Rent Your Place on Airbnb? The Landlord Wants a Cut

Perhaps an example will put you at ease:

"Oh could you help me take these to my flat? I know they're heavy, but don't worry, my building has a lift!"

Substitute apartment and elevator if so inclined.

Zilch. Nada. Absolutely nothing. They can accept it, or find somewhere else.

It's great that a landlord is saying, fine, you can sublease the place short term. But we have to regulate that, you have to pay us to do so, and if you can't hold up your end we have the right to put an end to it.

This is the only reasonable way I can see to solve the problem of short term rentals.

Your own comment some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623102

Why do you think that short-term middle-to-upper-class renters are preferable neighbours to medium-to-long-term lower-class renters? I saw your comment elsethread about ease of punishment, which makes some sense, but in my experience small landlords simply don't care.

Living above a pair of end-stage alcoholics who importuned people on the sidewalk and called the ambulance for health care every few weeks was far, far more annoying than the flophouse a few doors down. Then there was the poor family with 9 people in a two-bedroom unit, with a couple of teenagers who vandalised and may have been thieves as well (not that upper-class teenagers aren't hoodlums, of course: many of them are too). Then there was the prostitute with the shady clientele.

You appear to be opposed to short-term renters, but appear to applaud Section 8. Why the difference?

Neither are short-term hotel guests, but tptacek wants to reduce those while welcoming Section 8, which is logically inconsistent.

It's certainly true that if these things are done irresponsibly then bad things happen. And bad things do often happen, I'll give you that. But it's not necessarily true. How it's managed is what determines whether the outcome is good or bad and for whom.

When short term renters well behaved, then the neighbors aren't harmed at all. If any lease holder has the ability to sublet easily with support of the landlord then that is something of value. A landlord that gets involved like this is going to create an environment with incentives for good short term tenants.

I'd rather lease from a company that allows me to do that and also supports me in doing so. I'd rather lease from a company that actively manages subleases than one that sticks its head in the sand that pretends that isn't happening all the time.

Short term subleases are here to stay. Trying to stop them is like trying to stop piracy or illicit drug use. It's just not going to happen.

edit: also: To call what happens on airbnb an "unregulated hotel" is profoundly misguided. Have you ever lived for a significant period of time out of airbnb??

Of course, you may not like that trade-off. You may, like me, have kids in those bedrooms, and enjoy having other families with kids around you who form lifelong friendships with your kids. You may not really want to see an investor buy the 3 bedroom apartment next to you and pay his or her own mortgage and profit by bringing a never ending stream of strangers into the house or apartment next door - even if these strangers are very well behaved.

In short, you may wish to trade your right to turn your house into a hotel in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that your neighbors won't do this either. Or, alternatively, you may be ok with it in a more limited way, that perhaps you don't really mind people doing this occasionally, when they are on vacation, say for a limited number of days a year.

If this is the case, then you would gain none of the benefits but experience all the negatives of disruption.

As you can probably tell from the way I set this up, I feel it is immensely reasonable to zone certain sections of a city as residential with strong restrictions on short term rentals, as a way of protecting residents from the externalities of short term rentals, as well as a way of protecting long term housing stock.