Airbnb host ordered to pay £100k of unlawful profits after letting council flat

Westminster council has a form to report potentially unauthorised short term letting:

https://www.westminster.gov.uk/nightly-letting-complaints-fo...

(It's not specific to council housing; if it's specifically council housing as opposed to the developer just agreeing to let it at a reduced rate, then they'll take an even dimmer view on it; if it's the developer or some management company then it's worth contacting them as well as it may impact their insurance etc.)

Pick up the phone and ring your local council right now - they all seem to have a different approach to this, but the person on the other end of the phone will have the answer for you. They will be very interested in the outcome of this.

Isn't it a good thing if there are lodgers in social housing? It means more people being housed, without the council having to do anything to make it happen.

I think we all had high hopes for the "Sharing Economy". But instead we ended up with a "Sharing But Not Caring Economy". Giant corporations trying to create a monopoly with any means possible.

I think ultimately it is up to regulators to determine how to deal with these companies / platforms. They are legal entities and can be targeted, unlike open source software projects and protocols.

I can add a lot of opinions as to if these companies are a net positive or negative, but overall the regulators have a disproportionate amount of firepower compared to these companies. Airbnb first time offense for Miami Beach is $20,000 and doubles after that. All of these companies know that, and it is why they so aggressively fight the regulatory side.

Uber certainly got a lot of tailwinds due to regulatory capture backlash from local cab companies. Airbnb, to some extent because of dislike or outright unavailability of hotels. Some markets were much healthier and well regulated than others pre-Uber/ Airbnb. Some hotel/transport markets were a disaster.

In summary, if the regulatory frameworks are crafted in the right way, for whatever the given market is, everyone is better off save for previously well entrenched business. I’m not sure there is actually enough talent, globally, to accomplish that on a individual local market level.

"Socialize the costs, privatize the revenue."

Sounds like most industries actually, where externalities are passed on to society. E.g. resource extraction.

Zone 1 - zone 2/3 is not bad, but what actually happens is people are moved from zone 1 to some random town 40 miles away (because it's WAY cheaper to do that).

These people don't have cars, they are the least well off people in our society, often physically, mentally and materially. Their entire support system, friends, family etc. are ripped up from beneath them. They end up never rejoining the economy and the cycle continues.

These are people so we can't just shift them where we want to.

Here's an example from Zone 1:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/residents-of-the-heyg...

These people OWNED their flats, they were compulsory purchased from them at ridiculously low rates, demolished and replaced with luxury flats. The only option for these people was to move from their 2 bed flat to a new studio or leave London.

Some of the most expensive places in London are outside Zone 1 (Hampstead, Richmond, Kensington, West Brompton, Wimbledon, etc.). Also creating a high density of social housing aka ghettos is not desirable for any city in the world and those who have it have big problems because of it. London has huge inequality problems, but the fact that you can have a millionaires road only 5 minutes away from a council estate has the advantage that social issues are not just being ignored and brushed under the carpet by forcing people as far away as possible, it creates more diverse and accepting communities, it ensures that people from all different fortunes have access to nice parks, good transport links (which are even more important for people who are on low income), etc.

The large council estates in the UK often were an attempt at pushing poor people out to cheaper areas in many cases. Even in zone 1 most of the council estates that still exists are there because those areas were cheap, deprived, often bombed out hellholes in the post war years, and so were a convenient place to build cheap council housing.

It's just that they've now become desirable locations.

Continuing to move people out whenever an area becomes desirable is a deeply anti-social and very much temporary solution, and creates the new issue of dealing with the fact that a lot of the jobs are in the centre and a lot of the people who need this housing can't afford to get to them if they need anything more expensive than a bus pass.

Renting public (housing) apartment.

renting a subsidized apartment

Council flats are like "government subsidized living". Letting it out (aka renting it out), is taking money from the government, intended to help you shelter your family, and using it to turn a profit.

A "council flat" would be an apartment which is owned by the local government. The person who the council thought was living there was essentially sub-leasing it to people through Airbnb which is against the lease rules.

Renting out public housing

A council flat is an apartment rented as part of a socialized housing scheme to low-income households. Usually the rent is much much much lower than renting on the free housing market. Sub-letting is usually explicitly forbidden when you are part of one of these schemes.

People have mentioned public housing, but it's probably more like renting out an apartment that has rent control (where there's a limit on how much the rent is allowed to increase each year). "Public housing" in the US has a connotation of being blocks of apartments/flats that are all managed by a government entity, where rent controlled units may be almost anywhere.

Could also be like Section 8 housing where I believe the landlord gets part of the rent from the government and part from the tenant (disclaimer: never lived in any of these, I could be wrong on details)

In this case the issue was outright fraud: They got a council flat that is meant to provide subsidized housing for people who generally can not afford private housing, and profited from it against the terms of his rental agreement.

But in the general case, I keep arguing the same. In the UK there's a very strong trend to focus on landlords and foreign buyers leaving housing empty, or cases like in this article, but when you dig into it, it makes up a tiny proportion of properties.

The government has contributed to pushing the focus to these types of things, even though e.g. all empty properties in the UK being filled would maybe cover ~6 months of demand (and you can't fill all of them - most are empty for things like refurbishments or during a sale; very few are left intentionally empty for long periods of time). I doubt AirBnB demand would add up to more than a rounding error either. But it's a convenient excuse, and much cheaper than to drive higher growth in construction.

The UK definitely needs more overall housing capacity, and there is plenty of land which is not built on. Although I don't think this is the issue here, where the area is already full of dense residential and commercial buildings.

Subsidised housing in such areas is an effort to resist displacement and social change caused by gentrification. Permitting subletting of such housing turns the subsidy into no more than a monetary benefit, which fails to stop the unwanted demographic changes the government is aiming to prevent.

> Build more housing capacity. An increased supply of housing could support both long term housing and legal Airbnb rentals.

I keep hearing "build more housing", but I'm having a hard time seeing how it can help on its own, if housing is primarily bought up by people playing investment schemes, and people who want to rent it out. It wouldn't have to just outpace population growth, it would have to outpace the ability to rent flats at a profit, in order to dry out the pool of investors and let regular people have a chance at buying a place to live.

> "Anti-fraud software had found Harman's first name in reviews and connected the listing to him."

Pretty interesting to me...

> "It's illegal for council tenants to sublet their homes and we carry out tenancy checks, as well as monitoring short-term letting websites for any potential illegal sublets."

Also pretty interesting to me... it's nice to see that the councils in London are using their own technological advances to fight illegal activity like this!

so she lost nothing. good for her, bad for the rest of us.

others can do the same, at worst, you lose your profits.

The source article (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tenant-fined-100-000-and-...) states that the council also have a possession order, meaning the host is also losing their home.

If A is getting subsidized housing they’re earning taking others’ taxes and profiting from it. I’d say they’re not entitled to the subsidy in that case.

It's because the housing is highly subsidised by the government, in an attempt to prevent gentrification pushing low income people out of the area, breaking up their communities, changing the ethic makeup of the community and other such social issues.

The government does not want the limited number of subsidised spaces to go to people who are happy to move away from the area and receive the market value of renting the place. This effectively results in the government granting them an income, and the social problems continuing, where a space would otherwise have been available for somebody else.

I think the issue here is scarcity. There's waiting lists for most council housing.

The whole idea of council housing is that the state provides you housing because you can't provide your own. If they're renting out theirs, where are they living? They apparently don't actually have a need, else they'd be living in it. So they're profiteering off housing that someone in need is still on the waiting list for.

(I'd be tempted to agree with you if they were renting out their couch; the screenshot shows "Entire home/flat; 3 guests")

It is illegal and immoral. You have requested a government subsidised flat because you need it and would not be able to afford one otherwise. The government has determined, after some research, yes you do need one of their flats. If you’re subletting it then it’s obvious you don’t need it. You’re staying elsewhere, someone is paying you to stay in your place, and the long list of people who really need it remains full.