Toronto eyes plan to crack down on Airbnb-style rentals

I stayed in an Airbnb in Toronto last year. It was a beautiful new building in a trendy neighborhood. The unit was very clearly setup for continual airbnb rentals and wasn't anyone's primary residence.

Only after booking was I given very specific and careful instructions on how to avoid any interaction with other residents or building security, entering and leaving through the parking garage.

During my stay I felt like a criminal, even though I quickly figured out that this was a pretty normal thing in this particular building, which was known for loud parties and inconsiderate visitors.

What a terrible experience for me as the guest and the people who have to put up with strangers constantly coming and going.

Airbnb is cool when we're talking about a vacation home or occasional rental of your primary residence - not as a clandestine hotel. I'd be willing to bet that most people, homeowners or responsible renters agree with that, Airbnb's growth goals be damned.

There's a lot of cities trying to figure out how to handle Airbnb -- Barcelona for example is cracking down on unlicensed AirBNB's -- and the reason is the resulting rent increases.

Like taxis and taxi cab companies taking their hatred out on Lyft or Uber, I do believe that technology changes economies and that this will be another example of a misled attempt to prevent a technology from changing a city's economy. I also believe that many times these preventative measures are led by lobbyists by the very industry that is being hurt by the technology, and in this case it's likely hotels -- but then blaming it on rent prices.

It'll be great to see where all this leads, but making it illegal and taking it out on owners or drivers is going the wrong direction.

The solution to the "Airbnb problem" of rising home costs is less regulation, not more. It's the same situation in virtually every other city: housing regulations preventing increased vertical development are the true culprit, not services like airbnb which in my opinion are a positive force for home prices due to them adding "housing liquidity" to the market. Sure, in the immediate short term an airbnb rental property buying spree could raise house prices, but once housing prices are high enough, real estate developers will realize that they can just build bigger/more buildings.

That said, I do think it is fair for airbnb rentals to be subject to the same taxes and regulations as hotels.

Edit: I don't mean that housing liquidity raises or increases home prices. I think that would be tough to say. I just mean that it's good for the housing market from a consumer standpoint: it creates a kind of flexible vehicle for dealing with short term housing needs. It's better as a society for us to have a way to rent somewhere for a week than to not have such a way to do that (and hotels only offer a very specific kind of residence, which is not to everyone's taste).

The problem with AirBnb is that if you live anywhere in the downtown core (particularly King West in Toronto), you're likely to encounter AirBnbs being rented out to parties. And especially on a consistent basis. It's extremely annoying in condos when you have loud obnoxious guests who rent it for a weekend night not just in their units, but in the hallways.

Not to mention, that consistently in a condo that my family owns, we consistently see weekend warriors leaving empty beer bottles and garbage in the elevators and condos.

Yeah, it's not technically AirBnb's fault or even necessarily the condo board's fault. It's partially a result of living in an area with irresponsible young people combined with short-term renters who don't care. But when rules, bylaws, and laws have no real teeth, people aren't incentivized to actually deal with the problems that neighbouring tenants face.

At least the proposal allows for full apartment rental any x months of the year, it's just you can't be an AirBnB landlord and snap up a bunch of units you don't live in.

Still true to the spirit of AirBnB without housing market externalities. Sounds like an ideal model for cities.

How would a city officials detect when a home is being used for rental , versus having guests over

I'm from Toronto and work in the apartment rentals industry, and I think it's pretty clear that nobody actually believes that Airbnb rentals are having any sort of real impact on home prices and rents in the city. Since Airbnb listings in units people purchased just to Airbnb make up such a tiny portion of the housing stock, it's not sensible to think that this regulation is really targeted at impacting rents.

It's also worth mentioning that unlike NYC and SF where this may actually be a real issue, buying a place just to put on Airbnb in Toronto is hard to do in a profitable way. Airbnb rents in most parts of Toronto make it impossible to turn a profit worth the hassle, and most I know who have considered it decided not to based on the economics.

I suspect the political motivations are the mayor (who is generally sensible) wanting to be seen at least doing "something" to address rising rents, as well as catering to the various industry lobbies and other politicians who are generally uncomfortable with any industry operating in a largely unregulated way.

I mean, they cut a deal with Japan that legalizes Airbnb rentals and allows for local regulation-- why not Canada?

Alternate perspective on perma-rented AirBnB listings (that is, properties exclusively used full-time for AirBnB rentals): it is an externalization of unaccounted for costs in the degradation of the commons, and raising overall risks upon permanent residents. This is currently an unsolved problem, messily left to the permanent residents who are adversely-impacted to handle on their own. I'm not personally affected, but read about these points raised in municipal ordinance discussions about banning short-term rentals.

The stories about trashed public areas, even frequent instances of vomit, urine, and feces found in stairwells and elevators, are common, and some are even brought up in this thread. Who bears the cost (materials, time and/or labor) of clean up?

When the guests stay only 2-3 nights, and hold a raucous party on the last night that keep waking up the next door neighbor's infant, that degrades the commons. Sure they're gone by the following morning, sure the owner can ban that specific renter from ever renting the property again, but the key difference between a permanent resident and a short-term renter is the next door neighbor no longer has the assurance of reasonably-consistent behavior. The owner can even be well-intentioned, but let slip partiers through their screening enough that there will never be a season when the next door neighbor doesn't have to work with the police on a noise complaint. Always with new people they've never met before so there is no common base to work from.

Every time a short-term renter comes through, there is a nearly-imperceptible increase in the risk to the surrounding residences. Even in places where neighbors barely know each other, knowing by sight still represents a kind of commons. Even discounting the crime risk, there is the natural human instinct to put up your guard around "the other"; there is a small element of stress raised around this constant flow of short-term renters through a residential area. Years of crime data definitely prove relative anonymity raises risk profiles, but no hard metrics have been teased out of that to my knowledge, sufficiently to allow us to build predictive models around short-term renter effects.

It is easy to flippantly say the courts will handle these issues, but that is a tacit acknowledgement that the issues are a systemic pattern, not one-off freak occurrences that fall way off the edge of a Monte Carlo chart. When it is a pattern, then that is a cost externalization by the business. I'm seeing a lot of this behavior by businesses of all stripes, trying to gain an edge by monetizing any behavior that cannot be readily accounted for, especially in individual cases, yet in aggregate over time yield benefits to the business with asymmetrical costs borne by bystanders. This concentrated-benefits-dispersed-costs problem has been discussed [1], but to my knowledge no definitive solution exists yet, and in this case the challenge is even greater because the costs like increased, inconsistent and chronic stress, are difficult to assess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

Constantly amazed by how many people rock up here, like clockwork, to defend an the unlimited take on this business model: "Oh, it's just the hotel industry that hates this", "If only we just built like crazy Airbnb wouldn't be a problem". Riiiight, all we need to do is live in unregulated megacities and the magic of the market will deliver.

Here's the thing: a lot of people out there bought homes and apartments in countries that had these funny things called 'laws', where they expected that they were going to live in communities, not surrounded by rentiers running random hotels sans staff and regulation. A lot of apartment buildings in Sydney are essentially now completely fucked by this - you buy an apartment and find out you're living in party central and your neighbours are a never-ending collection of randos.

I think it's pretty clear from the extent that these companies go to obfuscate the actual addresses of the houses that they are not working with clean hands here. That aspect of the business model should be flat out illegal. Oh, you're going to operate a hotel, but you're not going to tell anyone where it is?

Hypothesis: The partiers urinating in the elevator and the HN posters who are utterly unsympathetic are one and the same.