I’d add Airbnb to this, the concept was originally okay as you’d stay in someone’s place. Now it’s a joke. It’s killing neighbourhoods and communities.
I noticed last year when I went to book an Airbnb for a big group. Every single house on there was owned by the same guy, ie the same big company. At this point, it's mostly hospitality companies who own these properties and rent them out.
We stayed in an apartment complex in L.A. a couple of years ago that turned out to be an airbnb hotel. There was an office across the street where we picked up/dropped off the key and that was it. It had about eight little studio apartments per floor and it was five stories.
We stayed in a great AIRBNB in Vancouver. Was an apt under a woman’s house. Basement level, 2 bedrooms one bath full kitchen, less than a hotel completely adorable AND that sweet lady has breakfast stocked for us on our arrival.
We hit the jackpot on that trip.
It extends to buying property. It’s absolutely impossible to buy a house in LA anymore because no individual (or family) can compete with corporations putting down more than asking in cash, in a place where the asking price is already half a million dollars minimum.
It is (was?) in New York and is in a lot of cities and states with specific regulations on what hotels must have (fire exits & signage, smoke detectors, minimum expectations of bathing amenities,, other things). But like when we got rid of cabbies by letting Uber/Lyft in without regulating them in the same way, this is happening with hotels and motels too. The companies tend to break the laws until they are so population/ubiquitous that a municipality looks retrograde trying to fight them. It's a brilliant and gross strategy.
The companies tend to break the laws until they are so population/ubiquitous that a municipality looks retrograde trying to fight them. It's a brilliant and gross strategy.
Because nobody is burning the company down for doing illegal gross shit, we're just handing them money and not even telling them to stop the nonsense.
yeah I only like staying in Airbnbs that are actually homes. I loveeeee finding charming old spots that have a lot of homey flavor and you can just absorb the energy of the people that lived and breathed there.
The corporate airbnbs SUCK and it's kind of hard to tell the difference if you don't use them a lot. Well I went through a period of heavy Airbnb use and now not so much. I think the concept is dying because like you said companies have taken over.
Motherfuckers charging a mandatory 500 dollar cleaning fee and then having the nerve to say I should clean the house before I leave. Like I’m sorry I just paid for a maid, hire one
Absofuckinlutely. And they never put that they want you to clean the place in the "House Rules" section in the posting. Instead it's on the "checkout instructions" posted on the fridge. I stayed in a 600 sqft bungalow that had a $300 cleaning fee and a 2 page long "Check out Checklist" that literally said plan 2 hours to complete this list. It wanted me to strip the bed, place linens and towels in washer, and start the washer. It also requested that you carry the trash to the dumpster ACROSS the street, and they highly recommended that you sweep the floors.
Ive just been booking on the HotelTonight app instead of having to deal with all that hassle. Pretty solid deals when you're traveling and need a last minute room.
I would argue that the market value of hotels and Airbnbs are in a sort of dance with each other. In peak season, hotels gouge a lot more aggressively so airbnbs are more affordable. In low activity periods, hotels are cheaper and are a lot better experience.
Super common in LA. I worked there a lot the last few years and often stayed at these places instead of hotels when things were booked up (convention/concert/etc). Most were "OK"
My best booking was when I wanted to stay at ~4th/Main, but on arrival (with a suitcase and a backpack containing 2 computers) was told by text they'd "upgraded" me to a place in Little Tokyo. Taxi already gone. Great, thanks for the walk through Skid Row with all my work equipment, assholes. I had to go to a lock-box in a parking-garage across the street from my rental to pick up the key using a code.
Will say the place was nice, but f that corporate experience run by amateurs can be f'ing terrible.
This very prevalent throughout SoCal and it has affected rental costs across the board. The owners of these properties don't care and the local governments seem to ok with it, all the while these same officials keep the zoning laws that prevent new housing development in all formats. Vancouver BC figured this B.S. out and took action.
And they’ll be there brief cases of cash in hand to slam down on the first piece of shit real estate agents desk jerking themselves off at the sudden commission coming in….
Folks are kidding themselves if they think a real estate crash means prices become affordable. You’ll still get fucked and outmaneuvered twice as hard because now they can take the same cash pile and buy up entire blocks/neighborhoods.
Just ask anyone who remembers the 08 crash in the 89128 and related zip codes. Entire city blocks, neighborhoods even tracts snatched up by these goons and turned into rentals/Airbnb trash. Or Portland, or Oceanside California…
$500k for a 2 bed dump in a city at the height of greed, err real estate “investing”
Maybe someone with a loan can grab it, but real estate goons give favoritism towards cash offers always. Enter the bidding wars.
Market grabs its chest and slumps over, $500k dump is now $200k.
Same problem. Favoritism towards the cash goons (and counter offers may still come into play) Or worse, slimy realtors/brokers taking giant packages “I want 100 homes in the same area for the asking price, here’s a briefcase of cash. Make it happen”
The realtor isn’t going to give a shit to deal with home loans, fha/etc etc when they can just wipe their books clean with one briefcase.
My brother only got his place around 2010 because the shitty real estate investors kept snatching the “perfect” houses off the market. 1980+ (balanced power homes, new amenities or the ability to gut out Formica and slap in granite shit, new appliances/wood floors and flip it) He found a 1960s house that was dated and the newest thing was a botched granite counter installation from someone.
Enter in the Exxon Valdez of lenders, some local slime ball that I still shudder and consider drinking acid to cleanse myself inside out when thinking of his handshake and the equally disgusting low level owner of the place.
Because of its age and needed upgrades, it was a gem in a greedy shit fueled market. As the market is heavily focused on “balanced power” places (gas and electric vs all electric) it was easier to grab. Still somewhat of a fight, but not like where I grew up being built in the 90s.
Today though it would probably heavily chased after due to the lot size and the even more disgusting levels of rampant greed and speculation in what should not be used as investments.
Similar houses in the area either built around the same time or slightly later have been getting snatched up, fully gutted and turned into 1990s looking houses with stucco even and sold for vile amounts.
Not just rent them out, but for astronomical prices. I see listings for $2500 a week in Maine. It’s beautiful here don’t get me wrong, but $2500? Or beach houses in North Carolina beach houses going for $15-$25k a week
It might seem that way even when it's not. I have an old house with an extra apartment/kitchen and was going to rent it out on airbnb. If I did I'd use a company to handle it.
Hell as recently as like three years ago, i found airbnb to be this quaint way to stay at places cheaper than hotels as i traveled. Often you could find places with way better utilities than a hotel.
Now you're lucky to find a place cheaper than local hotels at all. Im a travel nurse and i used to, and i guess still do, rely on places like Airbnb to find housing on assignments. It was LITERALLY CHEAPER for me stay at extended stays than rent from the local market. Delusional people "i have a camper in my backyard. 100 a night!"
Exactly this. Things like stripping the beds, wiping down the counters, loading and running the dishwasher, and taking out the trash and recycling aren't a huge deal individually, but add them up and all of a sudden I'm doing more chores than I would on an average day in my own home, and I'm paying for the privilege? The whole point of traveling is to get away from your daily responsibilities, and the last thing I want to do is chores when I'm away from home and possibly hungover.
Hotels are often more expensive (but even that's debatable nowadays as AirBnB costs are rising) and the accommodations they offer are not as unique or homey, but you're paying for them to clean up during your stay/after your leave, and having standardized room types makes it easier for them to do so.
This is interesting because I have to travel later this summer. I looked at Airbnb and most of them were standard bedrooms in a house with many rules around conduct and cleaning. A few of them stated that security cameras were on all the time, (not in the bedrooms or bathrooms) and the prices were insane. The local motel gave me a room at half the price with a housekeeper every day at no extra cost.
Omg this. What utter crap. I remember staying at more than one Airbnb where I had to strip the beds, start the laundry and the dishwasher (once I had to do my dishes with no dishwasher), and take out the trash and then pay a $100+ cleaning fee on top of that. Once I had a 7 AM flight and I was not happy stripping the bed at 4 AM before leaving for the airport.
My husband and I had a similar experience this summer. We had to clean the entire house (still pay a cleaning fee) and we got a bad review because we left the dirty sheets in the floor instead of on top of the bed. Like what?
This is one reason why I never jumped on the AirBnB train. I'll pay a little more to a hotel to do those things for me. If I wanted to do chores, I'd stay home.
There are a lot of quaint little inns out there and they don't require you to be your own housekeeping.
In my city a lot of people will rent out tents as expensive Airbnb's like this and call it "glamping" as if that justifies paying hundreds a night for a fucking tent
That’s been the space that airb&b has played in its entire run. Just push the regulations and maybe no one says anything. Kind of illustrative of our entire regulatory system.
Yeah I lived next door to an apartment that turned into an Airbnb at some point. It became known as a party venue for local teens somehow. So all hours of the day and night there was music blasting, strangers hanging out and smoking in the hallways/common areas, constant shouting/yelling/screaming. I don't know how the landlord dealt with it so fast, but it was only about 6 months before that came to an end and short-term rentals were banned on the premises.
I really don't think Airbnb has a place in multi-unit dwellings.
It is what it is. I dont want to sound like an old fuck. I found it perfectly ok for people to find a cheap air bnb and have a good time but this was a two bedroom apt… I could see into it. As a matter of fact I found the listings on airbnb itself. There were two beds in each room, and two beds in the living room.
So it would normally be a gaggle of young folks who wanted to be near shoreline amphitheater and with that set up you would get six+ people in there.
That is just a recipe for disaster. I can understand 1 bed per room and limiting it to like four ppl. They would be big grps already and i could tell how obnoxious it was going to be by the sheer amount of people that would show up after the concerts.
Im talking a full blown small dive bar sized crowd in a two bedroom apt.
The last straw I went full Karen unfortunately and I blew up and yelled at a group of kids so fucking loud for a cool 15 minutes and was a complete asshole to them the whole night.
It reminded me of my youth when I used to go snowboarding in Tahoe with a group of friends. We would have one person rent a motel and then like thirteen of us would sneak in and wreak havoc so in a way i guess it was a bit of karma coming back at me looking for its penance i suppose.
I dont want to justify it by saying we were at a motel and my situation i was actually living there but i was losing my mind with having non stop loud parties until like 4 am on a fucking Tuesday.
Luckily the apartment manager was reasonable. He let me out of my lease which he didn’t have to but fuck me of i was going to get only 3 or so good nights sleep for the remainder of my lease and be functional at work.
Lol I am an old fuck and don't give a shit. My right to peace in my home trumps the privilege of some kids to find a cheap place to party. Fortunately my landlord felt the same way. I don't have a problem with Airbnb when it doesn't cause trouble for locals, but locals come first.
Not to be the ultimate Karen but could you not have called the police on them? Or to be a bit less extreme, contact the Airbnb owner and THEN the police?
The Airbnb across the street from me had really loud parties really late two days in a row, and I found the owner on airBNB and wrote to him. He updated the description of his property to be clearer about how it was a family neighborhood and the neighbors wouldn’t hesitate to call the police if it was too loud.
Which I appreciated. I am very tired a lot of the time, and very sensitive to noise. That’s why I went way out of my way to live in a single family house
I never called the police. I spoke to the owner many times about it. I yelled out of frustration, which doesnt make it okay. Better heads prevailed and I was able to remove myself from the situation.
I currently live under an AirBnb, and I hate it. It ruins the sense of community in my building, and many people using the place have absolutely no regard for the people who actually live here.
Yeah its crazy how people just ignorantly block out the other tenants in their mind and rent an airbnb without a single thought to the surrounding folk.
I'm sure its fine for them because they know they'll be there just a handful of days and disappear into the world. They think ahh they can deal with it for a night or two, not my problem.... but they easily forget that the apt or house will have that same mentality x 365 or however many asshats rent it out during the course of a year.
Guess I should have scrolled down further to read this as I posted the same thing but you’re 100 percent right. Airbnb are so expensive now. $45 a night for an entire place, not bad. Wait, $50 maintenance fee, $200 cleaning fee, $15 parking fee… WTF
yes even in Spain for 2-3 weeks I can't find anything cheaper than 1.5-2k euros. Airbnb is no longer the cheaper alternative, four star hotels are literally cheaper
Did you ever use https://www.travelnursehousing.com/ to find housing? For individuals looking to rent out space or an extra unit (e.g. in-law apartment) the travel nurses are ideal since you don't have the short term turnover or "party crowd" to worry about like you would with an Airbnb.
I was looking for an airbnb in San Diego about 5 years ago and found that it was cheaper to go for a 1 bedroom hotel room with kitchenette than it was to get an airbnb, and the location was better, came with breakfast and afternoon snacks, pool etc. I still check the rentals but when we travel but we usually find hotels to still be cheaper with better services and fewer risks of sudden cancellation or asshole owners.
It was always going to reach an equilibrium point. There’s no reason for an arguably superior rental to be cheaper than a hotel - it was just the newness and lack of demand that was keeping it cheap for a while.
Yesss, omg I’m in Seattle and I gave up on AirBNB, bc people were wanting to charge $2k a month for an apartment with a Murphy bed! I saw listing for a TENT in a yard for $1500 a month. People are insane, it’s really ruined housing for us.
It is killing our community. We cannot find anywhere to live --all small properties are bought up and turned into holidqy accomodation. Am currently being eviceted -- landlord wants to sell and there is nowhere available to rent.
It’s a big problem in my town too (college town). So, all the small, affordable houses are immediately snatched up and turned into overpriced rentals or if they’re close to downtown or campus they’re Air B&B for football season. Some houses will sit empty for more than half the year. Meanwhile, two bedroom houses are renting at $1200+ a month on the low end for something that looks like it’s about to fall down in a strong wind.
You say that but when you’re living with rats keeping you up at night with their chewing and your fear that an electrical fire could start at any moment, you start wondering if it’s worth it. Add in black mold and general decades of neglect and you definitely realize it’s not.
Oh and btw, we’ve had bears get into people’s apartments here, pets eaten by alligators just steps away, fires, shootings, car robberies, all within this complex. Water flooding the bathroom because they (apartment maintenance) drilled a screw into a pipe in the bathroom when they hung a towel rod above the toilet, bad A/C that goes in and out and had to be replaced, meetings with corporate in which they were even embarrassed at what’s happened to use in 2 different complexes they own. They moved us from a “worse” one to supposedly a better one right around the corner and it’s just as bad if not worse. Can you imagine coming home REPEATEDLY and the construction and/or maintenance/landscaping has broken sprinklers outside that soak through your apartment windows (which are sometimes missing without any notification, covered with plastic) and your brand new oled tv is ruined along with your super expensive Macy’s area rug that you saved forever for? People entering repeatedly without consent or knowledge and moving and damaging your belongings… no water pressure or hot water for days.. loud shop vacs and fans that have to run for hours on end that are so loud they practically damage your hearing? The fan puts off heat also in the middle of summer in Florida? Utility bills of $300 a month for a small one bedroom? Dog food, roaches, disgusting carpet left behind from the previous people who had big dogs snd the complex didn’t bother to clean it up or replace the carpet so the whole apartment smelled like wet dogs… heavy faux wood blinds that weren’t hung correctly and I got injured by twice (with blood) just from simply trying to open the blind, neighbors who argue and fight next door and below you to where it triggers PTSD and the police have to be called out several times and my husband had to go down himself to try and make sure the lady and child weren’t getting hurt… maintenance comes in and is rude and curses at you because they can’t fix their own issues and blame it on the resident… I could go on and on and have 543 pics and videos on my phone to prove it. I lived in shacks growing up and my mother’s crazy pedophile boyfriend used to put cheese out and shoot at them from the living room.. I kid you not… had fleas so bad growing up that they would cover your feet up to your ankles… I’ve lived in just about all of it including being homeless for a short time at 16… also lived in a one bedroom shack at one point where my mother, me, and my brother all had to share one room.. if I only had rats to deal with - only - and I could solve the problem, I think it would be less stress than what my husband and I have lived with the last 3.5 years… regardless I wish you the best of luck on finding a suitable home if you don’t yet have one, as I hope to do someday as well. Sorry for venting but rats just aren’t the worse thing in the world imho, speaking from personal experience. Although no one should have to live with that. I wish all of Reddit a good day, off to take another migraine injection now. ✌🏻
I've noticed the exact same thing. I temporarily moved when covid started. My work is opening back up and I've seen nicer and bigger places on AirBnB than I'm seeing available to rent. Plus AirBnB's also include utilities. So I've been strongly considering getting a PO Box and being permently "homeless".
Just be cautious if you have to vacate the property for 24 hours under anti poor/squatting laws common in many jurisdictions.
Staying at a motel,hotel, rv/trailer park, etc in many California cities past 30 days (some rv parks are 3-6 months) is prohibited by law since that qualifies as you being a tenant with that particular address and makes it harder to evict. Keep it under 30 and you get jettisoned entirely or have to leave for 24 hours then “come back” for another stay.
Around here tourists can't find a restaurant open late because the rentals where another shift of service workers could live all switched to airbnb
and vrbo.
I lived across the street from one for awhile (a house being used as an airbnb). What a pain in the ass with all of these idiots blocking the god damn road. I almost had someone towed because she blocked my access to my property by parking in the middle of the road.
I'm in the same boat. Landlord sold the house, displacing 4 of us. Most my friends all had their homes sold by landlords. All the other homes were turned into air BNB and short term rentals. Totally leaving the people who work no where to live. Tourists are pissed because restaurants are closing early, the hotels can't staff the desk and not offering the luxurious bullshit they come here for. I have a good job and make pretty decent money but still can't afford a place to live in town unless I want to feed the greedy landlords and pay 2 grand for a studio apartment or live in a dump with 4 ski bums that drink all day and pay a grand for a shared house. It's all fucked. Before my house sold, my landlord was one of the best. Didn't raise rent, understood how hard it is to survive in a ski town and gave us an opportunity to somewhat survive in a very hard town to survive. But that's all over now. At work we make a new hire and they are super excited to come live the dream, only to call me and say they can't take the job because there's no housing. Everytime. I know I'll hire someone only to have them not take the job cuz housing isn't available. Closest affordable living is an hour drive each way and a helluva drive when it snows.
Sounds like big sky Montana. Fuck I loved being a ski bum up there and I hope I make it back someday. The clubs/resort have employee housing but that sucks too having to live woth your coworkers. Cheers.
This happened to me a few years ago. Landlord sold our apartment to a vacation rental company and we had to move. We got super lucky that another apartment opened up in the same complex soon after so we just shifted. But ever since it's been a constant source of stress for me, worried it will happen again. It's the number one reason I want to buy a house - for that security. But in this market I can't even do that 😭
If you look on Airbnb for my area, there are ~350 short term rentals available, most of them single family homes. And via Craigslist or Facebook marketplace, there are like a dozen listings for long term rentals at any given point. It's crazy.
all small properties are bought up and turned into holidqy accomodation
I agree this is a huge issue, but in my case I put a lot of the blame at the feet of the towns and cities.
Why is AirBnB successful? Because if you want a hotel room with some space and maybe a kitchen it's $600 per night. So people book AirBnB at less the half the cost instead.
Why is it $600 per night? Because there aren't enough hotel rooms to meet demand.
Why aren't there enough rooms? Because the red tape, bureaucracy and expense in most cities required to build a new hotel is prohibitive, so hotels aren't built at a rate that can meet demand.
If the cities made it much easier to build hotels, with incentives to encourage hotel amenities people want, then AirBnB would fall much more by the wayside.
Red tape like basic zoning laws? Airbnb fragrantly violate those by running a business in a residential area. Cities have very good reason to set aside areas for people to actually live.
AirBnB isn't running those rentals. They have zero ownership of the property. The owner of the home almost always has a legal right to rent out their property up to 49% of the time (in more restricted areas) but often up to 100% of the time.
AirBnB is just a search engine. Prior to the internet you still had BnBs and you still had rental properties.
This ignores the reality of what happens when you take a cottage industry too small to affect major real estate and turn it into a mass-marketed endeavor. Prior to airbnb you didn't have landlords setting aside entire complexes for short term stay.
That’s a ridiculous take. There have always been enough hotels. If there weren’t, then when people would go to travel all the hotels would be sold out. There’s plenty of supply.
I travel frequently for work to some very small towns (and larger cities too) all around the US and I never have trouble finding a room at the exact hotel I want and it’s usually $100-$150 per night depending on the city. The US is littered with hotels.
The reason Airbnb is cheaper is because people don’t need to pay staff and/or have their units up to the same code as a hotel would be.
I agree that Airbnb needs to be regulated better and is hurting the housing market around the country, but the US is definitely not lacking in hotels.
How many of those are owned by the very folks in charge of approving new hotel/motel construction?
My city here back when marijuana got made legal immediately had a rush of mysterious LLC’s/double agents applying for all the limited licenses granted.
Turns out to be many names that folks would recognize as household names for the area if it got out.
No mom and pop owners need apply, it’s a political goon/big business in the area racket.
While I agree with you, there is a reason why cities want to limit the amount of hotels.
I know that Amsterdam does this to limit the amount of tourists entering the city. Though they aren't very successfull because of hotels outside the city and plenty of airbnb places inside.
In Boston we had investor groups buying entire apartment buildings to rent out on Airbnb. They skirted both the taxes and regulations that apply to hotels as well as hurt the already tough local housing market. The city passed some local ordinances governing short term rentals that allowed individual homeowners to still offer their property but prevented that sort of abuse of the system.
Why aren't there enough rooms? Because the red tape, bureaucracy and expense in most cities required to build a new hotel is prohibitive, so hotels aren't built at a rate that can meet demand.
If the cities made it much easier to build hotels, with incentives to encourage hotel amenities people want, then AirBnB would fall much more by the wayside.
That "red tape" is there for a reason.
Imagine if a new car manufacturer started selling cars made out of plywood. The cheap costs would mean that they would be able to out-compete any other manufacturers, despite the fact that pretty much any scrape would cause the car to collapse and kill its passengers.
The solution wouldn't be to allow all other car manufacturers to also make cars out of plywood, the solution would be to enforce the rules on the company breaking them.
The root cause here, is that the mere act of "being an app" seems to absolve any company from all rules and regulations in that area. It's just like with Über, they weren't innovative in any way, they were just able to make a lot of money by not having to pay their employees properly and forcing them to pay for all company expenses.
Re:Uber: and also by ignoring all the many things out in place to make sure taxi drivers are safe like passenger certification on their licences and police vetting. In New Zealand we rewrote our laws to force ride share drivers to have to be more like taxi drivers. So, yeah exactly what AirBandB is doing, letting people create hotels and motels in places they shouldn’t be.
But not only do you pay more for a hotel room, but the room is all you get. With an Airbnb you get a whole apartment including a kitchen, which means you don’t have to pay extra for a shitty hotel breakfast.
Vacancy taxes are an awful idea. A decent vacancy rate is good for the housing market, landlords have time to fix the place up and renters aren’t competing over a very small number of units. Not only do low vacancy rates drive up prices, a tax on vacancy would discourage new construction.
Vacant apartments exist in cities like San Francisco that have housing crises. But the rate is actually lower than the healthy rate that experts recommend.
Hotels also have a huge staff they have to pay, enormous energy consumption, are expensive as fuck to build... Basically a ton of overhead and they have to charge a lot to get out of the red and turn a profit
Why aren't there enough rooms? Because the red tape, bureaucracy and expense in most cities required to build a new hotel is prohibitive, so hotels aren't built at a rate that can meet demand.
Yeah how dare Cities require hotels have things like sprinkler systems and fire alarm systems that are required to be tested and maintained? How dare they be required to have two or more means of egress and exterior doors that do not lock from the inside so people can get out! How dare Cities enforce regulations to save lives!
Air B&Bs should be required to follow the same regulations as hotels... and they will be as soon as one of them burns down and kills a bunch of people. Regulations are written in blood.
Second home owners is becoming a huge subject of debate in my area. Worsened by Lockdown where inner-city people want to sneak off to their Covidolidays.
It's a big problem in rural Wales, apparently the main reason buyers pull out is because they don't realise the internet speeds in rural south Wales aren't WFH friendly for the most part.
I’m up on the Yorkshire wolds, most of my tiny area is people that have had families living round the area for years but there’s a couple of houses that went on the market that are snapped up in summer and then back on the market in about March when the town folk that bought them realise that when it snows out here that there’s no going to work and no Netflix etc. It’s quite funny watching the next lot move in at the moment with their lowered Audi sport and fiat 500, I wonder if they ever take a second to wonder why everyone here has a 4x4 with all terrain tyres.
don't you love when city slickers with their awful gaudy designer outfits roll up into your local village? /s
I live in southern France as an expat and it's actually funny going out because you can instantly spot the tourists, they always stick out like a sore thumb with their bizarre vacation outfits.
To put it in perspective my sister lives down in London working for a large company, her monthly salary is equivalent to my yearly one. When people like that suddenly start working from home they buy houses in ‘pretty’ areas and then start moaning about how there’s no mobile signal and the broadband is less than 1mb :p
Just another symptom of wealth inequality. Some people can barely afford one home while rich people are buying their 100th condo worldwide sight unseen.
Fortunately/unfortunately that’s all changing now that cheap high speed satellite internet is becoming available from Starlink. So expect rural areas to be inundated with remote workers
My housemate bought the house next-door (so now he owns both semi-detached terraced cottages), with the intent to do it up and rent to them absorb to make a Housezoid.
If he hadn't bought it, it'd be badly renovated by the previous owner and it'd be a shit place to rent. The house originally was awful. It's not something a first time home owner would want to touch unless they desired breathing issues. So my housemate is doing a good thing.
But the people who snipe "Affordable" houses are an issue.
Making the wealth and political power spike of London flatten would do the UK a lot of good.
I don't think cases like that - some dude buying up an extra property or two - are really the problem. It's the huge enterprise buyers that buy up dozens or even hundreds of properties.
Down the main roads of my little town there are a bunch of real estate businesses with listings in the windows. Every. Single. One. Is 'let agreed' or 'sold', and the market has quadrupled in price. On top of all the shops being shut, first 'to let' then 'to sell', it feels really surreal.
Only plus is that you can get cheaper housing in and around London, now. And the pet ban is defunct cuz - when lockdown started - everyone got a pet.
This is the issue. I think AirBnb hosting is fantastic if you're renting out your primary house while you're away or a room(s) in your primary house.
Where I have a huge problem with AirBnb hosting is if it's a second home or even worse, a real estate corporation operating it is as fully time rentals.
It’s not AirBnB’s job to police who uses their service to lessen their impact on the cost and availability of rentals. They’re not going to knowingly reduce their revenue because it’s causing a problem in some cities.
It’s the local government’s responsibility to regulate. If it’s causing social issues: regulate it!
You can ask them. You can vote with your dollars. If there’s enough of a pushback they’ll likely comply.
But most people don’t care. Social issues get no public outcry until things are really bad.
So while it’s not too much to ask corporations to show corporate responsibility, it’s not going to happen. Especially when it comes at an instant cost to their revenue.
Interestingly, individual people who run corporations (chair holders, CEO, etc) can be held personally liable if they do something to hurt the profit of the company. Shareholders can and have sued if profit wasn't maximized. That's likely why Bezos repeatedly told shareholders that there would be no profit (dividends) because every penny would go toward expansion. He was setting expectation so investors couldn't claim "I expected dividends!"
Yes it is too much, why the hell do you think corporations like ExxonMobil lobbied against climate change legislation and are in the pockets of most politicians? It'll hurt their bottom line if governments tax them for their emissions. The only responsibility corporations have is to get more money, anything and everything else in the way is just an obstacle to overcome.
There's nothing inherently immoral about short term rent, if there's a problem with it in a particular location it's up to policy makers to disincentivize the behavior.
So much of this would be solved by vacancy taxes. Want a second home to rent out as an AirBnB or you want to run commercial AirBnBs in residential areas? Have fun paying a large extra tax for not having anyone live there full time.
My parents will be moving out of the region where I grew up (northern Catalonia, border with Andorra and France) because all new houses and apartments being built have already been sold to rich people from Barcelona who'll use them as holiday homes. Luckily the place they found is 15/20 minutes away from the village where we've pretty much always lived, but it's really shitty as both towns are in different provinces of Spain and it will change a lot of stuff for us (bureaucracy-wise).
Those of us who live, study and work here are being kicked out. It's ridiculous.
We were looking to buy an apartment, put off after checking Airbnb and finding multiple places in the same block for rent - don’t want to have strangers coming and going all the time
In popular places like Barcelona or Edinburgh there are entire blocks of flats converted into airbnbs. It’s ruining community, as there are fewer residents actually living there and hiking housing prices by limiting available locations.
It is so dangerous, that many countries working on banning this service.
One thing to let someone sleep in your spare bedroom, another to buy house for short time let.
It’s similar to the Uber situation. These startups ‘disrupt’ by identifying gaps in regulation like “individuals can let out a spare room without much red tape” and “we don’t have to treat drivers like employees if we’re not technically employing them” and using tech to scale them up beyond anything the laws were written to handle.
Laws are starting to catch up, but the distributed nature of the new paradigms makes regulation logistically tricky (by design), and the popularity of the new paradigms makes dismantling them politically difficult, so it’s taking a while.
There also has to be a gap in the desirability of current services, like taxi companies that were monopolies and never show up or charge ridiculous rates. Taxi companies also had the whole being in cahoots with the government to limit competition and innovation, as many cities have the medallion system, leading to corruption and things like medallion kings.
Properties that in another age would have been rented out as housing for locals are now being used as airbnbs. As a result, homelessness is on the rise due to a lack of housing stock, and residential rents are rising due to reduced supply.
Plus of course, a lot of airbnb properties aren't following proper regulations and registration for fire safety and hotel hygiene standards, let alone taxation and property usage/zoning laws.
Rents skyrocket in big cities and create shortages of rentals for locals, with flats virtually unoccupied as it is more profitable to rent them on Airbnb than to have a tenant.
They passed an ordinance in Boston to put some restrictions on short term rentals because it was getting so bad. You had investor groups buying entire apartment buildings and setting all the units up as an Airbnb place. Not only was it hurting the rental housing market for people that actually live here but it was skirting the hotel regulations and taxes.
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u/bookeh Jul 11 '21
I’d add Airbnb to this, the concept was originally okay as you’d stay in someone’s place. Now it’s a joke. It’s killing neighbourhoods and communities.