I'm currently living in an awesome rent house that couldn't make it as an Airbnb. The monthly rent is drastically lower than it should be for the quality of house. The owners got desperate and stuck. :)
The mania has passed I think. No one has extra money to travel and stay in Airbnbs. Plus I despise the Airbnb experience. It turned into a list of chores I need to do to make them money. Nah, give me a hotel with professionals paid to clean and do those chores and that know how to do it well. When I travel I want to go out and experience the city, and I noticed that when my family would stay in an Airbnb we would just stay in the stupid house instead of experience the new city. Hotels fix this also.
Sorry it used to be an Airbnb, it was turned into a traditional rental I found on Zillow and jumped on.
Usually I don't like renting but we are in between houses after selling ours and the mortgage on this house would be 1.6x what we are paying in rent with current interest rates, etc. It is hard to justify buying right now.
> No one has extra money to travel and stay in AirBnBs.
It depends on the location. In my experience, Airbnb seems to be booming in some places since remote work is the norm. Lots of people now use it as their main provider of housing and for longer periods.
"Lots" is already ambiguous, so I'm not sure what you're expecting. I've worked remotely for 8 years and spend half my time in Airbnbs. If you go to meet ups or nightlife with other expats, you'll find many others doing the same.
For people who travel a lot and stay in each place for less than three months at a time, it makes sense. I have had 1-2 airbnbs booked at a time almost constantly for the past two years, and know lots of people who work remote and do the same thing.
Airbnb is pretty much the only option for the gap between “stay a few nights” where a hotel makes sense and “stay for 4+ months” where renting a place makes sense.
> No one has extra money to travel and stay in AirBnBs
This is categorically false in the US at least. Average disposable income in the US is $58,947 in 2023 to date (the median number is not easily found unfortunately). This number is up slightly from 2022.
Disposable income was WAY up for about a year from mid 2020 to mid 2021 and people in white collar jobs had broad flexibility. I think it's broadly understood that this combined with low interest rates caused a boom in short term vacation rentals. With interest rates up and people returning to offices, it seems natural that short term rentals as a business would suffer.
Please don't quote "average" numbers for anything unless you also have the std. deviation listed too. Otherwise it is meaningless and misleading.
In addition, this is the definition:
> "The US Disposable Personal Income per Capita indicates American household income net of taxes for each person."
This number doesn't reflect costs in any way at all. It isn't "disposable income" as most people would use it for day to day conversation i.e. the amount left after I've paid all my fixed costs (and possibly some non-fixed costs like food).
The claim was "No one has extra money to travel and stay in AirBnBs".
Americans on average have plenty of money to do so. You're just arguing with the BEA definition of disposable income... which I guess is a perspective, but IMHO not a useful one. We could look at real household median income, which is also up https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N.
> The claim was "No one has extra money to travel and stay in AirBnBs".
(emphasis mine)
If income increases, but fails to increase enough to match a parallel increase in expenses, the "extra money to travel and stay in AirBnBs" has gone down.
This is insanely pedantic, you must be a blast at parties. But, income has almost been tracking inflation. So plenty of people have extra money for travel.
I guess I should clarify that no one I know has extra money right now to travel and stay in Airbnbs compared to a few years ago. Most are just trying to make ends meet and pay their inflated bills.
They seem to match this graph for personal savings rate which is down at 4.1% now from highs of 20-30% in the 2020-2021 era.
> It turned into a list of chores I need to do to make them money.
Agreed. It really irks me when a vacation home that I rented for a lot of money hands me a list of chores at the end of the stay, then has the gall to charge me a cleaning fee on top of it. These days I stick to a hotel other than for exceptional use-cases.
> No one has extra money to travel and stay in Airbnbs.
This is wrong as a general statement: what’s happened is that people have become more discerning about value, and it takes more than dropping $50 at IKEA to make a place cool enough to earn a premium. If your house is in a cool neighborhood close to something unique, that might work but if it’s a car-dependent suburb near a ton of hotels it’s probably not going to command much of a premium. Being near Disney is something but there are thousands of competing options capping how much you can charge.
There are situations where it makes a lot of sense - for example, we just visited family where it made sense for my sister and I to share AirBnB houses since there were 3 young children and having a kitchen and separate play space was important. The problem is a lot of people got into real estate speculation thinking it’d be free money and they didn’t spend enough time thinking about what they were giving you over a hotel room.
Also, I’d bet there were some very optimistic assumptions about overhead – retirees often make terrible landlords because they’re trying to hit targets for monthly profit and don’t have enough liquidity absorb cost increases. I suspect a lot of AirBnB hosts were in a similar boat where something like rates for cleaners going up really eats into the margin they are counting on.
The landlord who complains that rents aren't enough to make the mortgage, for example.
In an area like Silicon Valley, someone who buys a small property new and tries to rent it most definitely will not make the mortgage from rent, especially a single family house.
> Then, in August 2022, hosts howled when Airbnb further changed its refund rules to give guests more time to make complaints and seek refunds; the company ended up amending some language that made hosts responsible for putting complaining guests up in other accommodations.
Wild, it's almost as if being a landlord comes with obligations.
A lot of people chasing a 'passive' income dream becoming hosts and landlords. I'd imagine they are probably the worst because they're not understanding that they're entering a service oriented business.
We have a spare bedroom that my wife would like to rent out (could probably get over $1k/month in revenue for it). As long as we aren't hurting for cash, I'm avoiding it because of how much I don't want to be a landlord.
The safest way to do this is to rent the room to a local business/church/school that needs regular housing for qualified visitors.
Otherwise you’re dealing with random public in your house with all the issues associated with that. At least with renting to a business you have some sort of middleman.
Tell me about it! My own landlady is one of the tiktok "real estate investors" who didn't understand that she can't get out of legally mandated minimum heat requirements because "I bought an old house and it's gonna cost me $10k to redo the heating!"
She also used to run an Airbnb on the floor below me until this summer, so go figure.
Unfortunately, my dad and uncle are also turning a similar tone and I'm not sure if they're trolling or not. They inherited a 200 Yr old house and want to convert it into an Airbnb without any modifications, save for revamping the toilets and bathrooms. "We'll sell this as an experience of staying in a 200 yr old battered house to all those backpacking tourists, and charge a $100 a night for it!". Mind you, this is also a house where, the last time I visited, I was greeted by the foul smell of a dead fox which had somehow gotten inside. facepalm
There is a general conception that real estate is an instant “I win” button and it is very, very hard to dissuade people of this.
You have to research “tenants from hell” on YouTube to get a bit of an understanding of it, but even then the successful landlords often don’t even correctly account for all the finances and times and work out what they really made.
One bad tenant (or one bad uninsured disaster and there are thousands of possibilities here) can destroy years of leveraged appreciation.
Two sides to this coin: Yes, some landlords are [very] bad, but some AirBnB tenants will abuse the system at any chance they get.
I talked to someone who was renting out their basement apartment on AirBnB for a few months before a remodel was scheduled. They had one tenant try to file complaints about everything, down to the color of the bedding not matching the photos posted online. “Property not as described in listing”.
They ultimately won, but it was a lot of hassle.
Any marketplace has these issues. Getting the balance right is hard. I’ve had to fight a similar battle on eBay where someone waited until 4 hours before the claim deadline to file a claim that my “item was not as described”. They then requested a return and gave me a fake tracking number that never arrived. It took months and months to sort it out, but eBay was actually decent about looking at the facts. Still an annoying time sink I could have done without.
>I talked to someone who was renting out their basement apartment on AirBnB for a few months before a remodel was scheduled. They had one tenant try to file complaints about everything, down to the color of the bedding not matching the photos posted online. “Property not as described in listing”.
This doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Maybe the listing should match what they were actually offering to rent?
I guess it depends on the listing, but I once booked a place that was billed as a nice romantic getaway in a beach town on AirBnB, and when we got there the room didn't look anything like the picture, many of the sheets and towels did not match and were low quality, and many of the small pillows, rugs, decorative curtains, and other furnishings shown in the ad were not there.
Yes I insisted on and got a full refund -- they were advertising a boutique, romantic getaway, not a cheap motel near the beach.
Hotels have all the same sheets, so much so that a picture of your hotel room can often be traced to a particular address.
It’s insane to demand that the sheet color at an Airbnb match the color on the photo. It’s not materially relevant.
Now if the photo showed a queen bed and you got a twin, that would be a material difference. Perhaps even if the sheets were shown as cotton and you got something else.
But for me if I escape an Airbnb alive, I count it a win.
I mean, I actually agree with this take, even though it’s subjective. While guests can be unreasonable, I suspect many hosts are taking glamour shots of the bedrooms and then keeping them in normal conditions while charging a premium.
You see the same thing in fast food advertisements. A glorious hamburger on TV, and a greasy smushed mess when you purchase one.
The question is why we tolerate the latter, not why we should accept the former.
I can't read the article, so I can't comment much, but the problem is Airbnb will frequently give guests refunds even after the refund deadline. Our rentals are our small business and getting a cancellation with-in 30 days a $5-10k trip can be a real hit. The cancellation policies are to give time to rebook to someone else.
We have multiple full-time, short term rentals and will not list them on Airbnb because they do not let hosts set their own cancellation policies and even worse they will override the few options they do give you.
A real world example of this is happening right now for us with our units in Hawaii. We have a 60 day no refund policy. 100% refund before this. We highly encourage trip insurance and you must check a box to opt of getting it. In our refund policy we state do not refund for weather or natural disasters. In these situations Airbnb will give the guest a full refund regardless of your policy, where Vrbo will let the host decide if they want to break their policy because of the unique situation. FWIW we gave full refunds.
Ehh... archive.li / archive.ph seems to really hate Firefox users. Get stuck in an eternal CAPTCHA loop regardless of whether I have any extensions enabled. Ugh.
I'll be honest, a 60 day no refund policy sounds insane. If you're able to get people to book with you, great for you, but I can't see a world where I ever would sign up for that...
It isn’t for everyone, but even many larger hotels offer a more expensive, non-refundable option. People pay less for non-refundable rental cars and airfare as well. The terms are clear so we don’t need Airbnb canceling a 7 night stay the week of check-in because of a complication with the guest's dog sitter.
Also, if they do cancel in the 60 day window we relist the dates and if they get rebooked then we give that money to the person who canceled.
For what it's worth, I always book my flights and hotel stays non-refundable if that's a cheaper option. Except during the pandemic travel restrictions, I've never had to cancel a single flight or hotel reservation so I've figured it's an unnecessary cost.
Are you saying that you won't offer a refund even if you cannot provide the promised service (e.g. the unit has been damaged by fire) or that you won't offer a refund in the case where your guest can't reach the unit because of travel restrictions?
If I had booked and found that you could no longer provide the service you promised but refused a refund I would feel as though I were scammed.
In general I was speaking to Vrbo allowing hosts to define their own refund policy and to break it if the host would like to. Airbnb can break the refund rule for the guest if they choose to.
Personally, of course if the unit is inaccessible or damaged we provide refund. If travel restrictions change we always reach out to future guests and allow them cancel at that point. We've refunded guests that don't check-in for two months even though the city in Maui we are in had no fire damage and the roads.
People really want short-term rental owners to always be trying to scam, but many of us are just small business owners and try to do the right thing.
A better title would be "low-touch real estate speculation doesn't pan out for some people". AirBnB flippers have wreaked small havoc in my city, scooping up all kinds of units that would have otherwise sold to people who would actually have lived in them (not to mention work in and contribute to the community here). I'm praying for a crash in the AirBnB market so that we can actually reuse that housing for something productive.
That still wouldn't do all that much, given that every major US metro area has a shortage of homes in the first place [1]. At best it might reduce the rate at which home prices continue to increase.
Unfortunately I have to agree, and our housing market is REALLY bad. I think the AirBnB issue is relatively small potatoes next to big money real estate holdings firms, who've really gone wild scooping up single family housing and renting it back to people at way above what a mortgage+taxes would cost. People are starting to realize that we need to improve the housing stock options, and there is beginning to be some political will behind it, but it's very slow going.
Residential estate shouldn't even be all that attractive for holding firms, though, with all the maintenance costs involved in it and the lack of economy of scale. The only reason it's such a draw is that it's in an excessive shortage, resulting in the absurd year-over-year market rate increases, and because interest rates are so low that every other investment has very low returns compared to historical results.
IDK if that is net positive or negative, but FWIW most areas try to boost tourism as much as possible. (Like, every U.S. state has a tourism dept/budget.)
At least in my area, we absolutely get more tourists - but a lot of their money does not get spent within city limits.
They rent a house near downtown, spending all day at the lakes/beaches/attractions outside of the city, then maybe go downtown for dinner (assuming they don't cook out).
I live in a town with a resident population of about 140,000. It attracts a lot of tourists. I live in a flat with a neighbouring flat that is run as an unhosted AirBnB.
I'm sure the presence of tourists helps some shops stay open; but not the kind of shops that I use. Tourists don't use butchers, greengrocers, tool and hardware stores. They use tourist shops, which consequently multiply.
Today (as every day) I went to the shops. I got caught on the pavement/sidewalk behind a column of about 50 overseas visitors, following a tour guide. That column crashed into a similar column going in the opposite direction. This was the High Street, i.e. the main drag; it wasn't feasible to step into the carriageway, because there was traffic. In my view we have way too many tourists, and their guides don't extert enough control.
I regularly have my doorbell pressed by AirBnB guests who can't get in, and expect me to do something about it. This is frequently at night. There have been a few loud parties, including one with underage girls. I've been sworn at and threatened a few times.
The Council is trying to shut down this operator. They told the operator they were in violation of regulations (we're zoned as residential). They appealled. The Council won the appeal. I think they must have now appealled to the Secretary of State; they're still operating. This has taken over a year.
I would like it if my neighbour were the same person that was my neighbour yesterday. I have no "proper" neighbours.
The “touristification” of towns has happened time and time again, and shouldn’t be encouraged without some forms of restraint.
My small town isn’t touristy and the CBD is walkable and real and has places I go (and visitors can go, too, of course) like groceries, banks, etc.
A friend lives in a nearby slightly larger small town that is a tourist destination and his “downtown” is a sea of gift shops and restaurants and nothing much else. To get groceries and supplies he has to go to the outskirts or the next town over.
My city (Denver) has definitely pushed tourism HARD over the last decade, and in my view it's had mixed results. If you're a developer or like a certain class of restauranteur it's been pretty great. I also imagine it's generated a decent chunk of sales and use revenue. But this focus has come at the cost of not really prioritizing making it a good place to actually live. Some QoL stuff has improved tangentially to the tourism stuff (we've got lots of fun stuff to do now), but the actually nitty gritty of daily life (public transit, usable sidewalks, basic public amenities, etc.) needs a lot of work. Our outgoing mayor gave an interview where he said that the achievement he was most proud of was "making Denver a world class city", which in his mind seemed to equate to people who don't live here wanting to visit it. I think it's pretty telling that he focused on this, rather than something like average citizen QoL or similar.
Cities loved tourists because it’s perfect taxation without representation- you can raise hotel occupancy taxes all you want and the locals don’t care because they don’t use hotels.
But if Airbnb skirts those, you lose that financial advantage.
It's double edged: if Airbnb didn't exist, more hotels would pop out, so tourist flux may be the same long term. On the other hand, in hot spots, airbnb ruins living in the city for locals: ppl specifically buy property to use it for short term rental, as result price for longterm rental is skyrocketing, incentivising ppl to move out of the city. Also, since prices are so good, even locals that already have a property are considering moving to get extra $ and as result the city becomes predominantly dominated by tourists, esp the center. Prague is a prime example of this problem, but I guess there are others
AirBnB is the worst thing to happen to the housing market and towns need to outright ban it or allow specific areas for short term housing. Generally short term housing causes headache for the neighbors.
People who often do short stays don’t give a crap about noise, neighbors, or anything else.
Plus many got into airbnb to get rich. Have 0 business sense, 0 landlord experience and often don’t maintain the property.
Plus, every time I stayed at Airbnb I felt scammed. The pictures always lied. Some of the things were not as advertised. And before leaving I had a todo list. Absolutely pathetic way to spend vacations.
Yup, all it takes is 1 out of 10 guests throwing beer cans over the fence to piss off the neighbors for good. It doesn't have to be the norm to suck ass.
just chiming in to say that in the early days, i got an AirBnB in Tokyo, paid a reasonable sum and had a wonderful time, but have been staying in hotels since the debacles have started popping up
the sad thing is that from the very beginning, unlike many other startup businesses, they actually had a great value-prop and worked incredibly well as a product
I had one bad experience in Paris 15 years ago (ish) and that was it. No more Airbnb (unless I am travelling with other families and need kitchens etc - then the todolist is something i just put up with). Looks like ABNB is just getting worse over the years. But oh boy. Staying at a hotel - I know what I am getting. Yes it sucks for reasons - but they are all known reasons (eg small rooms, "boring" etc). Now (not a plug or anything) last three times I was with Hilton (nothing fancy) and I gotta say I got lucky all 3 times. Even other hotels - boring but dependable. No todo lists - just leave!
> AirBnB flippers have wreaked small havoc in my city
Cities have put themselves in this position both because they don't allow enough new housing and because they don't allow enough new hotels and VRBO-like options in the places people want them.
A large number of smaller/basement airbnb units near me are within a very short walk of hotels or hotels offering suites. Generally speaking, the hotels are located closer to favorable amenities.
Hotel and Airbnb prices are getting much closer unless you’re running with a group or family.
But hotels are tightly controlled and regulated and located (with the associated considerations about traffic, noise, etc). Airbnbs can be anywhere, unless regulations extend to them (and even then they often skirt the regs).
On the flip side, the people staying in the AirBnB's tend to eat out more often and our patronizing local business. They're not taking any jobs, and the landlord is still paying the property tax. It's essentially free money to your city.
WFH is working out the same way. People are spreading out to towns that don't have jobs to offer but thanks to people who are WFH they're bringing in money from the outside that's helping to prop up the local economy. As those people move out of the cities that's freeing up housing to be available for those who want to live in the city or need to live in the city.
My city's property taxes are among the lowest in the nation for an urban metro, so that's not really a big factor. However you're right that tourists spend a lot of money in our food+drink and entertainment industries, which has definitely had some positive effects in our overall "scene" and generates some good sales+use tax. On the other hand, we're not really starved for wealthy people who like to have a good time but we are starved for mid- to low- cost housing, so IMO it would be a better deal for the city to consolidate the tourism into dense hotels and leave all the charming 1.5 BRs for first-time buyers.
> They're not taking any jobs
My understanding was that you couldn't really "take" jobs (in the long-term anyways). I would imagine that increasing the volume of our labor force would only grow our overall economy (so long as we can house everyone)
the people staying in the AirBnB's tend to eat out more often
I doubt it. One of the reasons people choose AirBnB over hotels is that they want a kitchen so that they don't have to eat out. As to taxes, while the city is still getting the property tax, they're losing out on the hotel taxes that the people staying in the AirBnB would otherwise have paid. Plus the profits that are now going to AirBnB would otherwise have gone to the hotel owner/managers and thus been more likely to get spent in the city.
So on net I'd say people staying in AirBnBs generate quite a bit less money for the city than if they'd stayed in a hotel. The only places that this sort argument works is for places that are so out of the way or unpopular that they simply don't really have hotels for people to stay in.
The city is still ahead on taxes. The biggest complaint being lodged against the AirBnB's is they're keeping housing values high and pricing people out of the market. If the AirBnB's were to go away then the local housing market would collapse - along with the property tax revenue associated with it. That's if the naysayers can be believed that AirBnB is having that dramatic of an effect on local housing costs.
> AirBnB flippers have wreaked small havoc in my city, scooping up all kinds of units that would have otherwise sold to people who would actually have lived
Does your city not monitor and control the short term rental market to alleviate this? Many cities have strict controls on rentals less than 30 day.
One of the problems is owning a short term rental is seen/marketed at low-touch or passive income, but It takes a lot of work to run sort term rentals. We've ran into all sorts of crazy situations that take work to properly manage.
airbnb isnt entirely to blame, they just made the process that already existed easier for some people. This same phenomenon happens around college campuses for decades. They have special houses just for students or certain genders and many businesses cater to out of town renters. If you want changes, its at the gov. level or in regards to private property, which regulation of private property is like the opposite of what the western world is all about.
Airbnb has absolutely wrecked most of the holiday spots in the UK. Locals can't afford to rent, so it's killing local shops - only the tourist traps remain.
Markets solve these problems and that remains true even when you disagree with the results. If people don't want to visit places with tall buildings and sprawl, then it won't get built and where it does it will fail.
What actually bothers you is that this is what people want and it will get built and it will be patronized.
> What actually bothers you is that this is what people want and it will get built and it will be patronized.
Yes. It does bother me that the utility function of "the market" does not align with what is good for me, and that therefore it frequently produces results that are worse for me.
In fact this applies not just to urban development, but also to many other things.
Multi-story luxury condos are a thing. Not a lot of land used, and it's something that many people want to live in. Why are they not being built in these places?
Even high-end condos cost less than a low-end house to build, since the land costs are amortized among many units.
Your example has one thing that those condos don't have: glorious socialist realism waste of space - and I mean it in a good way.
When they were young, my grandparents moved into a whole district built from scratch for the purpose of housing workers from a nearby steelmill.
Communism notwithstanding, the district is amazingly well planned and - what's dearly missing in modern, hyper-optimized construction - sufficiently spread apart.
> Your example has one thing that those condos don't have: glorious socialist realism waste of space - and I mean it in a good way.
Exactly! If you rise up enough, it becomes possible to have green zones around these big buildings and make living actually enjoyable.
On the other end of the spectrum is Hong Kong and most of Manhattan - I don't look forward to living there, even if some condos are really nice inside.
One of the sisters is a great example for sure, and they were in my mind as I read your previous comment but I cant think of any others that come even close. Would love to see other examples.
If your urban planning is going to prioritize giving tourists scenic views rather than building affordable homes for the people that live and work in the city, then you shouldn't be surprised if the city turns into an giant museum/resort where only the wealthy can afford a decent QoL (because they're the only ones who can financially compete with the tourists).
Here's the thing: with the proliferation of AirBnB and real-estate-as-an-investment that's already the case regardless of density.
In my corner of the world people move out of large cities not because they enjoy driving so much, but because they don't have the credit score for anything within city limits
Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.
A multi-billion dollar corporation that actively strategizes to benefit from no regulation or bad regulation. Likely they also lobby for favorable regulation that will actively harm locals.
A local government not properly regulating.
I'd compare it to PG&E or Comcast in the United States.
The owners of said AirBnBs, who would be eligible to vote for the local councilors (who must approve new developments), have an incentive to ensure that that would not be the case.
The UK housing market is at least as f'ed up as the US market, in terms of actual construction of housing (no matter how badly needed) being mostly forbidden.
As far as I understand it, the UK housing market suffers from an additional problem that is rare to non-existent in the US: builders who get planning permission for new housing but then sit on the land because they know with almost 100% certainty that built or not, it will be worth more in the future.
There are places in the USA where a builder could take this bet, but it would be much, much riskier.
I'm curious about hotel capacity in Airbnb locations. If 1,000 people want to visit a city, they need a place to live. If Airbnb didn't exist, would hotels just be fully booked?
Tourists with no money are worthless for this town.
They just block up the pavement lining up photos of landmarks (and anything else) with their mobile phones, that they could certainly download from Insta and get a better photo. Every square foot of this town has already been snapped a million times.
The implication of your comment is that poor people should just stay at home and look at pictures on the internet instead of occasionally traveling and experiencing things for themselves.
If this is your perspective, you’re either incredibly privileged, jaded, or both. I don’t think that poor people are necessarily owed cheap accommodation or transportation in any sense, but I also don’t think that active steps should be taken to remove more affordable options simply because they can’t afford to patronize high-end restaurants and stores or do the more expensive tourist activities.
> If this is your perspective, you’re either incredibly privileged, jaded, or both.
My perspective on poor people and travel is that international air-travel is hopelessly underpriced; it isn't reasonable for all 6 billion people in the world to travel for holidays. I don't really care who travels; tourists don't better my bread, whether they're rich or poor. But the argument that tourists are good for the local enconomy depends on them being willing to spend money. Huge columns of overseas students don't spend much money.
My town is pretty, and world-famous. It is quite capable of sustaining itself without tourists; it has two universities, and several large hospitals. Housing is in short supply, and expensive. It's not a great shopping destination; tourists who want to shop shop elsewhere.
> but I also don’t think that active steps should be taken to remove more affordable options
Every housing unit devoted to tourists is a housing unit that isn't available for the local people. The Council is right to try to restrict residential housing to residential use.
In the 80s and early 90s we would alienate book our holiday cottage in Cornwall though a catalog. I’m not entirely sure how it worked, I guess my parents phoned up the company and asked for a given cottage for a given week.
Just got an Airbnb in San Francisco for the month for my parents to visit: $7k/mo . Pretty good deal, imho. I would have gone for a Blueground if there were availability.
Also, a friend of mine has a home in Palm Springs that he Airbnb'd out two years ago. Now he just has the same people pay the same rate for a month every year. Works out for all.
I think the situation on the ground is actually pretty good.
AirBnB hosts are unrealistic with their expectations. The raising costs, ridiculous cleaning fees, absurd "house rules", etc. make AirBnB pretty much a no-go for me these days.
Hotels have great amenities, really good customer support, and not too much BS.
With AirBnB it's an absolute gamble if you're going to get a good host or a wannabe slumlord. I don't think this is AirBnB's fault though, just general human greed, wanting to make easy money by providing as little value as possible.
If you want fast, low-variance places to stay with no research, pick a hotel. If you want something off the beaten path, try AirBnB, VRBO, etc.
AirBnB is where caveat emptor rules. AirBnB becomes more of a gamble was they allow gaming reviews. However, I've had plenty of problems with hotels (e.g., mechanical noise) and rarely experience anything delightful (although I did once get a very nice blueberry mule). Hotels are almost never better than expected.
Using AirBnBs, I've had some wonderful surprises (beautiful views, great human interactions) and a lot of variety. I've never had a problem, but I always make sure that the host is a superhost. My wife recently stayed at a place infested with roaches but it wasn't superhosted. . .
I think early on in AirBnB's existence I've had the delightful experience, interesting hosts, etc.
The last 2-3 years though, it has been less than stellar with both super host and non-super hosts stays for a majority of the stays, so I stopped using AirBnB. I'm sure there are still a lot of hosts that have a property they treat properly, treat the guests good, and care about hospitality etc. but the general vibe I get is that a lot of superhosts are folks with a bunch of properties doing the bare minimum while charging the absolute maximum. Just personal experience in the US though.
The dream was never real: the pitch was that you could make tons of money without complying with local regulations and cutting corners on services like cleaning but it turns out that markets are pretty efficient at cutting out actual inefficiencies. Once the VCs stopped subsidizing everything, it became obvious that this is not a massively profitable business but a relatively low-margin field which competitors can fairly easily enter. Everyone who went into this expecting double-digit returns for little effort is now learning a hard lesson about why you should do research before investing.
If it's finally only hitting the wall now, that seems like there's been several years of a good run. The dream doesn't have to last forever for it to have been real. It's like that saying, the stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions. There's been real money being made for people for years now. That may eventually dry up, but in the meanwhile, that's where it is.
> has predicted nine out of the last five recessions
It's basically a saying that people are always throwing out negative predictions that eventually come true, but that doesn't justify the excess false (poorly timed) predictions.
I guess that’s one way of looking at it but if you can only profit in a record bull market with historically unprecedentedly-low interest rates it’s probably a sign that you don’t have a viable business concept.
I would actually like to see the FTC or DoJ start putting hard limits on the length and losses the companies can run, or at least tax companies that run intentional losses.
I get it, you run losses to start a new business, but if your prices are provably unsustainably low, with no profitability in sight, then your business model is anti-competitive, period.
A common pattern in this type of company is that they’ll take less of a cut for their services than they’d need to actually pay their bills to keep the price customers pay competitive and to attract hosts (or drivers in the case of Uber, etc.). That’s not an invalid growth strategy but it has two risks:
1. It can give a misleading impression of how loyal customers are. People stayed in Airbnbs a lot when they were cheaper than hotels but since prices went up after Airbnb started needing to show profits, it’s really common for people to stay in a hotel at the same or lower price.
2. The bigger long-term risk is that it encourages building the wrong type of company. If you have barrels of VC money sloshing around, it is really tempting to hire a ton of people and compensate them like you’re old Google - after all, you need to expand rapidly and that needs the best executives and tons of staff, right? Unfortunately, that can make it easy to forget what industry you’re in and a certain class of investor wants to believe that doing something on the internet means it’s now a high-margin industry.
Airbnb is much better than most of their cohorts in that generation of business and they used the pandemic wisely to make some much needed cuts to their overhead, but what we’re seeing now is affecting the supply side: in a competitive market consumers aren’t willing to overpay for lodging and with everyone involved paying the full overhead costs that means being a small-time hotelier is not very profitable. That doesn’t mean doom but it means everyone should have more realistic expectations for profit margins – the hotel industry tends to be 5-10% except at the high-end where it might be 15%, so there’s money there but it’s not a Google/Facebook ad revenue kind of margin.
Thanks for this explanation. I know the standard model of VC subsidies to lower prices and gain market share. Airbnb is probably keeping its service fees lower than it can afford to or spending too much in other areas to grow faster using VC money. However VCs aren’t subsidizing Airbnb rentals like they are Uber rides.
I’m a host myself and VC funding plays no role in what I charge. It’s mostly a function of market forces.
Yeah, I think Airbnb has far better prospects than Uber/Lyft/DoorDash because they have a much stronger balance sheet and a bit more of a moat against competitors. The car/delivery services have the problem that most of their customers live in the area so someone doesn’t need to compete globally before they can undercut them (here in DC, multiple neighbors have commented that the taxis are both cheaper and more dependable now so they only use Uber when traveling), whereas Airbnb’s reputation does help travelers pick them over random websites in unfamiliar locations.
In October, they put their home online
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/932495383465985171
“We have absolutely zero bookings in August,”
Robertson says. “This summer is extremely slow.”
The listing seems to have rendered images instead of photos. Why?
And the listing shows no reviews at all.
Is that possible? Why don't they at least have some friends book the apartment and write the first reviews?
Personally, I never rent apartments with less than 100 reviews. That might be extreme. But I would imagine most people won't rent one with no reviews at all.
The better approach would be to provide excellent service and tell the first guests "You were our first customers. It would mean the world to us if you write a review".
But if that is not what they do, why don't they atleast have some friends book the aprtment and write a review? After investing $295,000 - would you really go totally hands-off if you value your investment?
They just need to discount the price enough to get a few people willing to take a risk and write the first reviews.
I live in Airbnbs for half of the year, so occasionally I'll take a gamble on an unreviewed place with good pictures and a well written listing. So far I've almost always had a good experience with a 40-60% discount relative to comparable listings.
> “It was made to sound like you would be booked all the time, and you could make 5, 10 grand a month,” she says. But the most she’s ever gotten has been $3,500 a month and sometimes as little as $1,000. “It’s not as much as we were expecting.”
So basically it's paying the mortgage on their $295k second home, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me. I don't think middlemen promising that you will make more money off of a deal than you actually do is a new thing, or that it's limited to AirBNB. Take estimates with a healthy grain of salt.
If the deal was really good the middlemen would snap it up. Just like really good real estate offers never hit the open market because the realtors buy the property.
But most people are financially bad at estimates and assume that maximum cash flow is anything close to actual cash flow - hence the laws requiring MLMs to disclose the average compensation vs the highest.
I'm going to stick my neck out a bit and mention that I run an Airbnb in Philadelphia, it's the second floor of my building, and I'm a fan of all the regulation that's put into place.
Our cleaning fee is $50, and before we approve you, we ask - are you really just two to four people? Do you understand, this isn't a hotel, you're staying in our house, so no smoking and no parties. This filters out 99% of the people who are looking for something we're not offering.
We're one of the highest rated Airbnb's in the city. Our neighbors have no complaints. And it shames me into picking up the garbage that New Jersey visitors leave on our street when they park here to go to Dave & Busters.
I think it works because we're closer to the original model - sharing space in our home. These people who buy up properties to be remote landlords or run hands-free hotels, who complain about rules going into place as a reaction to bad behavior? Good riddance. Is that good for stock prices? Beats me, but as far as I'm concerned, when done right, it's good for everyone involved.
> I think it works because we're closer to the original model - sharing space in our home.
Because of this, (1) you take the extra step in screening people and (2) you're there if there is a problem. When I hear of Airbnb problems, it's not when they've actually shared a room in someone's home, it's been a separate property of some sort.
For the sake of clarity, even though it's not super important - we rent the entire second floor out. It's about 450sqft - an apartment, albeit a small one for sure. We live on the 3rd floor (1100sqft). We almost never even see our guests.
You’re still there if you need to be and you know the situation; a lot of the time Airbnb hosts don’t even live in the same country as some of their properties. A lot of the time the “host” is just someone hired to answer the Airbnb messages and let the guests in.
Pretty sure. I talk to my neighbors. I'm the secretary of the local RCO (registered community organization), we have monthly meetings with the neighborhood. I'm also an admin on the neighborhood Facebook group.
You can take my word for it, or you can look me up, if it's important enough for you.
>What's in it for them?
Well, for starters, once or twice a month, I pick up the trash on my street. I've got a roller bin, a trash grabber, gloves, and a big box of black plastic bags. I live in Philadelphia, we don't have street sweeping, we don't even have garbage cans on every corner.
I'm building a theater on the first floor. It had been a magic theater, it's going to be an intimate multi-disciplinary performing arts space. Hope to make the lobby double as a coffee shop.
When I bought this building, it was in terrible shape. We fixed it up, and during the process, discovered two colonial era privy pits, full of artifacts from the years leading up to and including revolutionary war. I've become a citizen archaeologist and something of a hyperlocal historian. I conducted my first neighborhood tour in conjunction with a local blog, Hidden City, a couple of months ago.
I'm not saying you are wrong. Just theorising. All the things you mention seem unrelated to the Airbnb. You are clearly a forcefull figure in the local community. This might influence how thruthfull open people would be to you when it comes to crossing your plans.
Maybe it's just that I can not imagine how a forever changing stream of occupants with zero longer term local interests can be a positive or even neutral compared to long term invested neighbours for anyone but the host.
Theorizing is important, but it's also good to test your theory. Again, you can take my word for it, or you can ask my neighbors yourself. If you think I'm at all imposing enough that anyone would hesitate to speak truth to me, you've never been to Philadelphia and met Philadelphians, and you've no idea what a pencilneck dork I am. It's important to look for areas of improvement, but you're foolish of you ignore the actual positives of the current situation as well, and only seek out theoretical negatives.
As far as forever changing, I have several families that have become regulars. Some, annually for a music festival, others just like the price and location. Regulars or one-timers, they all typically spend more at local businesses than locals, or renters. Tourism has pluses and minuses, but so does any industry.
My neighborhood is a blend of homeowners and renters. The landlords are less invested in the neighborhood than me, without exception. The homeowners are a mixed bag. The renters couldn't care less, I suspect that their mothers show up weekly to do their laundry and wipe their asses. (that's exaggerating, but you get the idea) The ones who are as invested, if not more, have lived here since the 70s in property they own, and are definitely NIMBYs. For better or for worse.
> Disney World, which is just a 10-minute drive away...
Buying a house to rent to Disney World visitors was a huge mistake.
Disney park traffic is way down.[1] Disney parks raised their prices to the point that they are no longer a middle class destination. Disney World prices have increased 5x in constant dollars since the place opened.[2] Disney parks have now had a total flop - "Star Cruiser Adventure", which cost US$4,800 for two people for two days and is shutting down. Turns out that LARPs don't sell at that price point.
iirc from the article, they bought the second house as their winter destination; renting it out was just one way they were going to offset their mortgage.
Disney is on the profit-price spiral greed bandwagon still thinking they own Osceola County and people are stupid and will pay anything. Newsflash: Most people are losing real wealth and nominal income as America increasingly becomes a perversely unequal country.
We have Airbnb homes on either side of us. We have weekly problems with trespassing, trash, expletive laden screaming arguments, speeding and loud music. We're in wine country and the amount of obvious drunk driving is alarming.
The entire neighborhood has complained to law enforcement, county government (we're just outside city limits), Airbnb and VRBO hundreds of times. Nothing has been done by any of them.
Anyone else been in this situation and had any reasonable solution?
Start creating a paper trail. Research local laws. Our town has ordinance in place that prevent such behavior even during day time.
Email mayor, chief of police and start talking to neighbors. At some point you might be able to sue the owners, sue city/policy if they are not taking action to enforce rules(if they exist).
Thanks. We've pretty much done all you suggested up to getting a lawyer. My 10 neighbors and I are meeting up to discuss and it sounds like we'll just have to pool our resources and hire a lawyer.
Go offensive. Coordinate with your real neighbors as to what the absolute legal things you can do that make the Airbnbs useless.
Eg, start a backyard hog farm. Check local regulations on outdoor lighting and light your yard brighter than the sun. Incorporate a church and hold classical music revivals at appropriate times. Park exceptionally ugly and large equipment anywhere you legally can.
This is the nuclear option but sometimes nuking it from orbit is the only way to be sure.
Airbnb was cool when it started, no doubt. Then hosts gradually got impersonal, complacent, arrogant, and cash-grubbing as time went on. And then guests invaded private apartment complexes and acted like Americans on spring break. It's the arc of many things, and no different.
I’m expecting quite a few AirBNB landlords to exit when they hit their first milestone maintenance expense. HVAC, roof, special assessments, septic, well, there are some big ones.
Every time these threads pop up on HN there is very little sympathy for us who use these services. They say, why can’t you just stay in a hotel???
Well, why don’t you live in a hotel?
I travel 300+ days a year for work. On occasion I book a regular hotel. Maybe one week per two months or something. It’s not too bad, but longer than that and I want to get out and live like a normal person.
Yes it’s dead we are going into a recession . People can’t afford food and shelter . Airbnb is a pipedream for most people now vacations are a huge luxury that most can not afford . The covid money from the governments is all gone . There will be a huge crash in real estate as well due to all the BNB speculation and huge rent increase that are unsustainable .
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadThe mania has passed I think. No one has extra money to travel and stay in Airbnbs. Plus I despise the Airbnb experience. It turned into a list of chores I need to do to make them money. Nah, give me a hotel with professionals paid to clean and do those chores and that know how to do it well. When I travel I want to go out and experience the city, and I noticed that when my family would stay in an Airbnb we would just stay in the stupid house instead of experience the new city. Hotels fix this also.
Usually I don't like renting but we are in between houses after selling ours and the mortgage on this house would be 1.6x what we are paying in rent with current interest rates, etc. It is hard to justify buying right now.
It depends on the location. In my experience, Airbnb seems to be booming in some places since remote work is the norm. Lots of people now use it as their main provider of housing and for longer periods.
Citation needed.
Airbnb is pretty much the only option for the gap between “stay a few nights” where a hotel makes sense and “stay for 4+ months” where renting a place makes sense.
This is categorically false in the US at least. Average disposable income in the US is $58,947 in 2023 to date (the median number is not easily found unfortunately). This number is up slightly from 2022.
Disposable income was WAY up for about a year from mid 2020 to mid 2021 and people in white collar jobs had broad flexibility. I think it's broadly understood that this combined with low interest rates caused a boom in short term vacation rentals. With interest rates up and people returning to offices, it seems natural that short term rentals as a business would suffer.
In addition, this is the definition:
> "The US Disposable Personal Income per Capita indicates American household income net of taxes for each person."
This number doesn't reflect costs in any way at all. It isn't "disposable income" as most people would use it for day to day conversation i.e. the amount left after I've paid all my fixed costs (and possibly some non-fixed costs like food).
Americans on average have plenty of money to do so. You're just arguing with the BEA definition of disposable income... which I guess is a perspective, but IMHO not a useful one. We could look at real household median income, which is also up https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N.
(emphasis mine)
If income increases, but fails to increase enough to match a parallel increase in expenses, the "extra money to travel and stay in AirBnBs" has gone down.
They seem to match this graph for personal savings rate which is down at 4.1% now from highs of 20-30% in the 2020-2021 era.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/savings/american-savi...
Agreed. It really irks me when a vacation home that I rented for a lot of money hands me a list of chores at the end of the stay, then has the gall to charge me a cleaning fee on top of it. These days I stick to a hotel other than for exceptional use-cases.
This is wrong as a general statement: what’s happened is that people have become more discerning about value, and it takes more than dropping $50 at IKEA to make a place cool enough to earn a premium. If your house is in a cool neighborhood close to something unique, that might work but if it’s a car-dependent suburb near a ton of hotels it’s probably not going to command much of a premium. Being near Disney is something but there are thousands of competing options capping how much you can charge.
AirBNB: All those, plus clean up, worry about neighbors, half the time it's more expensive than a hotel, with a better chance of spy cameras.
I suspect many wanted an arm's length almost passive investment, and so they are putting the maintenance burden on to their guests.
Expecting cleanup for a three month summer rental tenant is one thing.
Expecting that for a three day guest is another.
In an area like Silicon Valley, someone who buys a small property new and tries to rent it most definitely will not make the mortgage from rent, especially a single family house.
Wild, it's almost as if being a landlord comes with obligations.
Otherwise you’re dealing with random public in your house with all the issues associated with that. At least with renting to a business you have some sort of middleman.
She also used to run an Airbnb on the floor below me until this summer, so go figure.
You have to research “tenants from hell” on YouTube to get a bit of an understanding of it, but even then the successful landlords often don’t even correctly account for all the finances and times and work out what they really made.
One bad tenant (or one bad uninsured disaster and there are thousands of possibilities here) can destroy years of leveraged appreciation.
I talked to someone who was renting out their basement apartment on AirBnB for a few months before a remodel was scheduled. They had one tenant try to file complaints about everything, down to the color of the bedding not matching the photos posted online. “Property not as described in listing”.
They ultimately won, but it was a lot of hassle.
Any marketplace has these issues. Getting the balance right is hard. I’ve had to fight a similar battle on eBay where someone waited until 4 hours before the claim deadline to file a claim that my “item was not as described”. They then requested a return and gave me a fake tracking number that never arrived. It took months and months to sort it out, but eBay was actually decent about looking at the facts. Still an annoying time sink I could have done without.
This doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Maybe the listing should match what they were actually offering to rent?
OP's scenario sounds like a shithead (which exist everywhere on every platform) was abusing the system to save some cash.
Yes I insisted on and got a full refund -- they were advertising a boutique, romantic getaway, not a cheap motel near the beach.
It’s insane to demand that the sheet color at an Airbnb match the color on the photo. It’s not materially relevant.
Now if the photo showed a queen bed and you got a twin, that would be a material difference. Perhaps even if the sheets were shown as cotton and you got something else.
But for me if I escape an Airbnb alive, I count it a win.
You see the same thing in fast food advertisements. A glorious hamburger on TV, and a greasy smushed mess when you purchase one.
The question is why we tolerate the latter, not why we should accept the former.
We have multiple full-time, short term rentals and will not list them on Airbnb because they do not let hosts set their own cancellation policies and even worse they will override the few options they do give you.
A real world example of this is happening right now for us with our units in Hawaii. We have a 60 day no refund policy. 100% refund before this. We highly encourage trip insurance and you must check a box to opt of getting it. In our refund policy we state do not refund for weather or natural disasters. In these situations Airbnb will give the guest a full refund regardless of your policy, where Vrbo will let the host decide if they want to break their policy because of the unique situation. FWIW we gave full refunds.
Sounds like the marker is working as designed. Buyer and seller have to find agreeable terms, otherwise no deal and move on
Also, if they do cancel in the 60 day window we relist the dates and if they get rebooked then we give that money to the person who canceled.
If I had booked and found that you could no longer provide the service you promised but refused a refund I would feel as though I were scammed.
Personally, of course if the unit is inaccessible or damaged we provide refund. If travel restrictions change we always reach out to future guests and allow them cancel at that point. We've refunded guests that don't check-in for two months even though the city in Maui we are in had no fire damage and the roads.
People really want short-term rental owners to always be trying to scam, but many of us are just small business owners and try to do the right thing.
[1]: https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...
Instead your city is getting more tourism?
IDK if that is net positive or negative, but FWIW most areas try to boost tourism as much as possible. (Like, every U.S. state has a tourism dept/budget.)
They rent a house near downtown, spending all day at the lakes/beaches/attractions outside of the city, then maybe go downtown for dinner (assuming they don't cook out).
I'm sure the presence of tourists helps some shops stay open; but not the kind of shops that I use. Tourists don't use butchers, greengrocers, tool and hardware stores. They use tourist shops, which consequently multiply.
Today (as every day) I went to the shops. I got caught on the pavement/sidewalk behind a column of about 50 overseas visitors, following a tour guide. That column crashed into a similar column going in the opposite direction. This was the High Street, i.e. the main drag; it wasn't feasible to step into the carriageway, because there was traffic. In my view we have way too many tourists, and their guides don't extert enough control.
I regularly have my doorbell pressed by AirBnB guests who can't get in, and expect me to do something about it. This is frequently at night. There have been a few loud parties, including one with underage girls. I've been sworn at and threatened a few times.
The Council is trying to shut down this operator. They told the operator they were in violation of regulations (we're zoned as residential). They appealled. The Council won the appeal. I think they must have now appealled to the Secretary of State; they're still operating. This has taken over a year.
I would like it if my neighbour were the same person that was my neighbour yesterday. I have no "proper" neighbours.
My small town isn’t touristy and the CBD is walkable and real and has places I go (and visitors can go, too, of course) like groceries, banks, etc.
A friend lives in a nearby slightly larger small town that is a tourist destination and his “downtown” is a sea of gift shops and restaurants and nothing much else. To get groceries and supplies he has to go to the outskirts or the next town over.
But if Airbnb skirts those, you lose that financial advantage.
People who often do short stays don’t give a crap about noise, neighbors, or anything else.
Plus many got into airbnb to get rich. Have 0 business sense, 0 landlord experience and often don’t maintain the property.
Plus, every time I stayed at Airbnb I felt scammed. The pictures always lied. Some of the things were not as advertised. And before leaving I had a todo list. Absolutely pathetic way to spend vacations.
the sad thing is that from the very beginning, unlike many other startup businesses, they actually had a great value-prop and worked incredibly well as a product
Cities have put themselves in this position both because they don't allow enough new housing and because they don't allow enough new hotels and VRBO-like options in the places people want them.
A large number of smaller/basement airbnb units near me are within a very short walk of hotels or hotels offering suites. Generally speaking, the hotels are located closer to favorable amenities.
But hotels are tightly controlled and regulated and located (with the associated considerations about traffic, noise, etc). Airbnbs can be anywhere, unless regulations extend to them (and even then they often skirt the regs).
WFH is working out the same way. People are spreading out to towns that don't have jobs to offer but thanks to people who are WFH they're bringing in money from the outside that's helping to prop up the local economy. As those people move out of the cities that's freeing up housing to be available for those who want to live in the city or need to live in the city.
> They're not taking any jobs My understanding was that you couldn't really "take" jobs (in the long-term anyways). I would imagine that increasing the volume of our labor force would only grow our overall economy (so long as we can house everyone)
I doubt it. One of the reasons people choose AirBnB over hotels is that they want a kitchen so that they don't have to eat out. As to taxes, while the city is still getting the property tax, they're losing out on the hotel taxes that the people staying in the AirBnB would otherwise have paid. Plus the profits that are now going to AirBnB would otherwise have gone to the hotel owner/managers and thus been more likely to get spent in the city.
So on net I'd say people staying in AirBnBs generate quite a bit less money for the city than if they'd stayed in a hotel. The only places that this sort argument works is for places that are so out of the way or unpopular that they simply don't really have hotels for people to stay in.
Does your city not monitor and control the short term rental market to alleviate this? Many cities have strict controls on rentals less than 30 day.
One of the problems is owning a short term rental is seen/marketed at low-touch or passive income, but It takes a lot of work to run sort term rentals. We've ran into all sorts of crazy situations that take work to properly manage.
What actually bothers you is that this is what people want and it will get built and it will be patronized.
Yes. It does bother me that the utility function of "the market" does not align with what is good for me, and that therefore it frequently produces results that are worse for me.
In fact this applies not just to urban development, but also to many other things.
Even high-end condos cost less than a low-end house to build, since the land costs are amortized among many units.
Perhaps because a tall residential building in a tourist spot is an eyesore.
People go there to see something scenic, not more of what they have at home, or worse.
If you build it like an eyesore, it will be an eyesore, yes. Here is a multi-story building that I lived as a student in and it housed another 10k: https://www.ruseducation.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/LOMON...
But I agree that building glass+concrete rectangles is a not a great idea for tourist spots (or anywhere, really).
When they were young, my grandparents moved into a whole district built from scratch for the purpose of housing workers from a nearby steelmill.
Communism notwithstanding, the district is amazingly well planned and - what's dearly missing in modern, hyper-optimized construction - sufficiently spread apart.
Exactly! If you rise up enough, it becomes possible to have green zones around these big buildings and make living actually enjoyable.
On the other end of the spectrum is Hong Kong and most of Manhattan - I don't look forward to living there, even if some condos are really nice inside.
In my corner of the world people move out of large cities not because they enjoy driving so much, but because they don't have the credit score for anything within city limits
Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.
That's because there's not enough housing in the city limits.
>Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.
That's not true, adding a few more sky scrapers increases the amount of space for people and does not impact the amount of sunlight people can enjoy.
Cities can also do things like add more rail lines, so people can commute from further away -- which also increases the amount of space for people.
A multi-billion dollar corporation that actively strategizes to benefit from no regulation or bad regulation. Likely they also lobby for favorable regulation that will actively harm locals.
A local government not properly regulating.
I'd compare it to PG&E or Comcast in the United States.
There are places in the USA where a builder could take this bet, but it would be much, much riskier.
The U.K. has had a housing shortage for decades, and solving it becomes harder each year as the backlog increases.
Or do hotels not have the capacity?
They just block up the pavement lining up photos of landmarks (and anything else) with their mobile phones, that they could certainly download from Insta and get a better photo. Every square foot of this town has already been snapped a million times.
If this is your perspective, you’re either incredibly privileged, jaded, or both. I don’t think that poor people are necessarily owed cheap accommodation or transportation in any sense, but I also don’t think that active steps should be taken to remove more affordable options simply because they can’t afford to patronize high-end restaurants and stores or do the more expensive tourist activities.
My perspective on poor people and travel is that international air-travel is hopelessly underpriced; it isn't reasonable for all 6 billion people in the world to travel for holidays. I don't really care who travels; tourists don't better my bread, whether they're rich or poor. But the argument that tourists are good for the local enconomy depends on them being willing to spend money. Huge columns of overseas students don't spend much money.
My town is pretty, and world-famous. It is quite capable of sustaining itself without tourists; it has two universities, and several large hospitals. Housing is in short supply, and expensive. It's not a great shopping destination; tourists who want to shop shop elsewhere.
> but I also don’t think that active steps should be taken to remove more affordable options
Every housing unit devoted to tourists is a housing unit that isn't available for the local people. The Council is right to try to restrict residential housing to residential use.
How is airbnb and different?
Also, a friend of mine has a home in Palm Springs that he Airbnb'd out two years ago. Now he just has the same people pay the same rate for a month every year. Works out for all.
I think the situation on the ground is actually pretty good.
Hotels have great amenities, really good customer support, and not too much BS.
With AirBnB it's an absolute gamble if you're going to get a good host or a wannabe slumlord. I don't think this is AirBnB's fault though, just general human greed, wanting to make easy money by providing as little value as possible.
AirBnB is where caveat emptor rules. AirBnB becomes more of a gamble was they allow gaming reviews. However, I've had plenty of problems with hotels (e.g., mechanical noise) and rarely experience anything delightful (although I did once get a very nice blueberry mule). Hotels are almost never better than expected.
Using AirBnBs, I've had some wonderful surprises (beautiful views, great human interactions) and a lot of variety. I've never had a problem, but I always make sure that the host is a superhost. My wife recently stayed at a place infested with roaches but it wasn't superhosted. . .
The last 2-3 years though, it has been less than stellar with both super host and non-super hosts stays for a majority of the stays, so I stopped using AirBnB. I'm sure there are still a lot of hosts that have a property they treat properly, treat the guests good, and care about hospitality etc. but the general vibe I get is that a lot of superhosts are folks with a bunch of properties doing the bare minimum while charging the absolute maximum. Just personal experience in the US though.
> has predicted nine out of the last five recessions
It's basically a saying that people are always throwing out negative predictions that eventually come true, but that doesn't justify the excess false (poorly timed) predictions.
I get it, you run losses to start a new business, but if your prices are provably unsustainably low, with no profitability in sight, then your business model is anti-competitive, period.
1. It can give a misleading impression of how loyal customers are. People stayed in Airbnbs a lot when they were cheaper than hotels but since prices went up after Airbnb started needing to show profits, it’s really common for people to stay in a hotel at the same or lower price.
2. The bigger long-term risk is that it encourages building the wrong type of company. If you have barrels of VC money sloshing around, it is really tempting to hire a ton of people and compensate them like you’re old Google - after all, you need to expand rapidly and that needs the best executives and tons of staff, right? Unfortunately, that can make it easy to forget what industry you’re in and a certain class of investor wants to believe that doing something on the internet means it’s now a high-margin industry.
Airbnb is much better than most of their cohorts in that generation of business and they used the pandemic wisely to make some much needed cuts to their overhead, but what we’re seeing now is affecting the supply side: in a competitive market consumers aren’t willing to overpay for lodging and with everyone involved paying the full overhead costs that means being a small-time hotelier is not very profitable. That doesn’t mean doom but it means everyone should have more realistic expectations for profit margins – the hotel industry tends to be 5-10% except at the high-end where it might be 15%, so there’s money there but it’s not a Google/Facebook ad revenue kind of margin.
I’m a host myself and VC funding plays no role in what I charge. It’s mostly a function of market forces.
And the listing shows no reviews at all.
Is that possible? Why don't they at least have some friends book the apartment and write the first reviews?
Personally, I never rent apartments with less than 100 reviews. That might be extreme. But I would imagine most people won't rent one with no reviews at all.
The better approach would be to provide excellent service and tell the first guests "You were our first customers. It would mean the world to us if you write a review".
But if that is not what they do, why don't they at least have some friends book the aprtment and write a review? After investing $295,000 - would you really go totally hands-off if you value your investment?
I live in Airbnbs for half of the year, so occasionally I'll take a gamble on an unreviewed place with good pictures and a well written listing. So far I've almost always had a good experience with a 40-60% discount relative to comparable listings.
Hell, it can be listed as “cockroach infested shithole” and of the price and location is right someone will take it.
So basically it's paying the mortgage on their $295k second home, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me. I don't think middlemen promising that you will make more money off of a deal than you actually do is a new thing, or that it's limited to AirBNB. Take estimates with a healthy grain of salt.
But most people are financially bad at estimates and assume that maximum cash flow is anything close to actual cash flow - hence the laws requiring MLMs to disclose the average compensation vs the highest.
Our cleaning fee is $50, and before we approve you, we ask - are you really just two to four people? Do you understand, this isn't a hotel, you're staying in our house, so no smoking and no parties. This filters out 99% of the people who are looking for something we're not offering.
We're one of the highest rated Airbnb's in the city. Our neighbors have no complaints. And it shames me into picking up the garbage that New Jersey visitors leave on our street when they park here to go to Dave & Busters.
I think it works because we're closer to the original model - sharing space in our home. These people who buy up properties to be remote landlords or run hands-free hotels, who complain about rules going into place as a reaction to bad behavior? Good riddance. Is that good for stock prices? Beats me, but as far as I'm concerned, when done right, it's good for everyone involved.
Because of this, (1) you take the extra step in screening people and (2) you're there if there is a problem. When I hear of Airbnb problems, it's not when they've actually shared a room in someone's home, it's been a separate property of some sort.
If your neighbor’s house is owned by someone a thousand miles away they’re never inconvenienced by anything that happens in the building itself.
Are you sure of that? What's in it for them?
Pretty sure. I talk to my neighbors. I'm the secretary of the local RCO (registered community organization), we have monthly meetings with the neighborhood. I'm also an admin on the neighborhood Facebook group.
You can take my word for it, or you can look me up, if it's important enough for you.
>What's in it for them?
Well, for starters, once or twice a month, I pick up the trash on my street. I've got a roller bin, a trash grabber, gloves, and a big box of black plastic bags. I live in Philadelphia, we don't have street sweeping, we don't even have garbage cans on every corner.
I'm building a theater on the first floor. It had been a magic theater, it's going to be an intimate multi-disciplinary performing arts space. Hope to make the lobby double as a coffee shop.
When I bought this building, it was in terrible shape. We fixed it up, and during the process, discovered two colonial era privy pits, full of artifacts from the years leading up to and including revolutionary war. I've become a citizen archaeologist and something of a hyperlocal historian. I conducted my first neighborhood tour in conjunction with a local blog, Hidden City, a couple of months ago.
Let me know if you've got any other questions.
Maybe it's just that I can not imagine how a forever changing stream of occupants with zero longer term local interests can be a positive or even neutral compared to long term invested neighbours for anyone but the host.
As far as forever changing, I have several families that have become regulars. Some, annually for a music festival, others just like the price and location. Regulars or one-timers, they all typically spend more at local businesses than locals, or renters. Tourism has pluses and minuses, but so does any industry.
My neighborhood is a blend of homeowners and renters. The landlords are less invested in the neighborhood than me, without exception. The homeowners are a mixed bag. The renters couldn't care less, I suspect that their mothers show up weekly to do their laundry and wipe their asses. (that's exaggerating, but you get the idea) The ones who are as invested, if not more, have lived here since the 70s in property they own, and are definitely NIMBYs. For better or for worse.
Buying a house to rent to Disney World visitors was a huge mistake. Disney park traffic is way down.[1] Disney parks raised their prices to the point that they are no longer a middle class destination. Disney World prices have increased 5x in constant dollars since the place opened.[2] Disney parks have now had a total flop - "Star Cruiser Adventure", which cost US$4,800 for two people for two days and is shutting down. Turns out that LARPs don't sell at that price point.
[1] https://insidethemagic.net/2023/07/walt-disney-world-crowds-...
[2] https://www.tiktok.com/@piechartpirate/video/701961608049041...
The entire neighborhood has complained to law enforcement, county government (we're just outside city limits), Airbnb and VRBO hundreds of times. Nothing has been done by any of them.
Anyone else been in this situation and had any reasonable solution?
Email mayor, chief of police and start talking to neighbors. At some point you might be able to sue the owners, sue city/policy if they are not taking action to enforce rules(if they exist).
Call cops whenever rules are broken and document.
Eg, start a backyard hog farm. Check local regulations on outdoor lighting and light your yard brighter than the sun. Incorporate a church and hold classical music revivals at appropriate times. Park exceptionally ugly and large equipment anywhere you legally can.
This is the nuclear option but sometimes nuking it from orbit is the only way to be sure.
I travel 300+ days a year for work. On occasion I book a regular hotel. Maybe one week per two months or something. It’s not too bad, but longer than that and I want to get out and live like a normal person.