bedroom unit, with a couple of teenagers who vandalised and may have been thieves as well (not that upper-class teenagers aren't hoodlums, of course: many of them are too). Then there was the prostitute with the shady clientele.
You appear to be opposed to short-term renters, but appear to applaud Section 8. Why the difference?
Neither are short-term hotel guests, but tptacek wants to reduce those while welcoming Section 8, which is logically inconsistent.
They are both groups of people who some folks wish to exclude as neighbours, and others wish to include as neighbours, in both cases presumably based on desirability or undesirability qua neighbours.
I've explained my reasoning (which is that I think short-term renters are more likely to be of a similar social class as their neighbours than are those who qualify for housing vouchers, and that I view local class homogeneity as a social good); it's hardly illogical, although you are of course free to disagree with it.
It's the landlord who offers (within the limits of local law) the terms of the lease. I've never seen a lease agreement that allows subleasing without at least right of refusal on reasonable grounds by the landlord. The landlord is within its rights prohibit the tenant from entering into any kind of sub lease entirely. It could (again, within the limits of local law) evict the tenant for even advertising a possible sublease without its written permission.
But no, the landlord is very graciously offering to actively support subleasing via AirBnB. If the landlord executes properly, that's a win for the tenant, a win for the landlord, and a win for the neighbors.
It's certainly true that if these things are done irresponsibly then bad things happen. And bad things do often happen, I'll give you that. But it's not necessarily true. How it's managed is what determines whether the outcome is good or bad and for whom.
When short term renters well behaved, then the neighbors aren't harmed at all. If any lease holder has the ability to sublet easily with support of the landlord then that is something of value. A landlord that gets involved like this is going to create an environment with incentives for good short term tenants.
I'd rather lease from a company that allows me to do that and also supports me in doing so. I'd rather lease from a company that actively manages subleases than one that sticks its head in the sand that pretends that isn't happening all the time.
Short term subleases are here to stay. Trying to stop them is like trying to stop piracy or illicit drug use. It's just not going to happen.
edit: also: To call what happens on airbnb an "unregulated hotel" is profoundly misguided. Have you ever lived for a significant period of time out of airbnb??
I'm not sure why I'm meant to care that there are people that use Airbnb for long-term living arrangements. The modal Airbnb renter does not do that.
What this landlord is doing is the equivalent of saying, "People are going to do drugs. OK. You can sell drugs and you can consume drugs, I'm not going to stop you. I only demand to test their purity first. And if you hurt unrelated parties I'm going to hold the guilty party accountable."
Now everyone has something to gain by playing by the rules. Sure, they have to give up something, but they get more than they give if they're honest. Once someone in a legal position of authority can get the parties to agree to play by the rules, that authority can do a lot to reduce, if not completely mitigate, the negative side effects.
Of course, you may not like that trade-off. You may, like me, have kids in those bedrooms, and enjoy having other families with kids around you who form lifelong friendships with your kids. You may not really want to see an investor buy the 3 bedroom apartment next to you and pay his or her own mortgage and profit by bringing a never ending stream of strangers into the house or apartment next door - even if these strangers are very well behaved.
In short, you may wish to trade your right to turn your house into a hotel in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that your neighbors won't do this either. Or, alternatively, you may be ok with it in a more limited way, that perhaps you don't really mind people doing this occasionally, when they are on vacation, say for a limited number of days a year.
If this is the case, then you would gain none of the benefits but experience all the negatives of disruption.
As you can probably tell from the way I set this up, I feel it is immensely reasonable to zone certain sections of a city as residential with strong restrictions on short term rentals, as a way of protecting residents from the externalities of short term rentals, as well as a way of protecting long term housing stock.
It might be better to just do a "site:" search, prepending "site:" to the url. In this case, the search is:
site:www.wsj.com/articles/big-landlords-airbnb-discuss-partnerships-1450200473
This brings up 1 result, which is the paywalled article.
Essentially, I'd still pay my rent like normal and then have them manage the Airbnb while we're out of town and they'd get a cut of the proceeds. I'd need to check the lease to see if I'm allowed to do it anyway, I assume not, but it seems like a reasonable way for all three parties to win:
They collect more rent, I cover some travel expenses, ad someone gets to stay in a cute place close to downtown Santa Barbara.
Leases can be amended - it's not a law.
My wife and I rent two vacation homes on AirBnb and other websites. We started with a one night minimum in the off-season and then quickly change to 3 nights. This essentially means we book fewer off-season weekend rentals.
Here's why we did that: It takes 1 night to trash a house. So do you want someone to pay you $200 to trash your house or $600 to trash your house?
You're also playing Russian roulette where every new guest is a trigger pull. The fewer trigger pulls, the less likely you are to take a bullet.
We'd rather a higher vacancy rate with an overall fewer number of guests. In the end this means we might reduce our revenue by 10% to have 50% fewer guests.
Your landlord would have to decide that couple extra thousand dollars a year would be worth hosting 20 random visitors. If that's how the numbers break down the risk isn't worth the reward IMO.
In my case I believe our city recently (or might soon) change the rules of short-term rentals to only allow for rentals longer that 30 days.
What I was specifically thinking of doing was taking my family to another country for a month and renting the place out for the duration to help cover the expenses. Hopefully the longer term rental would weed out many of the types of people that might trash a place.
Stress + time spent managing the debacle @ my bill rate + lost income during repairs + items insurance fails to cover, etc...
We've really only had one group trash a house and it was really just a big mess with no real physical damage. Took about $800 of extra cleaning and was handled by the deposit.
As I mentioned in another comment, I was thinking of taking my family to another country for a month and renting the place out for that entire month to a single renter to help reduce some of the costs.
Let's be honest; marketing the place on Airbnb and dealing with renters aren't a huge value-add. The majority of the value is generated by the ownership of the building, and the building owners want to capture as much of that as they can.
Airbnb is a slippery slope: it mixes the hotel markets (which tend to be much higher priced) with the rental markets. This brings the prices of rental markets up, and many renters may feel the only way they can afford their apartment is if they rent it out. It's also how you get $1 million studio apartments in Manhattan - the monthly payment on a $1 million loan isn't bad when you consider you can rent it out at $350/night for half the year (hotels in the same area are ~$500/night) and still turn a profit.
I'm not really sure whether these issues outweigh the points you made or not, but if this happens, it probably makes legal action against bad actors using AirBnB much easier.
The logistics are difficult, but maybe it could work like this:
- Airbnb stores landlord info for each rental (where applicable)
- A certain percentage is set aside for the other tenants in that building and paid directly to the landlord of that building
- The landlord then distributes the amount they received from Airbnb to tenants via deductions in their monthly rent
As much as I love Airbnb, I still feel like i'm doing something sketchy when I use it and i've had some awkward run-ins with landlords because it's clear the person doesn't have permission to sublet. So I would definitely like to see the service become more legitimate and move out of the shadows.
Also doesn't get around the usual "hotel" regulations in many cities that forbid short term rentals, also for a long list of reasons.
I mention it because the headline reads a bit more like "greedy landlords decide they want your money from letting on airbnb!"
It is illegal in NYC to rent an apartment for less than 30 days and is enforced by many landlords. If Airbnb is trying to convince landlords to look the other way, I find that disgusting.
I don't want my building to be a hotel. I don't want random people in my building. The idea that landlords can rationalize steeply raising rents with the expectation that tenants will find the money by letting someone crash on their couch for a few days every month to make it up is dehumanizing.
Will this be exploited by the 20% of affordable housing units in these buildings paying well below market rates?
Here's the thing... it's not your building.
I totally understand it being wrong to AirBnB a rental without the landlord's approval. But if the landlord is ok with it... they own the building, that's their call. If you don't like it, find a different apartment.
No, actually it's not. It's against the law to use a residential building as a short term occupancy hotel.
If you don't like it, find a different language. :P
Perhaps an example will put you at ease:
"Oh could you help me take these to my flat? I know they're heavy, but don't worry, my building has a lift!"
Substitute apartment and elevator if so inclined.
In high density areas, local governments have codified the value of "home" into law. NYC has housing laws that offer protection for people across the spectrum. From rent stabilization and eviction laws for the homes of those in lower income brackets, to Co-op and condo laws that protect the home of some of the wealthiest residents.
Actually, it's very likely that a bank owns the building with a 30 year mortgage.
Tenants have rights. Landlords are not, and should not be, allowed to do whatever they want with their building.
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The assertion that, for residential rental, anything that is not a free market is "dehumanizing" to "everyone who came after you" is not self-evident.
Consider this: when someone gets an apartment, they put down roots. Their utility curve is biased towards them wanting to stay where they are. They arguably should not be asked to swap the location of where they live as easily as a day trader would sell stocks. Think about commuting for a person already making ends meet with multiple jobs; think about the disruption to a child's schooling. Rent control is designed to account for this, to dampen the dynamic system of the housing market as an attempt for greater overall utility.
Whether it is optimal, whether it is overapplied - since utility can't easily be quantified, that's something that everyone will have a different opinion on. Quoth the Dude, "That's just, like, your opinion, man." [0] You're certainly entitled to call someone else's opinion "dehumanizing," and they are equally entitled to downvote you in return.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c
Well unfortunately intentions are not consequences. Rent control has very visibly benefits (grandma gets to keep her apartment at close to the same rent as she has been paying for decades) but distorts the market in very subtle but destructive ways (landlords not paying for any maintenance and harassment and dehumanization of tenants paying below market rates).
There are transaction costs to everything. You think a landlord wants to go through the process of finding a new tenant and moving him in, ideally with no difference between your move out day and the new tenants move in date? Also, the protections you receive are priced into the cost. Would you take a slightly lower rent if the landlord could kick you out at any time?
> Putting down roots
This is very sentimental but that argument can be used to justify many policies that are meant to favor the recipients of a current system. In America there has been a huge transfer of wealth from the young and relatively poor to the old and relatively wealthy.
> Whether it is optimal, whether it is overapplied - since utility can't easily be quantified, that's something that everyone will have a different opinion on.
Yes, that's why we have a market and people are willing to trade based on their own utility (e.g. I signed a two year lease at a higher net effective rent)
When your area of comfort is being disrupted = Disgusting(Airbnb).
When somebody else's area of comfort is being disrupted = Innovation(Uber).
Airbnb is trying to turn buildings zoned for residential living into commercial hotels, which is illegal.
Tenants who have landlord's permission to rent on Airbnb != All people who rent on Airbnb have landlord's permission.
And yes disruption is always when it happens to others, when it happens to you, it looks 'unfair'.
> I don't want random people in my building
Well, why not ? when wealthy white people "exploit" legal loopholes and government subsidies for personal financial gain, it's called capitalism.
It has happened in Queens already and I believe the tenants have been evicted. Such a foolish choice considering the money they would have saved over the years.
What do "white people" have to do with anything here?
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