Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

In many cities apartments are normally owned through some kind of co-op with a board that decides things. If that’s the case then I wouldn’t buy one in a building that allows more than temporary subletting. This is the case at least in Sweden, i.e it’s pretty hard to buy-to-let, and that’s normally a good thing (also for price stability).

View on HN

That's actually really interesting to me!

Here in Switzerland (once again, sorry for being generally mixed up with Sweden), most buildings are owned by investment funds, life insurance companies, banks, etc..

So the exact opposite of what you describe happens - to maximize profits at close to zero risk. Cities are having a really hard time keeping a lid on companies that restructure whole buildings to use as short-time rentals.

I’m only talking about buildings that are owned by the tenant now, not flats for rent. Rented flats are usually too hard to come by to make a business of subletting them.

unfortunately people list units where it's not allowed as well.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-airbnb-covert-l...

A lot of people on my floor did that when I lived in a 6000 sek/month 1 room flat outside Stockholm that required me to be an active student and still required 5 years of being in the queue for apartments which you can't sign up for until age 18.

It was impossible to study most days because of kids to illicit renters running around screaming and biking in the corridors.

Couldn't you ring the bell of suspect apartments, verify the presence of illicit renters and call the police? Aren't there fines or worse for the owner?

> and call the police

But it's just a civil agreement between property owners, isn't it? Is breaking that civil agreement a criminal matter that needs police attention?

At least in the US civil and criminal law are two totally different things.

Right, as in most places, so why would you involve the police in a civil matter?

In the US it's usually a city or county ordinance we're talking about, which can be criminal. Some cities have some kind of code enforcement officers to handle those cases, but a lot of the time this is handled by the police.

Yes, the landlord should be contacted because of a breach of contract. Not the police

> verify the....

Lost you there, how exactly? I live in one of these buildings. They can just tell you they are relatives or housesitters, then what?

I’m sure a significant number of people would just say they booked on AirBnB straight up. Especially if it’s multiple apartments, and there are many, many different people coming and going. You can also find the listing on AirBnB itself. This should be sufficient evidence to do whatever you need to.

You can't use the police to enforce policies set by the apartment company. It needs to not only be breaking the rules but also laws (which is hard to do disturbance-wise during daytime)

I think you are working on assumptions. You shouldn't.

If a person in a building that is not Airbnb-able, trust me, they will tell their tenants to say these things. I have experienced it myself in several Airbnbs i have stayed in.

No go for the police. Owner has disturbance staff but evicting people takes ages and they seemed to not work very hard on that, still getting that rent income so it's no difference to them.

These people are going to be gone before any eviction procedure, but the owner can be punished for each instance of subletting.

What's the police going to do? How would you "verify the presence of illicit renters"?

My impression is that this form of apartment ownership ("bostadsrätt") is uncommon outside of the Nordic countries.

It is, but I think various forms of condo associations also exist in the US? The question is of course how far reaching their power is, e.g when it comes to violating rules of the association when subletting on Airbnb, can they be “evicted” (the property sold etc)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com