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Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

> Here’s what’s wrong: an increasing amount of Airbnb’s commercial activity in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles does not come from the listings of “regular people” who are merely renting out a spare room.

This is my problem with AirBnB. I know investment firms buying as much property as they can to list on AirBnB. 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.

Unfortunately, that means in my experience the quality drops, no 'homey' feel, and it negatively impacts the locals.

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.

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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).

I wonder what controls they have to prevent someone who gets dinged with bad ratings (as a landlord) from reposting the same exact property. After all it would be trivial to post with an address and unit "1705a" and then if a problem just call it "1705b" with different pictures as if it's a completely new listing (and curious if that much effort is actually needed). Likewise landlords (I am a commercial landlord) often have various entities that they use so it's easy to come up with a new "owner" of the unit. I wonder if Airbnb even cross refs ownership with city records at all.

> Second was horrible. (no curtain on windows directly facing office buildings, broken shower, no tv, 2 hangers for a 10 day booked stay, etc).

With current housing boom in London that is the luxury package .... /almost sarcastic

One question I haven't seen to be raised often is how the reviews are "regulated" by airbnb.

I rented an apartment in a metropolitan city via airbnb last year. Both the owner and the apartment got about ~15 excellent reviews. It turned out the owner was very indeed very nice and friendly, but the apartment was far from both the description and the reviews. Our friends living in the city was astound since the price we paid should get us a much better deal than that.

It made me wonder if 1) the reviews were "regulated" or "engineered" somehow, 2) due to the two-way review system, renters were reluctant to write a bad review since they were concerned they could get retaliated by the owners giving them bad reviews in response.

Edit: fix typos

due to the two-way review system, renters were reluctant to write a bad review since they were concerned they could get retaliated by the owners giving them bad reviews in response

This, I think, is important. Both the renter and the landlord have to write a review before both reviews appear on the website. And the review content of the other party is not known to you until you post your own. So, basically, we know when the renter is "problematic" - has a lot of complaints, is constantly unhappy etc. We generally don't leave a review for such person. This is probably not the best approach from an ethical point of view, but yes - we do not want to know what this "problematic" guest may write about us.

So, if I don't write a review, the other party's review won't get posted either? This misuse can be prevented by implementing a deadline for submitting review and beyond that, whoever submitted theirs gets posted. So even if you forfeit your review, it still wont prevent the other party's bad review from getting posted

So, if I don't write a review, the other party's review won't get posted either?

Yes, I'm quite sure that's how it works currently. There is a deadline, which is 14 days, and also you are notified when the other side posts a review. The message says something along the lines "X just posted a review, you need to post a review for both of your reviews to become public". And you also can't see what the other side wrote until you post yours.

There is also place for "private feedback" in the review, so of course it is possible to leave a good review, but send a bunch of complaints or suggestions that are only visible to the person you are reviewing.

Haven't used AirBnB so I don't know about the review mechanism but isn't it blind? For example, if i remember correctly, on Freelancer.com, you cant see the other party's review until you submit yours. The reviews only get posted once both parties have submitted theirs. Isn't this the same for AirBnB? If not, wouldn't implementing this resolve the issue?

Side note: You can implement a deadline for submitting review to avoid misuse where someone doesn't submit their own review in order to prevent a bad review from getting posted on their profile

> 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.

Umm, are you sure? You can leave reviews only if you actually rent from someone. It's not like Yelp, where anyone can write reviews for any place. On AirBnB, the actual rental transaction has to happen.

Secondly: you don't see each other's reviews until after the review period has closed. So you could leave a negative review, but the owner would not see it until their time to review has passed.

yes, I'm sure. "you post a negative review of us, we'll say XYZ about you" XYZ being completely not true, but unprovable. We had vids/pics and contradictory email messages, which should be proof enough of fraud, but what they threatened to write was pretty bad. One neg review against them - with multiple dozens - could be ignored as "meh" whereas one against my wife would have been 1 out of 2 (actually, not sure she had a first one from the year before) and would probably have hurt her chances of people renting to her in the future.

So... - hey, airbnb, great job. You've made it much easier to just not use you at all. Yes, we're a small one-off exception. Fine. I bet there's a whole lot more of these exceptions that are unknowable because there's little recourse to escalate your case. We possibly could have taken this up to the credit card company, but IIRC there were some mediation clauses in our terms of service which I thought at the time meant we couldn't.

The 'resounding no' justification was "well, you decided to stay there the whole time, it couldn't have been that bad".

Hrmm... we paid up front, and told us to try to work things out - even after sending in pictures/videos of non-working stuff. How do you walk away from having splashed out $2k already, then try to find another place in the middle of a trip, with no guarantee you'll see a dime of this back? $100 reduction, while symbolic only, would still have been symbolic enough for me to not have such a bitter/negative experience that I'm talking about years later.

It's an empty threat. They can't see your review until they have left their review or the time is up to leave a review. So you can say you won't give a negative review but give one anyway.

At the risk of repeating myself: you cannot see the other party's review until you have left your own! So they won't know what kind of review you left until either (a) the time window of reviewing closes, or (b) they have submitted their review. So there is ZERO chance of them knowing that you left a bad review before writing theirs. ZERO.

They didn't care. Basically, the threat was they'd post something negative regardless. If we posted anything, we'd get a negative review.

I have to shout now: THEY DO NOT KNOW IF YOU REVIEWED THEM OR NOT! You have a time window to review; after the window closes, you can see their review (if they reviewed), and they can see yours (if you did). UNTIL THE WINDOW CLOSES, BOTH SIDES ARE BLIND.

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).

For a while, eBay was the default name in "looking to buy/sell something second hand" in Australia. "Just put it on eBay," that sort of thing. It was then overrun by professional sellers and I almost never hear it mentioned.

People speak almost exclusively here of Gumtree which is individuals selling second hand things. Gumtree is, these days, owned by eBay.

Sort of similar in the Netherlands, we had Marktplaats (marketplace). Pretty much totally dominated the market, eBay bought them actually. Now? I barely hear anyone about it, haven't used it in a long time. It, too, is pretty much dominated by professional sellers now. If you look for product XYZ the first full page of hits (it's beyond ridiculous) are dedicated sellers who paid for the spot or just spam the same stuff. All of the 2nd hand trading by me and my peers now goes through FB trading groups, a natural platform to communicate in text, post images of the product, negotiate prices, get a sense of identity/trust etc. This was great for about a year, but right now all of the few FB groups I used to frequent are seeing timed posts advertising professional services and products which keep popping up on my feed, drowning out the real sellers and causing me to delist myself from the group.

New niche marketplaces pretty much keep popping up that grow pretty quickly until they're big enough to get spammed by professional accounts looking for new sales channels.

Marktplaats is extremely frustrating for a non-professional seller that has come from ebay. The main issue I had with it is that the bids are not binding. So getting someone to commit once they have bid is extremely hard. Ebay should just shut it and redirect it to its own superior site.

I remember the days when ebay was all about how people are mainly nice.

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.

Surely these articles lend credence to the idea that AirBnB is only growing at the rate it is because landlords are using it to "abuse" the housing market.

As the situation stands right now, they have absolutely nothing to gain by limiting those "power users", and a substantial amount to lose.

"The fact that "power users" are making so much money from Airbnb indicates just how poorly hotels serve travelers"

There are plenty of well ran boutique hotels that serve travellers very well. "Power users" are making so much money by breaking the law.

If they were following the law, they would be running highly profitable boutique hotels/bed and breakfast houses /above the law/.

> 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?

A lot of people prefer Airbnb not because hotels are so terrible but because Airbnb is so cheap.

> These negative Airbnb articles simply indicate that Airbnb is growing faster than the company can keep up with its users.

Airbnb is a big company with a lot of resources at this point. They aren't doing anything about these problems because they don't want to.

Right now they are exactly where they want to be: they collect a hefty percentage of every transaction that rolls through their platform, and they get to offload pretty much all of the risk onto their users.

> 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.

The reason they don't do this, I suspect, is because "for sale by dealer" is illegal is a lot of places unless the host registers as a hotel and complies with hotel regulations (which probably excludes their property from being usable).

Well, then, there you go. AirBnB are profiting by violating law.

Good, bad, or otherwise, the owner/dealer distinction clarifies this. Eventually the site simply becomes one-stop shopping for atty's g'l intent on enforcement.

There's a huge difference between me breaking the law and me not auditing you to know that you are.

Does Craigslist investigate every item sold to make sure it's not stolen?

<em>Does Craigslist investigate every item sold to make sure it's not stolen? </em>

No, but they probably should. Pawnshops, in many jurisdictions at least, are supposed to hold things that they buy in case they turn out to be stolen. You can be on the hook for fencing something even if you didn't know it was stolen.

Craigslist also does not take a cut of the price of the item -- it is solely a marketplace.

They also cooperate with authorities.

Does the phone company monitor your calls to make sure you aren't scamming the pizza-guy? And can you imagine the delay as you had to go back and forth with Craigslist on what constitutes proof you own a ten-year-old bike, or whatever.

How large should my obligation be, to make sure you aren't breaking the law?

If you think there's a Craigslist seller selling illegal goods, arrest them. Nice and easy.

If you think someone's violating the terms of their lease, tell their landlord.

Better answer: CL clearly indicate what activities and items are prohibited, and provide means for users to report these.

The system's far less than perfect, but it does exist and is explicitly supported.

There's a huge difference between small rates of incidental illicit use, and massive, flagrant violation.

Craigslist does have terms of service, and relies on a user-based flagging method to remove nonconforming content. They claim significant deletions base on this, though my own experience is of massive levels of bad-actor behavior, less of illegal activity and more of rampant spam posting in several sale-by-dealer categories, many lasting for years. Large consequence is that those sections of Craigslist are of exceptionally little value to me. Actually, much of CL doesn't really do much for me these days....

But despite that: the overwhelming majority of activity on CL is at least reasonably above-board.

In the case of AirBnB, the article here notes that 40% of rental volume is from multi-listing members. That is, people not leasing single rooms or properties, but managing multiple properties. Which further discounts professionals who only manage a single property.

That is: a large and visible chunk of AirBnB is not the "come stay at our house" vision the company's propaganda promotes, but is a commercial rentals service not meeting standards of either housing or hotel accomodations.

If that were true, we don't cities enforce this? I hear occasionally about issues with private (individual) tenants violating their leases, or conflicting with local hotel laws, but I never hear about purposeful crack downs on multi-listing power AirBnB users.

Maybe taxpayers are not interested in paying more tax for the enforcement of well-known laws against people who flout them (a few of whom are the very same taxpayers).

My experience with Craigslist is that there are huge numbers of one-off dealers selling under the "by owner" category.

> 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.

If 90% of their business comes from 'power users' and investment firms and not 'locals renting their home while they are out of town' - then AirBnB is founded on an extraordinary lie.

Yes.

Personally I'd bet that a majority of their revenue is attributable to units that are not owner-occupied for several reasons:

* people using a dwelling limits how much hosting they can do

* how hard they've fought to avoid forcing these professional landlords to obey the law (viz nyc, sf, etc); would they have fought so hard (potentially endangering their whole business, see current prop F backlash in sf) if this were a small fraction of revenue?

see eg http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/...

My back-of-napkin rough estimates are 40-70% of revenue is not the face of the anti-prop F campaign, ie someone earning a little extra money from the odd weekend guest.

Uh, of course it is. This is why they continue to resist showing any meaningful property data. I'd wager good money on the majority of their rentals also being illegal. But it props up their value and makes money cheap for them so they'll continue to fight until legally forced to do otherwise.

But what is the better foundation: an honest 2.5B valuation, or dishonest 25B one?

(calling Airbnb 'dishonest' is perhaps an exaggeration, but their advertising definitely reflects values that a lot of hosts don't represent, and they must know that)

From Paul Graham's "What We Look for in Founders", point 4 is "Naughtiness":

http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

Pretty sure governments don't share the same view.

Depends where the company is being naughty.

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.

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.

> 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".

Concurrently renting out 2 rooms so often that you would want this, is still a qualitative difference between renting out just 1 room or renting out your whole personal residence for just 5 weeks in the year. I don't know that it crosses a meaningful line yet, but it is moving toward the "professional/large-scale" side of the spectrum that your parent comment is complaining about.

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)

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.

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.

> 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 think getting to list only one rental is the solution, but perhaps an owner can only list one property as their primary residence.

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.

Big companies turn a blind eye to bad stuff, in part because it is really hard to manage and because truly cracking down may remove all revenue growth for a while. I don't need to list the specifics, but both Google and Amazon are certainly guilty of the same thing.

Some interesting things I don't hear mentioned often:

a) prostitutes have been shifting away from hotels to airbnb ~ at some point this could be a serious safety concern b) there is nothing in place to prevent racial discrimination

I haven't had any terrible experiences with Airbnb. I've used it just a few times. I have noticed a tendency for places to look good in pictures but you don't know if like the mattress is horrible.

Realistically cities may need to have an additional zoning category for short term residential rentals. Buildings/condos/apartments/co-ops most certainly have a right to aggressively enforce rules if something like airbnb is prohibited. If an airbnb host is either breaking the rules of the property or the city, they should be on the hook to refund all booking fees from day one.

> I don't mind professional listings

Back in my day, they were called hotels. And were regulated.

Those who don't know why regulations were created are doomed to reintroduce them.

> as near as I can tell he's a sociopathic asshole [...] the completely worthless piece of shit that he absolutely appears to be

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