Nearly 80% of Japan’s Airbnbs removed in response to new home-share law
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AirBnB obviously was interested in getting their product used by as many people as people (growth at all costs) - but this had the effect of getting a lot of young, cost conscious people to take holidays in area that were traditionally residential. While most AirBnB renters are polite and respectful, enough of them were loud, disruptive and ignoring the local rules (for example, tourists in Venice who use AirBnB but ignore the very strict garbage disposal laws) that local residents started dreading having AirBnBs around.
AirBnB is already very strict with landlords: it needs to start being a lot stricter with its users too. They rapidly need to educate their users about how to be good citizens, and that the motto of 'the customer is always right' is completely the wrong way to think about a stay in a residential area in a foreign city. Users should think of themselves as a respectful guest, not an entitled customer.
Barcelona and Rome are overrun with tourists, and it's killing the cities. AirBnB should just go away, the market worked very well before it, even if things were a bit more expensive.
Uber, like AirBnB and a lot of other startups, are 'disrupting' industries by entering them and taking them over by ignoring regulations, insurance, and even laws to keep costs low and make a profit. In this day and age, they can grow fast enough that by the time cities see the repercussions and react to them, the companies are big enough and rich enough (and flush enough with VC money) to fight back, and are already entrenched with a loud and enthusiastic user base.
In other words, Uber is great if you ignore the various safety and insurance regulations, background checks, licensing, etc. that taxis have to comply with.
"I've been waiting for two hours, and you're going to Chinatown!? Fuck you!" (Not far enough)
"Brooklyn?! Fuck you!" (Wants to stay in Manhattan)
One cabbie was so pissed he went 70 in a 35 zone to demonstrate how annoying my destination was.
Cabbies pretend to get lost so that the fare is longer. Uber will refund the difference. Etc. Etc.
Uber has no incentive to limit the number of drivers they employ. Our small streets are jammed with Uber/Lyft cars endlessly driving back and forth.
Uber costs less than a taxi, so this is giving poor(er) people more choice.
The medallion laws are unjust and should be broken, other laws like insurance, driver training and vehicle safety are not. This is what makes the debate so complex and passionate, with people taking one side or the other depending on their personal incentives and political bias.
I don't follow the logic. Many companies have negative cash flow while they invest in growth. What is "it" in your sentence? If you're saying there are only two possible factors for the relatively low ride fares, I think you're forgetting the reduction of transaction costs.
Hailing a cab on the street is frustrating. Hailing a cab by phone call even more frustrating and uncertain. Decreasing the transaction cost increases demand, which encourages supply, which lowers cost, which ... Anyway, there's a new equilibrium price.
Are you an Uber employee revealing private information? If not, it seems you're making a big assumption about the proportion of their expenses that are marketing and growth versus steady-state marginal cost.
Amazon didn't make profit for a while and everyone wondered if they could. Oh, it's a low margin business, they'll never be profitable, blah, blah. Turns out they can, in fact, make a bit of money. Maybe Uber and Lyft can, too. Delta can, even though flights are a commodity business.
Oddly enough, I was thinking the same thing.
You've asserted that they're ignoring cost in their pricing, but have provided no evidence for it. Uber and Lyft have claimed to be profitable in their biggest markets. Doesn't that suggest they set prices above marginal cost?
In any case, even if they're not currently profitable, that may be because of capital expense, not operating costs. Until they go public, it's hard to know.
It didn't have the hyper-growth potential of the current model, but it didn't draw most of the ethical/moral objections, while still providing at least some "disruption" to the taxi monopolies.
With young kids, you often what your own cooking/food preparation facilities. Sleep arrangements are often easier in a house too.
Ironically, it seems like hotels with food preparation areas are more common in Japan (weekly mansion/business type hotels).
That's specifically what I was replying to.
I live(and rent) in a city that is tourist based and less affordable because of airb&b and the like. It has a vacancy rate of under 1%. So i completely understand what you're saying. I just disagree that the market for staying somewhere worked well before airb&b.
Having stayed in a motel a lot over the last month, I'm pretty confident most parents could get 4-5 kids into most hotel rooms without management being the wiser.
As a simple example: if we have too many tourists, give a progressive daily tax that's charged to every visitor that automatically includes museum visits/etc. Use that revenue to build more housing for local residents (and if some dipshit points out that more housing ruins a neighboorhood's character, ask yourself if Paris or suburbia has more character) or to subsidize local transport infrastructure.
Step outside of theoretical economic thought experiments and try living in a formerly quiet neighborhood or building suddenly experiencing an influx of loud drunk littering assholes. Residential areas are desired as residential areas for a reason. I live in NYC and sure as hell don't want to live around Times Square. There are actual people living in these cities who want a decent quality of life where they live.
Echoing many others in the this thread, in a previous apartment in a residential area of Manhattan someone down the hall starting renting their unit to Airbnb visitors. It was a nightmare, but thankfully the landlord caught wind in a few weeks and kicked the person out.
That's awful. In the US we have misdemeanor noise violations that carry a fine (or jail time if you refuse to pay).
Neighbors will call the police if your party is too rowdy. They'll show up looking for underage drinkers. Usually if you are nice to the cops and promise to be quiet (and everyone they see is 21+) they'll just warn you and not write a ticket.
Lots of places already have this as a "hotel tax" .. which AirBnb doesn't pay.
There may be some places which haven't yet arranged for AirBnB to pay the tax, but it isn't because AirBnB refuses. In fact, it may be because hotels in that area are still holding out for the possibility of banning AirBnB. When AirBnB starts paying hotel taxes, it becomes nearly impossible to remove.
Outside of that list, the host may have to collect it themselves if the location is not supported yet: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/654/what-is-occupancy-ta....
(Disclosure: I work at Airbnb)
How about charging a very high tax (in the form of a voucher) for hotel/AirBnB stays, but make that voucher spendable in local restaurants/museums? This would have the bonus that you'd also kill the local black market economy, as tourists would insist on being able to pay for goods using their voucher.
I suspect any voucher system like you propose would just create a secondary gray market in slightly-discounted vouchers.
2. Anywhere popular with young tourists (Amsterdam, Berlin etc). This might be limited to Europe, with a €20 flight (or bus) to the city, a bed in a cheap hostel, a visit to all the free things etc. This isn't new, but Couchsurfing and cheap transport have probably increased it.
So while I'm interested to hear of those cases, this "they don't spend" concern still seems out-of-place if directed against AirBnBers.
Sure, there are solutions. There's a huge housing bubble right now (which will collapse whenever tourism dries up), for instance. Maybe if it keeps on this way some legislation will be passed to get it under control.
But both of those solutions are completely out of the hands of the people who actually can't afford to live in the city where they work.
There was a woman at a city council meeting a few years ago who lived in a building with around 10 units, and she said six of them were on AirBnB. When ever she checked, their (small) pool always had people in it she'd never seen before, and never would again. People buy places to live in and make a life in, and then half the building is party people.
For what it's worth, this has always made us extremely wary of AirBnB, and we do a lot of research for cities we visit before we rent an AirBnB somewhere. In Montreal they're regulated, so we had no problem there. In Reykjavik, we rented from a woman who was staying at her mother's place to take care of her pets while she (her mother) was out of the country, so our stay wasn't depriving anyone of housing.
Other places we go, where AirBnB isn't as well regulated, we're very particular and tend to go for hotels (e.g. Ottawa, Seattle) because we're very aware of how bad these kinds of systems can be for people.
This has to be repeated. There's no point in living without some level of quality of life. Having everyone trying to raise their family, do their school work, study, or just try to sleep, in what are essentially all becoming hotels, is just not something we should strive for.
One could even argue you're going to end up in a world where success in life is tied to wealth, not because of all the reasons commonly associated with it, but just because one group can actually sleep at night and one can't.
In cities such as Reykjavik and Vancouver, they could tax Airbnb and divert the funding to create more housing, but housing construction is a physical process that takes time. Meanwhile in the short term rents are spiking.
Don't convolute these two things in order to influence readers. One does not necessarily imply the other. Venice would not 'kill' for more tourists and most cities in the world would probably 'kill' for a certain amount of tourism but not for couch tourism which indirectly favors real estate speculators buying housing for short-term rent and driving the locals away.
Yes, starting with killing affordability for their citizens.
> build more housing for local residents
But where? 50 km out of town, so they, too, can experience tourism on a daily basis.
Whether or not we regard one right as more important than the other (and to be fair, we absolutely should), that doesn't change that nobody else is obligated to assist you in pursuit of your rights.
In America, for example, the right to legal counsel is positively asserted. "If you do not have a lawyer, we will provide one for you." Most other rights, including those explicitly enumerated in the constitution, are negatively asserted. We have the right to keep and bear arms, but it is encumbent on no one to aid me in that right, only the government may not interfere.
What does Canada (or your province) do to ensure that all housing prices are kept to affordability?
Because, in the West at least, society isn't capitalist uber alles.
Different people want different things. Too much of a good thing isn't always still a good thing. It's not that hard to understand.
Even within the same city! 10% of the city might be tourist facing, 90% not-tourist-facing. So something that's great for that 10% and annoying for the 90% is naturally gonna get some resistance.
In the city I live in (no NYC, but still one of the densest in the US and high demand), there's currently some big construction projects, and people are complaining its not big enough. Except its on a former landfill that could not support the larger structures. Let say we fix that...but the size of the project was also scaled according to capacity of the sewer infrastructure. Sure, we can fix that TOO, but then the people building the project have to wait a year, or two, or more, and they want money now.
You have to throttle things so that all the moving parts follow each other, to avoid making it hell for everyone.
It’s not so much the rise in tourism that’s the problem as it is the rise in tourists staying in residentially zoned areas. Hosts are renting apartments and then illegally subleasing them for profit, artificially inflating rental prices without a corresponding increase in income. This is an especially large problem in developing countries, where due to geographical arbitrage, tourists can afford to pay way more for an apartment than a resident can.
This is a problem that can't be solved by building more housing, because that housing is not going to be built in the historic city centers where the tourists want to stay. (Also, it takes a while to build more housing.)
Wouldn't the real market solution be to build more hotels?
Sure there are spots near the Roman forum you would expect to have lots of tourists(basically inside the Aurellian walls).
But outside of that its a 20+ minute drive for a tourist to popular areas. If a 50$ airbnb is beating out a $1,000/mo rent its because people cannot afford $1000 in rent.
We host an airbnb ourselves, lots of business travelers in our area.
If people are coming to visit what humans did 2000 years ago and not visiting the humans there today, I dont think the problem is Airbnb.
A key aspect of hotel rates is that they fluctuate with demand. When you come into town for the big event, the rates may be 4 times higher than staying on a cold, boring night. A long-term stay will be much cheaper per-night than a nightly rate.
You need to take down sheets, wash them, remake the bed, clean the bathroom, buy fruit/food every ~3 days, vacuum, be available for your guests.
When you have tenets, its passive income. You clean up every 6 months to 3+ years.
Airbnb pays better, but its labor. The ~300$/mo difference can easily be accounted for with that. Not to mention the cost of food(always HQ), electricity, water, heat/AC.
The items I listed are not optional, people can give you a bad review regardless what expectations you set with prices + description.
The problem is that Airbnb will charge maybe 80-120 euros a night for an apartment depending on size, location etc. And I am paying 750 euros a month.
So a landlord can make more money from a week of Airbnb than a month of normal rental.
In the three years I have been here the rents have risen probably 15% or so - it means even with promotions and pay rises you just keep up.
Ironically London also has an insane rental market so moving back wouldn't help much...
Well, except you also have 15% more money after paying rent as well. If you save the same percentage of your overall income then your absolute savings went up 15%. And if you assume that all your other costs are not rising as quickly (maybe fair, maybe not) then you could save a higher percentage of your income because your salary grew faster than your costs as a whole.
It's the same argument why living in SF or NYC is worth it even with the high cost of housing.
So it means even with promotions etc. you just break even - it feels like you are just working for your landlord.
That said, it is still better than London where the situation is just untenable and I prefer the quality of life here as well. (sadly so do all the tourists!)
That's why I think it's fair to blame AirBnB for that. We'll see what happens in Tokyo, Madrid and other cities where they're severely restricting usage.
Devil's Advocate: I'd agree that AirBnB isn't entirely to blame, but a large company helping your town's citizen rezone their long-term residential units into short-term residential units and not telling the town isn't going to help the zoning board make correct decisions.
Japan has made a good decision to at least butt themselves into the process.
Sorry, but people who believe that 1 promile decrease in supply could cause tens of percent increase in prices are just dumb beyond salvation.
I don't think AirBnB was the cause of the Greek debt crisis.
You mean during the recession?
AirbNB is getting away with very grey legal area here, they should he held legally accountable for facilitating illegal rentals. Right now my tax dollars are paying for the government to enforce what AirBnB sells without impunity.
On a personal note I'm thinking of pursuing this legally with AirBnB and/or my city, my street has 4 illegal AirBnB rentals on it and my city can't see to enforce their own laws. There's enough interest in my region to easily get about 30 people on board, and that's just one semi small town.
And we don't blame the users of AirBnB, they dont know the local laws, we blame the landlords and ultimately the platform.
I know in west coast tourism destinations you will practically get beat up if your renting out to airBnB illegally since it has such a negative effect on local housing prices.
We stayed in a hotel nearby that cost about $30 more, but had free breakfast.
I will go for hotels first in the future. I never had any issues with airbnb in the past, but one night of waiting around to hear from the host (and never actually gaining entry) with a family of tired people is one too many.
That's funny, that's exactly the issue I had with AirBnB "guests" in my building. Also, them bumping their wheely suitcases down the stairs at 5am for the cheap flight home.
With Airbnb I get a separate bedroom and a fridge that isn't the size of a shoebox and strategically filled so I can't put my own store bought water into it. Just thinking about hotel culture makes me mad. And it seems global.
I find the traditional double bed hotel rooms depressing now.
I’m at the point where I simply will not use AirBnB for travel in an area I don’t already know well. It’s too risky.
Does AirBnB ensure that the landlord/owner is properly licensed to offer the property for a short term rental before listing it? Or do they just take the landlord's word for it?
"While most AirBnB renters are polite and respectful, enough of them were loud, disruptive and ignoring the local rules (for example, tourists in Venice who use AirBnB but ignore the very strict garbage disposal laws) that local residents started dreading having AirBnBs around."
A short term renter in an unlicensed business operating next door to you in your residential apartment building is necessarily going to be louder, less safe, and cause more issues than a long term neighbor. I rent a residential apartment in a residential building on a residential street. I did not rent a hotel room for a year next to other hotel rooms.
I was going to ask "Why are there laws against people making money?", but it make sense. Residential areas are for residents, not commerce. There should be a place for folks to relax around their contemporaries without having to deal with knowing that their environment may change from day to day.
I would say, perhaps there should be a compromise. After-all, being able to rent out a room from time to time can help home owners stay in their homes longer (or even enjoy life more). Maybe there could be a 2-3 strike rule on tenants. Where, if things do go out of hand (for whatever that reason), then the homeowner cannot be part of the AirBnb renting experience.
That way, there is something to gain and something to loose. Educating tenants would be priority.
I don't think they ask for users' IDs. Presumably anyone could sign up with a fake name and a prepaid credit card, act wild, get banned, and repeat the process.
Determining the identity of an online user can be pretty hard. AirBnB doesn't want to add verification steps that will cause attrition in the rental pipeline, so they'd rather do nothing than do a little and be seen as failing at it.
The effects are just now being understood which why legislation is just now being enacted to taper it a bit.
It's not at all strict with landlords. Requiring hotel/b&b zoning would be being strict with landlords, say, and that's what many countries and municipalities now do, but AirBnB seems to generally have little interest in helping to enforce that.
Lots of landlords that rent places for a living started using AirBnB. I specially experienced this in Poland, where I often had to go to a company-owned building to pick up the keys. There they had an office, reception, etc.
It didn't feel any different from a hotel. One time we complained about an apartment, and they gave us another one that was empty.
So, my point is that the host often sets the mood. If it's a hotel-like structure that even has self check-in, with a company that uses its own website, Booking, AirBnb and whatever else is around to rent rooms, you feel like an entitled customer. If an old woman opens the door to the guest house, you feel like a guest in her house.
I guess AirBnB departed from their original vision of having people sleep in your living room on an air mattress, and it's now used by hospitality companies as another channel to get customers. When that is the case, you definitely feel like acting as a guest at a hotel, since that's what it is although booked via AirBnB.
The reason Airbnb is cheaper is because users are running afoul of the laws and possibly taxes.
Have you checked the Airbnb listings? Very little people are sharing their places. Most of the people are running this as a business. Many of them are not either there and delegate the key to another third-party.
It is a mess. And I'm not against it (I'm not a legal citizen of every country). But it is not fair to have registered hotel who comply with rules and pay taxes. And have Airbnb. You'll have to pick.
AirBnb creates "bad neighbours" by putting lots of tourists, some of whom behave badly, in formerly residential locations. It creates a whole new set of absentee landlords. If it were restricted to renting out places where the owner was still living it wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
But this doesn't stop you using other services. While non have the same inertia and awareness amongst the public as AirBnB there are several so it is easy to get around the limit by using several providers who don't talk to each other.
(We have been having problems with a neighbouring flat that is being run in this way. The details are murky but it appears to be intentionally managed like this)
It's worth noting that this distinction between who technically isn't complying and who will actually get prosecuted is a big part of why people have such different feelings about GDPR. Some people are focusing on the difficulty of complying and the penalties that could be assessed; others are focusing on the unlikelihood of small, mostly-compliant, well-meaning operations being targeted.
Also worth noting, this kind of selective enforcement can absolutely be used in a harmful way or have unintended negative consequences. I'm just trying to point out why a jurisdiction might pass a law even if they don't expect anyone to abide by it.
"I have mixed feelings about the Japanese Airbnb news. On the one hand: does it seem like the optimal regulation? Probably not. On the other hand: my condo’s live-in supervisor had to update their “We will call police if we spot illegal tenants” policy with “Note: Patrick isn’t”"
(patio11 is that rare thing, a Western permanent resident of Japan, and has lots of tweets on the subject of how Japan combines legendary, genuine politeness with a system that excludes non-Japanese)
Classifying people into commercial and "sometimes" renters makes sense. If you want your business to be bigger, comply with more regulations.
This implies that rent should rise to meet nightly AirBnb rates, which has all sorts of implications ..
(Edinburgh is building housing, but lots of it is suburban low-density)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo#/media/...
^^ They're the green part of this map. The non-green part of this map is, technically correct is the best kind of correct, also Tokyo (administered under Tokyo-to as opposed to any other prefecture), but it's not core Tokyo.
(Akiruno-shi, for example, looks like this: http://www.bbqjp.com/portfolio/dainimizube/ )
The density of the 23 wards is ~twice that of Queens, which much of it being 3x. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo
With the correct numbers, Tokyo "23 wards" becomes 40 % higher than NY metropolis, and approximately the same as Brooklyn (~15000 / km2). I would still argue it is not as dense as many people think (e.g. people often don't think of Paris as super dense, even tough it is itself ~40 % higher density that Tokyo). Yes, the houses are small, but except for within the few central wards, there are not that many high rise buildings.
Technically correct but misleading; Queens is not especially dense. I dropped a pin at random in Queens:
https://goo.gl/maps/ULFor21SjXq
Here's a random pin-dropping in one of the 23 wards:
https://goo.gl/maps/Ah5kaMKvyLn
Roughly equivalent, I'd say, and not atypical for Tokyo. But compare to what most anyone would call a "dense" part of Manhattan:
https://goo.gl/maps/kKMgK4qZVcG2
HN people who talk about the "density" of Tokyo are picturing skyscrapers and block housing, but it's not an accurate picture. Having spent plenty of time in both cities, Tokyo is about as dense as the outer boroughs of New York, on average.
Otherwise, an increase in density might reduce airbnb's impact on rents, but at the cost of making airbnb even more annoying.
In Vancouver, condo towers are coming up like weeds, but it's not reducing the cost of living for anyone. People who already have money buy those condos, they rent them out at high prices so they can pay their mortgage, people have to rent them because there's nowhere else because literally no one is building rental housing, and so rents go up.
Rents go up, so property values go up because there's so much money in them, so people build more condo towers, and the cycle repeats.
The problem is that we have hundreds or thousands of speculators who got in early and have the real-estate wealth to leverage to purchase more real estate, but they're in it to make a short-term profit. They don't have the capital to set prices for the long-term, so they have to rent things out at pretty high prices.
Meanwhile, if we had purpose-built rental, you'd be looking at one building, one landlord, one set of rents, and a business with a long-term view rather than real estate speculators who are just holding onto a condo as long as they can before they can cash it out and retire (or leverage it to buy more).
Most the full-time airbnb places in my neighborhood seem to be vacant most the time. So I'm not sure it's a way to increase property utilization so much as it's a way for people who move out of town to cover the cost of hanging on to the property even though they're not really using it anymore, but without taking on the same legal obligations that renting the house to a full-time tenant would incur.
No amount of demand suppression will ever fix a supply issue. “We’re better off not building up housing infrastructure subsidized by short term leases and just trying to suppress any demand that changes the market clearing price”
Just market it as a holiday rental on dates corresponding to big London-based football matches, when people traveling might often pay hugely inflated nightly rates.
Maybe supplement during academic conferences or government events. In the right part of London and for a unit with the right amenities, you probably could still turn a net profit annually just on 90 days, and leaving it empty the rest.
Which would mean it could still negatively affect housing shortage issues and home prices, and still result in poorly behaved tourists nearby for 1/4 of the time.
Not sure whether it's a good solution or not. Mixed feelings about it.
I have pledged to never stay in an Airbnb, ever and tell my friends they shouldn’t rent a whole place either.
Your problem is actually zoning, not Airbnb: https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/affor...
> This may not be a popular opinion here but I totally understand the concern. There had been a huge increase in transient international visitors being introduced to residential areas that previously did not have to deal with that. Having a constant stream of strangers coming and going in your building is not something many residents feel comfortable with.
Also: > Also I just want to be sure to note to people: THESE LAWS APPLY TO ALL SHORT TERM RENTALS AND ARE NOT JUST FOR AIRBNB.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/JapanTravel/comments/8os3mv/minpaku...
IMO, there are certain advantages to regulating things at a higher level. It's easier for AirBNB to comply with one set of rules instead of many. An individual in Japan can take advantage of a single, well-written how-to guide instead of learning his or her local laws.
That being said, where I live, I made sure the HOA explicitly forbids AirBNB-style rentals.
More clearly: I don't think you should make an app like this illegal. The burden should be on the property owners, not on AirBnB. Or why not?
What other problems exist?
In some supreme court cases, justices have argued 'while I do not agree that this should be legal, it should be up to the states to legislate, not the federal government.'
The two major advantages I see for local legislation is 1) more-representative and more-direct democracy, and 2) value in allowing experimentation and competition of policy legislation...
I'm not so much making this up as I go, but these kinds of ideas are things I've read in American political history, and when I thought about it, decided I agreed with. Here, it seems to me like an obvious candidate for such line of thought... But I could be wrong, maybe you can convince me otherwise?
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/26/national/local-...
One very good thing about Japanese housing legislation is that it happens at the national level. It prevents a lot of issues you have in the United States.
The problem is that "spare" bedrooms (as Airbnb likes to call them) are far more lucrative used as short term tourist rentals than as a living space for kids, who cost a bundle and don't generally pay much in rent. The pitch Airbnb makes is that people have a spare bedroom lying' around and why not rent it out? But the thing is, people start to acquire properties with spare bedrooms for the purpose of having one to rent out - or entire housing units. When this proceeds apace, former communities - which in places like the French quarter are already primed to protect themselves from too much conversion into tourism stock - come to see Airbnb as an existential threat.
Even if the Airbnb guests are well behaved, this fundamental difference won't go away. Think of it this way: some people would like to trade their right to run a hotel out of their house in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't either. That means severely restricting Airbnb.
This! And: most of us thought we already had laws to that effect.
Also, even for the best-behaved guests I would not want to have regular AirBNB-ing in my building. There are young children and old people living here, and they deserve some presumption of safety, not just quiet.
(I do stay in AirBNBs myself sometimes, and I'm a very low-impact guest, but I recognize my opinion is a bit contradictory because of that.)
I realize you're talking about large cities, but it seems everyone else in this thread is as well and forgets that Airbnb operates well outside of large cities.
This doesn't seem like a plausible scenario. I highly doubt that Airbnb revenue from a spare bedroom is enough to offset the cost of the spare bedroom itself. Here in SF an extra bedroom easily adds 1K or more to the cost of an apartment. Between getting a 2 bedroom apartment and spending the time and effort to run a Airbnb in it, vs. having a 1 bedroom apartment and saving a lot of money without any extra effort it's hard to see people electing the former.
Most of the Airbnbs I've stayed in were vacation homes that the owners didn't live in most of the year, or families whose kids moved out.
I definitely think Airbnb should have the limitation that you can only rent out a place you actively live in.
Can we just have home-share for people that understand how to be good neighbors, pretty please?
Nice idea but, speaking from experience, it can work the other way around. I've stayed in a few AirBnB's where the neighbours have been arseholes.
Hosts also, on at least one occasion.
One might assume from my place of birth that I am a hillbilly, but decades of travel and living in various places domestically and abroad have mostly civilized me. I do occasionally have to correct myself however.
This is important because of privacy. If it says 2 bedrooms it should actually have 2 bedrooms. Not a one bedroom and a living room with a sofa.
The fact that AirBnb endorses this really speaks to the integrity at AirBnb which AFAICT is fairly low (have documented lots of other similar issues with them)
edit: Yes I know I didn't provide any specific examples and that this viewpoint will be foreign to those of you who go somewhere for vacation and think it seems nice (yes, that's the point, to seem nice enough to get you to spend your money here, that doesn't mean it's actually nice or nice for the people that live there).
Genuinely, resident building are so different from hotels I wonder how smooth it is for the residents to have random oversea people passing by even only 180 days a year, even if they are polite, well educated and well intended.
The hosts usually explained the rules how to sort the trash, including the removal the cap on the water bottles, and showed where to put the trash (on this random trash pile next to the building). Not sure about the balcony usage, but I'd would probably use common sense and not be yelling there or using it in the middle of the night. Also I don't smoke but seems as smoking goes, the rules were pretty liberal in Japan.
I don't see these being issues, if the host explains the customs, obviously you cannot expect that everyone knows all your countries rules. On a side not its interesting how many different ways there is to sort trash.
People just respect regulations and they generally do work very well.
In a lot of countries (80%+) taxi drivers are rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes.
Uber takes all of this away. The rating system ensures drivers are polite. The estimate € (plus route tracking) ensures they don't take the scenic route, and the fact that all payment happens via the app means there is no longer 'my meter is broken/the credit card reader is broken/sorry I miscalculated its €10 more'.
And because Uber is global I can use the same app wether I am in Paris, Prague, Hanoi or Seattle.. which means I don't need to install and learn 3 different apps.
Edit: to be clear, I am aware why Uber gets such a bad rep, and as a tech company they might deserve it, but as a taxi company they are absolutely top notch.
I have had every experience you explained with Uber. People driving me weird ways around my city to make the trip longer, rude, attempting to add a cleaning charge with no reason, or the classic "Hey if you cancel the ride and give me $10 I can get you there."
I called Uber 10 times, in Houston. Got scammed 5 times. Part of the "the driver just keeps driving and never acknowledges letting you out of the car" scam is that the app takes the same approach to "uh, I'm not in the car anymore" as it does to "uh, I would like to complain to Uber". (The way to say that the ride has ended is to cancel the trip, an operation that feels like you're trying to scam the driver, so an honest person will avoid doing that while searching for the nonexistent "the ride has ended" UI.)
4/5 scams: the driver goes past your position and then waits a mile down the road to pick you up. The moment the driver was near, Uber switches to "ok go get in the car" mode. It never switches out of it. If you cancel, rather than hike an unreasonable distance to catch the car that deliberately drove past you, then Uber charges you $5.
That's not my experience; I've complained three times over the years, and I always got my money back.
Just look: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=complain+to+uber
Or look at this article about Uber deliberately hiding a contact number "to test discoverability" (meaning: if users find it too easily, it should be made harder to find) https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/10/11196352/uber-secret-emer...
If you lucked out and found that your specific issue had a UI entry in the app, that's not the same thing as being able to explain a situation to a human and have that human do the (paid, drudge) work of wading through obscure interfaces to find the button that fixes a given problem.
What's wrong with that? It's just an offer that you're free to reject.
It is probably "privilege" as a big heavy white dude with a perpetually surly expression that I'm not alerting on "danger" in such a situation. If I were a different person I could totally imagine reporting the driver and trying to get him fired. People worry when getting in strangers' cars. Actually once in India I did get such a misdirected cab ride, but my Indian friend noticed and convinced the cab driver to stop. He chewed the driver's ass for a while, then we got another cab.
Made up percentages don't count as credible data, unless you can cite the objective and peer-reviewed analysis that demonstrates that over 80% of taxi drivers are "rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes," you're just trying to disguise your opinion as fact.
Which is fine, but just say what you mean - that you imagine most taxi drivers in most countries are probably rude.
There is little to no such data, but we can extrapolate from two things: 1. Uber, Lyft and co. would never have grown globally at such an astronomical rate (and eaten the taxi branch its lunch) if there wasn't a large demand for a 'clean' taxi experience, and 2. Wether you are aware of it or not, taxis and their drivers are one of the most oft complained about branches of industry. Seriously, ask 100 random people who have travelled internationally about their taxi experiences, and I guarantee you a large contingent will mention the same pain points I did.
On a sidenote, I did not 'try to disguise your opinion as fact'. Its a normal figure of speech, when you (and others) experience almost nothing but bad experiences with something you present it as 70/80/90% or 3/4 or 4/5th or whatever is 'bad'. Trying to shut that down with a quasi-strawman adds absolutely nothing to the discussion, except for appearing pedantic or combative.
> Which is fine, but just say what you mean - that you imagine most taxi drivers in most countries are probably rude.
Sans the imagine, considering I've traveled most of Europe, a lot of Asia, and a little bit of North America. Add in experiences from friends who have also been to those places and/or S. America, Australia, etc., then yeah.. a pattern starts to make itself clear.
That’s a dangerous assertion when Uber spent a sizable chunk of its investment money on promotions to make rides available at less than cost. Selling services below cost and competitors price is a way to gain market share that does not prove that your business model is in any way superior.
In my country the main selling points of the pirate-taxis (and they have been judged that by the courts) was a fare half the price.
They do that by skimping on things that real taxis need (by law), for example customer insurance (private insurances don't cover passengers, if they paid anything to drive with you), professional level drivers licenses, multiple yearly DMV checkups, sick pay to the drivers, maximum daily driving hours, taxes etc.. ...
We know for a fact (due to the court ordering Uber to give the data to them) that the biggest Uber earner in in Denmark took home just shy of 590 thousand dkk (93k USD) in a year. A real taxi needs to have revenue like that in a quarter to have any chance to survive...
I drive 50+ trips per year (mostly in Copenhagen, but also a few in other european cities) and sans 1 (one) slightly bad experience in the 5+ years, I don't see how the Ubers are better (other than cheaper). I took around 20 uber-rides until I went back to the taxis...
I do welcome the kick in the butt, that Uber gave the taxis, as multiple new taxi concepts have risen (all real, legal taxis btw).
But in my opinion, Uber was not even close to the top reason for the improvement you see. It was mobile navigation, more organized taxi companies, including internal rating systems and more often inspections, and job insecurity. Uber definitely helped with job insecurity. Personally I'd rather have a somewhat annoying driver that talks on hands-free the entire ride over a smiling quiet driver that can't make ends meet and his livelihood depends on a couple of ratings. There's a good compromise somewhere between the two ends but it's not like we weren't in the former end for a long time. Taxi licenses were extremely expensive, fares were extortionate and you got scammed immediately if you looked out of place.
It's easy to be top notch when you don't have to pay all the expenses you incur. By offloading all of their infrastructure costs onto their employees (that is, the cars and the phones), they can operate very cheaply. But it's not because the service is cheaper, it's because they're avoiding their bills.
"The average rate a cabbie paid to take a taxi out for a 12-hour shift climbed 11 percent, to about $85, between 1990 and 1993, based on the most recent figures available from the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission."
($85 in '93 is about $150 today)
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-d...
Pre-Uber New York City taxi cab story time!
Rewind lots of years. I am living on 30th & Madison. One of my roommates is an immaculately-dressed Brown graduate and young executive. Every few days, he makes an odd request of me: Can I hail him a cab? Why? Cab drivers routinely ignored his hails. The probable cause? He's black.
Add to that "busted" credit card readers, refusals to drop off outside Manhattan and cell phone use. (San Francisco, Paris and Las Vegas were similar.) Note: yellow cabs have become much better since Uber.
As you say, there are a lot of things to dislike about Uber as a tech company and I try not to use them. (And I don't actually use cabs/Uber/Lyft all that much in spite of doing a lot of travel.) But they've definitely made it easier for people to get around in many cities.
AirBnB's market, on the other hand, wasn't really broken even if the (legitimate) short-term rental agencies were more fragmented and less modern than they could have been.
Except when the regulations are inappropriate or protect the incumbents instead of promoting experimentation and innovation. There's a reason Japan is lagging behind in almost everything these days compared to its neighbors in Asia.
Problem is that fast changes in Japan has been associated with bursts of civilian violence. Pushing back what needs to be done until it's untenable is NOT a good strategy.
I think you can be right under some circumstances and wrong in others.
For such a strategy to be effective, what is required is for there to be a period of social / technological stability in the rest of the world. I believe that once the direction is clear, Japan's internal coherence allows it to forge ahead. Until that time though, they cannot figure out how to proceed, so they prefer to wait for clarity.
Definitely more Waterfall than Agile. Again, Waterfall remains the best methodology for some types of project.
But all of this is a vast generalisation. Even now, there are signs of adaptation.
Uber tried their shit with Quebec, then two drivers had their cars impounded and that was the end of that.
Lyft doesn't operate in Canada outside of Ontario. They added Ottawa as their second city in Canada earlier this year (https://blog.lyft.com/posts/coming-to-ottawa).
> hosts are required to register their listing and display a license number on their listing page by June 15th in order to stay active on our platform...
> Unfortunately, the Japanese government issued a sudden announcement on June 1st instructing any host without a license number to cancel upcoming reservations that were booked before June 15th–even though many of these hosts are actively engaged in the registration process or awaiting their license.
From: https://press.atairbnb.com/supporting-travelers-in-japan-aus...
Rules are followed in Japan. Allowing a grace period for unlicensed rentals was really fair of them.
Yes that’s the aggressive stance when 80% if units are at stake, but it’s Airbnb who is inconsiderate of renters here. They accepted reservations that were bound to be cancelled.
I have just read AirBNB’s response, stating that they ARE cancelling reservations, in a rolling 10-days-out fashion.
The linked [cntraveler.com] article is wrong. So, paulsutter is right, it is disingenuous for AirBNB to have allowed those bookings knowing the law would go into effect on June 15th.
And I personally am screwed, crap.
Leaving original for posterity
[pre-Edit]:
Huh? Did you read the article?
They specifically say that existing reservations are not cancelled.
Good thing for me, too, because I have three different existing AirBNBs booked in Japan after June 15th.
It's hard to get public support of law breaking when your solution is just incrementally better than the existing system.
I am not disturbed by double parkers or jaywalkers. I was disturbed by unit 4F and 7B's weekly round of "drunk Europeans screaming in the hallway at 3AM".
Cities are going to regulate out the concept of people buying apartments purely to wholly rent them out 100% of the time on Airbnb. This is a very significant portion of Airbnb revenue.
I have trouble seeing how Airbnb's valuation isn't going to have to be scaled back when big parts of their business are regulated out of existence.
They are not interested in strong control over either users or landlords, for they need more and more users - but the laxer the rules are and the more people are using their service, the harder cities and residential areas will fight against it.
Probably an equilibrium could've been found not for the new and lawless startup culture fueled by their own hubris.
If every single person had a cheap plot of land and a cheap house on it, then loud neighbors wouldnt be as much of a problem.
I am a budget traveler and low income remote worker and I really am glad I got to slide in before airbnb got shafted. It's a shame that I now have to choose between hostels and overpriced hotels, when I prefer the AirBnB experience. I met friends my age, got to see a side of Japan outside of tourist spots, and learned what it's like to just live in a normal house here without some exchange program or school. Without AirBnB I would not have been able to visit this unique country! RIP!
When you have a family of five, hotels add up fast (it was hard even finding a hotel room that would allow 4, forget 5).
Still, there are always ryokan. Not quite the same as "living native" but somewhere in between that and the expensive Western hotel.
A great business, but if you live in a block with constant travellers then I guess it can get super annoying fast.
If I can rent out 12 months at $1,000 (= $12k), vs 150 / 200 days at $150 (= $22.5-30k) then as a property owner you have a decision to make. Short term lets are more work, but more profitable.
They'll likely not care it stays empty, because it's to be expected that on some dates and months it will not be rented out.
Often the solution the the problem is that you start buying the properties rather than renting them, which means profits per unit will be (much) higher (but you will also need additional capital to support that). Or you buy an entire block with 5 or 10 apartments; then there should be no complaints.
Sure, if a society thinks they cause more harm than good, by all means, ban them, but that's a different argument.
> And you're clearly not a landlord if you think it involves no effort.
The person described in the original post isn't a landlord.
Why? What am I missing?
While on the whole, I definitely can see the argument that AirBnB needs more regulation, in this particular case it seems more like a classic case of "established players using the law to shut out competition" than "creating regulations to curb some of the issues created by AirBnB".
You don't.
If the apartment next to me ended up being an airbnb spot here in Japan, I'd do whatever I could to either get the renter evicted or move out. I have too much experience with people having zero self-awareness when they come to Japan, and I couldn't possibly deal with having new people coming in twice a week and trying to explain that yes, you are indeed noisy as fuck, and yes, people actually don't party 24/7 in this country because some people do work.
If it wasn't for AirBnB's abundant selection of places and prices it would have been near-impossible to get those kind of experiences (and new friends and countless other random things).
More power to them. But why should we use violence means against peaceful people?
I think this guy is one of those hyper-libertarians who equates government regulation with violence.
Pacifist, anarchist, libertarian call it whatever you will; at the end of the day you are supporting a system where peaceful people will either be imprisoned or have their property stolen if you don't do what men with guns tell you to do.
The government is great place to balance competing interests, especially if it's more democratic.
> And “Everything will be cheaper by limiting people the ability to trade”
That's missing the point. The goal with regulations like these isn't to make things "cheaper," but to control negative externalities. There's more to life than the price of goods.
Unfortunately, prices are easy to quantify and that fact irresistibly draws certain kinds of people blind themselves to all non-quantitative observations and engage in the McNamara fallacy.
Seeing as the proponents -- of regulations regarding who can trade what with whom -- first cited issue is "Affordability", categorically, yes, these regulations are about making things "cheaper".
>The government is great place to balance competing interests, especially if it's more democratic.
How successful has the US government been at balancing trillion dollar bailouts for the banking/political class and endless wars of murder? Building a system where the minutia of liberty can be taken away with a stroke of a pen unless millions of dollars are spent lobbying the political class is not what I'd call a "great place to balance competing interests".
> How successful has the US government been at balancing trillion dollar bailouts for the banking/political class and endless wars of murder? Building a system where the minutia of liberty can be taken away with a stroke of a pen unless millions of dollars are spent lobbying the political class is not what I'd call a "great place to balance competing interests".
It's not very promising to start a conversation by ignoring the actual circumstances under discussion, so you can get on your hobby-horse to rail against your favored straw men.
So, as a helpful reminder, we're talking about a specific set of Japanese regulations meant to help people who are annoyed because they never chose to live next to a hotel room. We're not talking about hotel costs and we're certainly not talking about US bank bailouts.
So to summarize you: rights are not inalienable but dependent on if people get annoyed.
Do you see how philosophically weak that position is? Should Muslims be deported because the US government finds them annoying and people 'never chose to live next door to them'? Rights must be grounded in something other than 'popular opinion'.
I'd rather live in a world where I simply have to buy/rent in an HOA which everyone signs a contract stating that we will abide by XYZ rules rather than one where we have to rely on the threat of murderous government.
Government's proposition to you is: Let me kill whomever I want and I'll make your life marginally better. I find it ethically unconscionable to benefit so marginally at the expense of someone else's life.
You're not being reasonable, but rather reading your own straw men into what I wrote.
Based on your misunderstandings, I can pretty confidently say that "rights" are a lot more complicated and multifaceted than you seem to comprehend. There are more kinds of rights relevant here than just property ownership rights and those created through contracts.
To put it another way: these Japanese regulations can be thought of as an articulation of preexisting rights that hadn't previously been codified.
I'm just going to ignore all the ridiculous hyperbole in the rest of your comment, because it's not worth a response. You seem enchanted by an over-simple toy mental model of society (with an admittedly seductive simplicity), and angry that it's not normative in a world that's too complex for it to fit.
I don’t need you to realize rights are inalienable but you do need to me to believe that submitting to oppression does bestow rights to me or else your framework falls apart.
You are being unreasonable. You seem to be unable to imagine things except from the POV of a person who wants to rent out an apartment as an AirB&B, which may be the root of your unreason.
Anyway, this thread is dead and you seem immune to the insight that what you seem see as an "inalienable right" (turning an apartment into a dedicated AirB&B) might actually be an oppression on others. It's pointless to continue.
I'm glad you're not my neighbor, and I'm glad there's government to keep you from being too much of an inconsiderate asshole if you were.
Property owners: OMFG! it's the end of the world, what about my property prices!