Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

It enabled whole masses of people to rent their properties out, something they maybe haven't even considered before, be it due to social stigma or technical difficulties, with relatively strong protections of a major corporation behind it. Previously if you wanted to rent an apartment out in a small rural town in Poland, you could.....print some fliers? Buy an ad in a newspaper? Massive pain in the ass basically. But thanks to AirBnb lots of people were able to do it with relative ease, at a benefit to them and those staying in the area. If that isn't benefit to a society then it's only because of a definition of either benefit or society that you picked.

View on HN

People rented out holiday cottages long before Airbnb existed, even long before the internet. There were sections in classified listings in newspapers, and later specialised websites.

Yes. This has nothing to do with holidays though. I'm thinking a mid-size town where the only attraction is a local coal mine - the only hotel option was an old post-soviet hotel where you'd only stay if you absolutely had to. But even if it's not a holiday destination people still have to stay short term occasionally - be it for work or for things like weddings, funerals etc. Not that long ago finding a place to stay that wasn't the mentioned dingy hotel was very hard to do, nowadays there's always at least a few listings on AirBnB so you can stay somewhere that it's a dump.

I always think it's amusing that people assume that before the internet nothing like this could possibly have been done.

Here's how it worked before the internet: You the property owner would engage a local estate agent [realtor] and they would find tenants for your property. There were both short and long term rentals. Most of the time it would be rented out to someone local. But if someone from another country wanted to do a short term rental, they would contract a company who would have a presence in the foreign country and would in turn be able to contact local estate agents by telephone, get particulars sent through the mail or fax (or if it was really urgent, read out on the phone), and these would find their way back to the prospective tenant.

Sure it's not as smooth as clicking on a website, but it was still a thing that was done.

(In fact these intermediary companies still exist and are still used especially by businesses that want a full service and don't want to deal with the randomness of Airbnb. I knew someone who worked in a Japan-England company back in the 90s http://www.redacstrattons.com/)

Counterpoint: This increased short-term rental market in a lot of cities displaces long-term renters who were priced out...and this disproportionately affects the poor who can't afford to buy property.

Indeed thats true but with the same logic you could blame companies and public offices for having their offices in the city center.

Airbnb are helping the little guy overcome social stigma?

You couldn't misrepresent the effect on regular working people more.

What do you mean?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com