Airbnb makes that matchmaking easier (on both parties), and in exchange takes a 9-15% cut.
Property owners who used to be forced to choose between offering 1-year lease or trying to piece together some mid-term rentals (and suffer vacancies in-between) now have an additional choice: take ~85% of the much higher daily rate people are willing to pay.
I agree it's perhaps made that specific pattern of consumption more expensive, but IMO, it's done that by making the overall market more efficient.
I don't pretend to know everything about the housing market. Just that in a time where the Internet have created opportunities to more easily work on the things you think matter with like-minded people, the housing market is going the other way in terms of flexibility. Paradoxically time and space are more important than ever. Being able to do conferences and have people hang around afterwards, as a smaller company bring some in to consult in person, even just hanging out and exchanging ideas all takes time. It's all possible now, but not only is it not equally distributed, it's somewhat getting less so.
My general sense is that merging the vacation/short term rental market with the long term home rental market puts serious upward pressure on the latter, thereby increasing scarcity of opportunity for middle income people in urban locales.
IMO, anything that puts downward pressure on the derivative of social mobility over time is ultimately putting upward pressure on the shittiness of society as a whole and really makes life pretty unpleasant regardless of socioeconomic class.
I'll take an inefficient housing market any day over that.
So I guess we agree that supply is limited.
But I ask you this: If supply is critically limited, then how on earth is it silly to complain about a "rental service" that mainstreams alternative uses of housing stock where the net effect is even more reduction of supply.
Alternate means of doing business are interesting, and new structures in society are also interesting. People can and should experiment. But if they're experimenting in areas that are already problematic and are doing so in ways that obviously make the problems worse... I'm going to heap blame on them whether you think it's silly or not.
That some people were previously benefiting from the existing inefficiency is a bug, not a feature, IMO.
It can take over a year and cost tens of thousands of dollars to evict a tenant. Throw in rent control and you have a market where it is often more attractive to not rent your vacant unit - particularly if you want to move into the unit or sell it within the decade.
All in all, I would estimate that airbnb siphons up around 1% of the units away from long term rentals.
You seem to advocate for exactly the same approach that got us into this mess. Instead of attempting to regulate supply and demand out of existence and blaming the "free market" after the fact, why can't we just build more houses?
If the entire month was peak (like July in a popular city in Europe or something..) that would still be understandable - but you could again apply that logic to a 3 month reservation and a host arguing about how the month in the middle are peak dates.
Of course, not all hosts are like that - yet. But if this is the shape of things to come, long term rentals are going to get harder just like the parent mentions.