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Comment by pokstad | Hacker News Reader

> Coincidently I have been seeing a lot of fully furnished units coming on the market which I assume were former Airbnbs.

Wow. Does anyone have an estimate of the cost of living increase caused by Airbnb rentals?

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specifically, it's the tourists causing the cost increase. airBnb is just the facilitator. if they weren't going to airbinb they would've gone to hotels or people renting out their apartments.

Conjecture. AirBnB's are generally below market rate for hotels which brings more people in than you'd have otherwise gotten.

This has not been true in any major market for years, once you factor in all the fees that AirBnB doesn't disclose until you book a listing.

Once fees are included, AirBnB is usually more expensive in markets like SF, LA, or NY for individual/couple listings than a comparably furnished hotel room (inclusive of fees).

This is not true at all, I regularly rent Airbnbs in major American cities for less than a quarter of what a basic hotel room would cost in the same location. The AirBnbs are a lot larger and nicer too.

It gets even better when you split the cost with people. I can get a full, nice house in a great location in LA for a little over $200 a night all in and split it with 5 friends. I would have to get a hotel penthouse for the experience to be even close.

And yes, the fact that it's so cheap does significantly increase the appetite for weekend trips for people my age. The housing part of the trip goes from a major expense to almost an afterthought.

Have you seen SF hotel rates during convention season? The most basic rooms go for $3-400. Have you tried to book a Paris hotel in summer? In my experience your statement is not true

Have you tried to book an AirBnb during a marathon? The most basic room goes for $200/night, before you add in the "cleaning" fees or the "service fees" or the other "fees" that hotels are required by law in their original quotes.

If they were going to hotels, they wouldn't cause rent increases in residential properties... that's kind of the point..

Really looking forward to overleveraged airbnbers, the kinds juggling 10 mortgages and causing housing shortages, to get blackswanned.

I wonder why people renting their cars on Turo(or buying cars to do so) aren't causing car shortages? Oh yeah, because there aren't the artificial constraints on supply there is on housing. Let's focus on the problem and not wish ill on those trying to provide a useful service to others.

It’s a service which even if being operated in compliance with local laws has a negative cost to the rest of the neighborhood through higher issues with noise, trash, parking, etc. There are reasons why hotels aren’t spread randomly around cities.

Living around people at any density has the same costs. Living in a city should have an implied contract that you will have these issues as costs, with numerous other things coming as benefits.

The issues of noise, trash, parking etc should be made to be internalized by those that bring the nuisance. There are noise laws, littering laws, and parking ordinances. Maybe adjustments are appropriate in some cases.

At the end of the day, anti-AirBnB laws are about control over your neighbor. The same things were said about home offices for years (and still are in some localities). The problem is, you can always point to antecdata to support your point, but we should be looking at individual violators of reasonable laws that uphold health and safety in a neighborhood - not using a blunt instrument to snuff out all new uses of property that come about because you don't like it.

> artificial constraints on supply there is on housing

I mean this sounds good and all, but in practice property owners are at the forefront of restrictive zoning regulations too.

And that is also wrong, and unjust in my opinion. When buying property, you gain a bundle of rights over the described property deeded to you. Not an infinite set of positive rights over the whole range of human activities that occur within some geographic radius around it.

Nope--they're taking units out of housing supply, demand remains the same, so prices adjust up.

> it's the tourists causing the cost increase

Ok, show me where the tourists do this without a landlord enabling it. If AirBnb didn't exist, would tourist just sleep in the park?

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