The two faces of Airbnb

> AirBnB should implement the rule that you only get to list 1 rental. That would solve this problem, and allow them to stop lying to everyone about who is actually renting on their platform.

That proposal is a one way train from a $25B valuation to $2.5B valuation.

Of course, if AirBnB loses a number of these key regulatory battles that too could put a serious damper on their biz. Hence, their massive lobbying efforts.

> AirBnB should implement the rule that you only get to list 1 rental.

I agree with your concerns, but why not just distinguish between personal/regular/single user and power/multi-listing/comercial users? Craigslist does this pretty well with their "for sale by owner" vs. "for sale by dealer" option.

Agreed. Small sample size, but my wife used airbnb twice in london. First time was good (not great, but good). Second was horrible. (no curtain on windows directly facing office buildings, broken shower, no tv, 2 hangers for a 10 day booked stay, etc). Video evidence for everything, and multi-day delays in getting resolutions (everything documented via their platform). Requested a partial refund (no working shower for 4 days?) Response was a resounding no, then threats from the person who was doing the renting that they would post negative reviews of my wife as a renter so no one would rent from us again. Guess what? The owner (and his girlfriend) had several airbnb properties they were renting out, growing a landlording business (without all the pesky regulation). (edit: there were multiple reviews stating how great it was - it was a veritable dump - which is partially ok, but broken shower, no tv, etc - when those are clearly listed amenities - is simply lying. Oh, and if you're going to rent out a room/place via airbnb, please remove moldy/stale food from your refrigerator first)

Contrasting that with a recent nashville visit via airbnb (I didn't book it, but stayed there) - the epitome of the "share my home" aspect that gets played up - notes around the house, everything fresh and tidy, etc).

Forcing just 1 would certainly get back to the roots. Or perhaps a sliding scale - fees go up as you want to list more rooms? The individuals wanting to rent out a spare room get the cheapest fees - the people trying to be the next hilton (sans service and regulation) pay correspondingly higher fees).

This is exactly what happen to eBay: eventually, eBay become "crappy Amazon".

If I'm AirBnB I would focus to be real marketplace so AirBnB does not end up as "crappy hotels.com" - but on other hand, eBay did extremely good (if you sold stocks before 2014).

> Every single rental I stayed in when traveling around Asia was done by 'power users' or real estate companies with scores of listing throughout the cities.

To some extent this probably reflects what you're looking for. When I investigated airbnb rentals in Shanghai, there were a number of notices to the effect of "because I'm female, it's not convenient for me to have a male guest".

I don't mind professional listings, really; but I do mind fraudulent ones. And AirBNB isn't setup to encourage honest feedback.

My singular experience with AirBNB was a listing where they advertised a NYC address 2 avenues from the real address; they lied about details; they used a multitude of names; they told me to lie about who I was to a superintendent who might stop by. The place was a pit.

But my recourse was limited, because I didn't feel like getting into a fight with fraudsters who knew my real identity but who'd hid their own, and AirBNB doesn't give a shit. So I just recognized that AirBNB is a haven for crime, realized that their review policies are designed to protect the criminals, and I stopped using it, and became an anti-airbnb advocate.

I hope I meet Brian Chesky someday, because PG loves to go on about what a great guy he is, but as near as I can tell he's a sociopathic asshole who made purposeful design decisions specifically to enable fraud that happens to increase his profits. This makes sense, given that he built the whole damned thing by being a spammer (and lying about it). I'm genuinely curious if he's not the completely worthless piece of shit that he absolutely appears to be from a customer standpoint.

> AirBnB should implement the rule that you only get to list 1 rental.

Disagree to an extent. If you have two extra bedrooms in your house besides your bedroom, you should be able to have 2 listings.

The rule should be "only N listings that belong to 1 property".

I don't think getting to list only one rental is the solution, but perhaps an owner can only list one property as their primary residence.

I remember seeing their "Never a stranger" ad runs on tv. thought it was unusual that they promote the idea that hosts stay with guests. i've used airbnb twice too and both times the host was an employee of a property management company. at least, in the first one i met the host to collect and return the keycard to the room. second one was just a text message of the numeric password on the main door. Not saying that's a bad thing, but just an observation on the reality. I sort of preferred it this way, although who knows how the neighbours felt. I certainly could not care very much while I was there since I was in and out in a few weeks.

I prefer it when its run by a company, rather than someone renting out their apartment (I've stayed a coupleof times where they moved out of their home (once to stay with parents next door, not sure about the other)). I don't really see any advantage (for the person staying). The company ran ones are tidier, have cleaners they can arrange to come out and clean when required (like a hotel's daily clean), etc.

I use airbnb for cheap accomodation and because I can see exactly what the apartment will look like. I don't do it to talk to someone when checking in for an extra 10 minutes.

I understand the correlation you're making between "corporate" units and the quality of the experience, but shouldn't the ratings and reviews system completely solve this? As a frequent user of AirBnB, I feel like there is more than enough information for people to make an well-informed choice when booking. I really feel like an arbitrary limit of one would create more problems than it solves, especially since plenty of people have no desire for a "homey" experience.

The fact that "power users" are making so much money from Airbnb indicates just how poorly hotels serve travelers. Rather than curb users to 1 listing, why not try to embrace their energy to create a better travel service?

These negative Airbnb articles simply indicate that Airbnb is growing faster than the company can keep up with its users. Every issue outlined in the article-- fire safety, tax compliance, banning Ellis Act abusers, regulating "power users"-- can be mitigated or solved completely. Not without effort, for sure, but it's going too far tarnish their brand without a solid thesis about how one could build a better Airbnb. (And if somebody's going to make that argument, they might as well start a competitor or join Airbnb given the market opportunity...).

These sorts of articles should send an important message to future founders with wildly successful products: if you can curb growth and yet still outpace your competition, do that instead of "blitzscaling." You want to scale quality, you don't want to lose the faith of your users and the media in your ability to execute, and growing fast (without competition warranting it) will benefit investors more than your customers.

I think AirBnB relies on those power users to have the volume it does. It's unlikely they would ever set that rule because it would basically break their business model (hotel listings, basically)

And it also made real estate prices skyrocket in some places, because rich people (or usually companies) bought out a lot of property, which is now rented for a nice profit. Some apartment buildings can looks very strange as they are relatively empty because it is clearly used as 'AirBnB hotel'.

Basically if you want to buy/rent property for a sane price you must go deep into suburbs.

P.S. It's all my subjective experience, I have not conducted any studies.

Aside from the fact that if you market it as such, it loses literally billions in valuation. Airbnb cannot become just a middleman for bed and breakfasts because its investors would rather fail at being a replacement for Hilton/Marriott than settling for a small time bed and breakfast purveyor.

Sounds like much of the problem would go away with better labeling and categorization. Some people want the get-to-know-your-host experience, some people want the impersonal experience, and some people might want either one depending on the nature of the trip. The problem arises when you expect one and get the other.

Maybe your experience was caused by NYC? I find it quite good except big cities such as NY and London

AirBnB is a reputation-based but otherwise largely unregulated marketplace for nightly accommodation.

Simple as that, I don't know why so many people seem to be tearing their hair out over what it is and what that means.

I've never used AirBnB, but presumably the electrical safety problems are things that you can highlight in your review, and will inform future guests?

(I've stayed in hotels with very dodgy electrics, so I don't think this is necessarily an AirBnB-only problem)

> the thing that you find from a hotel is completely lacking with AirBnB: Consistency

AirBnB isn't an alternative to a hotel, it's an alternative to a booking agency. That's like calling Booking.com inconsistent because you can rent a room at varying levels of hotels.

There are good hotels and bad hotels, and you cannot always know what you're going to get when booking a hotel room sight unseen, either.

> should people be looking at AirBnB as a direct replacement for hotels? Obviously that is the operating thesis, but I think a better way to consider AirBnB is as a marketplace for Bed and Breakfast accommodations

I think you're overlooking a very large group of people for whom "hotel" and "bed and breakfast" are fully synonymous terms.

Slightly unrelated: I host interesting folk in NYC for free. Have you considered trying out Couchsurfing instead?

I stayed in a house in nice residential neighborhood in Berkeley recently. It had four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen, and it was clear the owner didn't live there. In fact, I never saw the owner or spoke with him at all. We were instructed to not speak to the neighbors, and not answer any questions about the owner's Airbnb business. Clearly, the neighbors weren't pleased that an unregulated hotel had sprung up in the middle of their neighborhood.

On the other hand, it cost me $60/night versus the $250+/night charged by local 3-star hotels.

Well, quite simply, YouTube are (and Megaupload was) serving the infringing content, making them a contributory party. If we started holding building managers responsible for the lawbreaking of their residents, that would at least set some cats among the pigeons I guess.

I am a considerate guest, trying not to disturb the neighbors. The guests I have in the flat next door tend to be partying cunts.

Which bodes well for Airbnb, since the modern business environment is pretty much based on socializing negative externalities while providing value to direct customers. Besides cars, there's also oil, coal, mining, plastics, advertising, agriculture, water rights, and housing development.

They're not shooting the messenger.

Proposition F >Limits short-term rentals of a unit to 75 days per year, regardless of whether rental is hosted or unhosted. >Requires proof that the unit’s owner authorizes using the unit as a short-term rental. >Requires short-term hosts to submit quarterly reports on the number of days they live in the unit and the number of days the unit is rented >Mandates that the city post notice on buildings with a unit approved for short-term rentals and notify by mail owners, neighbors of the unit and interested neighborhood organizations. Source: Ballot Simplification Committee

AirBnB created a market in an area where existing laws didn't apply. This is part of legislation catching up.

AirBnB was just walking by the scene, looking unsavoury enough to make for a sufficently satisfying lynching.

You seem purposely to miss some of the points of Steven Hill's very even-handed analysis which is that some AirBnB operators are turning residential zones into commercial hotel zones by having multiple listings and this causes conflicts for 1) residents who find commercial activity in and around their homes , 2) municipalities deprived of tax revenue, 3) guests who find themselves in units that do no have adequate safety protections let alone commercial insurance.

This is especially problematic given that in LA, SF, and NYC AirBnB makes a large fraction (~44%) of its revenue from commercial operators with multiple listings. That is, in these markets nearly half of AirBnB "hosts" are entrepreneurs who are flouting municipal law and obligations for their personal gain and to others' detriments.

Hill offers a few common sense (and in my opinion equitable) actions AirBnB might take to make amends. In a passage worth quoting in context, Hill writes

> Perhaps the biggest tragedy in all this is that at the core of Airbnb is a really good idea. It has cleverly used Web- and app-based technology to bust open a global market that connects tourists with financially strapped homeowners. After interviewing some of Airbnb’s “regular-people” hosts, I’m convinced that this service legitimately does help them make ends meet.

> But by taking such a hands-off, laissez-faire attitude toward the professionalization of hosting by greedy commercial landlords and multiproperty agents, Airbnb has become its own worst enemy. As the number of victims piles up, it undermines its own “sharing and trust” ethos because Airbnb could easily meet cities halfway:

> • With one stroke of the computer mouse, Airbnb could “evict the evictors” — de-list from its website any professional landlords or property managers operating multiple properties as tourist hotels. It has the data and knows who they are.

> • Cooperate with cities like San Francisco, Santa Monica, and Portland, which require hosts to register with local agencies, by de-listing any unregistered hosts.

> • Pay the same hotel occupancy taxes that hotels pay in all 34,000 cities in which Airbnb operates, or collect them from the hosts and turn them over to the cities.

> • Stop refusing to supply the data that cities need to enforce regulations and taxation, including the number of rental nights and rates charged by each host.

EDIT: Remove markup. Readability. Grammar.

I'm a little late to this thread, but I think short term rentals could be a bigger core problem than you've recognized. This is all hard to determine without data, and some of what I am worried about is a risk rather than a current reality, though it appears to be growing.

Here's where I'm coming from - in my lifetime, the percentage of SF residents under the age of 18 has dropped from about 22% to below 14%. Much of this happened without airbnb or short term rentals, so obviously they can't be the core cause. However, it could exacerbate it.

Airbnb makes it far easier to rent out a "spare" bedroom - in doing so, they vastly increase the value of having a "spare" bedroom that you don't use. So if you are a family with just one kid, three bedroom houses suddenly become much more attractive than two bedroom houses, because what used to be an occasional guest room is now an income generator. What happens when a family with two kids goes up against them in a bidding war? One family can factor in the extra income, the other factors in no extra income and the additional expenses of an additional kid.

airBnB(noKids, hasKids) { unless(noKids.income(isWayHigherThan(hasKids.income)) { numKidsSF--; } }

At least in that scenario someone is still going to be "from" SF (when this is no longer the case, SF will be nothing more than a disneyland for young people and empty nesters).

It can get worse - what happens if investors now realize that they can just buy the whole 3br house and treat it as a hotel?

I could see airbnb being a factor in driving the already collapsing percentage of SF residents who are children to even lower lows.

By the way, in all of this, I see a good place for airbnb. If a San Francisco family wants to leave for a vacation in Paris, and they can rent out their place for a couple of weeks, and vice-versa, this seems like a good thing. But if converting a "spare" bedroom means that what were formerly kid's bedrooms are too profitable as tourist rentals to be wasted on children, then no, this would be extremely destructive to SF.

We need to regulate this, and airbnb needs to be a good citizen and cooperate. The suggestions in this business insider are good ones.

that describes Uber pretty well too

Not sure if I'm missing something about your question, because this seems obvious. It's increasing the demand (by allocating a whole new population of short-term tenants to the market, who would otherwise either not visit or would stay in hotels and hostels) and constricting the supply (by incentivizing landlords to take entire properties off the rental market to service those tenants).