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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> Airbnb has lost its fucking head. Why would I donate to my host? I can't even afford one house.

Well, at least it sounds like many of those hosts can't, either.

Other articles of this topic mentioned this titbit:

> The financial situation is especially dire for megahosts, some of whom bought up dozens of properties and built short-term-rental empires that made up their main source of income (about one-third of Airbnb hosts have more than 25 properties, according to the analytics site AirDNA).

https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-asking-renters-to-don...

Now where did I put my tiniest violin...

Right? And a 3rd of them? That's a lot of people.. think of all the properties and inflated rents in areas where people could have gotten long term homes.

My rent has doubled in the past four years, largely because or AirBnB's "oh this is just regular housing with a spare rented room", so I have zero sympathy for them.

That's your fault for living in a beautiful Mediterranean city...

How could I have been so foolish!

It's called investing. Investing is another name for risking. Those people risked. Atm they are losing. In future they might gain. Heck, for years before that they were gaining big time.

Unless they have a very strong lobby (such as bankers, etc) they cannot make anyone else pay for their loss. And that's how it's supposed to be.

The attitude of many people towards property is incredible. People expect house prices to rise and rise and somehow think they've been wronged by society/government policy/acts of god if the bubble bursts and they lose money. I've been called out by many ordinarily level headed people for saying that owning property is a risky investment.

It isn't just property but also jobs and industries. Look at the vastly disproportionate amount of tears for coal miners. That feeling seems to apply to any way to make a living that they react hostility to being told is risky. Because everything is an investment and everything is a risk including not taking one.

I suspect it has to do with Calvinism essentially and the religious fixation of work as righteous and a guarantee such that anything going wrong is "bad things happening to good people" and a fundamental sign that things Aren't Right and Someone is to blame.

Actually, quite a few people (including myself) believe there is a vast gulf between doing actual work and making money off of the people doing actual work - aka investing in property (especially to rent it out) or stocks. I have little sympathy for people who get hosed doing the latter, but a great deal for the former.

There's no doubt coal miners have been used nihilistically as a political tool to conjure the aesthetic of being attached to the honest, hard-working underclass. Still they (and other workers who have been displaced) deserve support. It is very easy to diversify investments. Extremely difficult to diversify skills needed for a career.

I'd rather live in a society that held work as righteous rather than idleness. It seems to be a problem currently that we're paying many workers more to stay home than they'd normally make on the job, and their personal attitudes towards work are not enough to overcome this inverse monetary incentive. As Musk put it, the economy is not just a free flowing cornucopia of "stuff" that everyone has to squabble over. You gotta make "stuff".

Coal miners, to switch careers, probably have to uproot their lives, move to another state, and take a much lower paying job. It seems obvious why they'd resent being told to do that. Lucky for me software is going pretty good, but if you told me I had to go install solar panels on a roof in Scottsdale tomorrow I might be upset.

If someone makes less money working than they do on unemployment, the problem isn't that the unemployment payment is too generous, it's that their wages are too low.

"Someone makes less money working than they do on unemployment" isn't enough information to figure out which one is out of whack.

In a pandemic, incentivizing people to stay home instead of working is exactly what we should be doing.

100% this. Buying and renting a property (even just one) is a business venture. It is no more guaranteed to make you a profit than, say, opening a restaurant or starting your own plumbing business. Yet one frequently hears landlords talking as if something must obviously be wrong with the system if they are not making a profit.

Is there some way I could solicit the megahosts for a donation?

Seriously, my rent has nearly doubled because of these megahosts picking up properties all over my city and turning them into flop houses.

This didn't sound right to me, and it looks like they've indeed corrected that line in the article.

> (about one-third of Airbnb properties are owned by hosts who manage at least 25 properties, according to the analytics site AirDNA).

This makes more sense.

They get to hold on to them for now though, and get to take their sweet time waiting for the process to work itself through the courts, and then get to shuck off most of the debt in bankruptcy (which some can probably avoid personally by incorporation), so that's not too bad.

Really interested in being corrected if I'm wrong about any of the above.

s/hosts/speculator/

If you're that leveraged, it simply becomes a gamble which might or might not pay off.

Anecdotally, I know a number of people who started by renting out their basement on Airbnb, and then made so much money off of it that they bought another house, which they pay the mortgage on by renting out the entirety of their original house.

I believe this. I’ve paid $100 a night before to rent a basement converted to a 2bed in-law unit (which was still the most economical option given the number of people/location). $3k/month is nothing to sneeze at

Maybe I should create an Aibnb for Airbnb hosts?

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