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Comment by stevesearer | Hacker News Reader

My landlords live in a small one bedroom home behind the house my family is in and I was thinking about doing this with them.

Essentially, I'd still pay my rent like normal and then have them manage the Airbnb while we're out of town and they'd get a cut of the proceeds. I'd need to check the lease to see if I'm allowed to do it anyway, I assume not, but it seems like a reasonable way for all three parties to win:

They collect more rent, I cover some travel expenses, ad someone gets to stay in a cute place close to downtown Santa Barbara.

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I think it would be unwise for your landlord to allow this. They have little to gain but a lot to lose.

My wife and I rent two vacation homes on AirBnb and other websites. We started with a one night minimum in the off-season and then quickly change to 3 nights. This essentially means we book fewer off-season weekend rentals.

Here's why we did that: It takes 1 night to trash a house. So do you want someone to pay you $200 to trash your house or $600 to trash your house?

You're also playing Russian roulette where every new guest is a trigger pull. The fewer trigger pulls, the less likely you are to take a bullet.

We'd rather a higher vacancy rate with an overall fewer number of guests. In the end this means we might reduce our revenue by 10% to have 50% fewer guests.

Your landlord would have to decide that couple extra thousand dollars a year would be worth hosting 20 random visitors. If that's how the numbers break down the risk isn't worth the reward IMO.

Yeah, that makes sense.

In my case I believe our city recently (or might soon) change the rules of short-term rentals to only allow for rentals longer that 30 days.

What I was specifically thinking of doing was taking my family to another country for a month and renting the place out for the duration to help cover the expenses. Hopefully the longer term rental would weed out many of the types of people that might trash a place.

Sounds like you need to take a larger deposit. Then you could rent it out for 1-2 nights at a time, assuming a cleaning fee that covers your costs, without worrying about damage. Not that the $1 million in insurance wouldn't cover you either way

In my experience insurance will never make you whole.

Stress + time spent managing the debacle @ my bill rate + lost income during repairs + items insurance fails to cover, etc...

We've really only had one group trash a house and it was really just a big mess with no real physical damage. Took about $800 of extra cleaning and was handled by the deposit.

> I'd need to check the lease to see if I'm allowed to do it anyway

Leases can be amended - it's not a law.

Depends on what country you're in.

I'm curious about this; can you elaborate?

I'm not the person you asked it of, but I suspect that what the person means is that you can amend a lease as long as it fits the legal requirements of the location. If you're in a city that doesn't allow short-term subleases, then you presumably can't amend your lease to specifically allow short-term subleasing.

Sure, but is the lease likely to have pointers to laws that forbid that?

I specifically had it written into my condo agreement that Airbnb is illegal, even though it is illegal anyways. It's illegal in lots of places, but people still do it--having it written explicitly in the lease probably makes it more easily enforceable. This is just added protection that holds even if the laws are changed.

You're making a lot of assumptions here. As a landlord I would just evict you if you tried to do this with my property. My lease and most other leases say no subleases for this reason. On what planet would I manage my own property for a renter and hand over all the revenue to them?

OP makes it clear he would work together with the landlord on this.

Yeah, the landlords live 30 feet from us and we have a great relationship with them. So I would just ask them and if they said no, then I wouldn't do it.

As I mentioned in another comment, I was thinking of taking my family to another country for a month and renting the place out for that entire month to a single renter to help reduce some of the costs.

Not all landlords are the same. I have a friend who rents a place in Venice and the landlord told them they could airbnb the in-law addition if they had no use for it. Presumably the person on the lease is on the hook for any damages anyways.

It was only a few sentences long, how did you miss all the facts? OP stated that he would have landlord be part of it ("have them manage the Airbnb") and they would do this because they would make money ("and they'd get a cut of the proceeds"), but before proceeding with asking about it the OP will check the lease ("I'd need to check the lease to see if I'm allowed to do it anyway").

OP said he'd get the landlord's permission. Besides, OP is already paying rent for the entire property, for the entire month. The way you use the term "my property" makes it sound like you can walk into your tenant's homes without their permission because, well, it's your property.

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