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Comment by varunsrin | Hacker News Reader

I always found AirBnB's model based on a surprising amount of trust - I for one would never be comfortable just handing over they keys to my place to a total stranger.

Even if they didn't ransack my place completely, as happened to the unfortunate author - I would be concerned about unintentional damage to my property that I might not discover till too late. Renting out something as private as my primary place of residence just seems like a generally bad idea, especially when I am not around to constantly check in on it. Even if I got to meet them, and they seemed like nice people whats to stop them from leaving without paying if they accidentally broke my TV ?

As the service expands, and becomes more craigslist-y (in terms of audience) I can only see problems like this getting worse, and apart from implementing some kind of guest / host rating system (like ecommerce portals do with sellers) I see no clear solution to the problem.

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As the service expands, regular people's homes (with unrestorable personal value and charm) will be replaced with commercial properties using airBnB as just another advertising channel. When that happens the fresh appeal will be gone and airBnB will be successful if they have become popular and stable enough that an airBnB listing is mandatory for people in the property management business.

I hope this happens soon.

The risk/reward trade-offs don't seem to be understood by most AirBnB landlords (99.99% chance of earning $100, 0.01% chance of losing $50k+). Even though this is strongly positive expected value, for a family that can't afford to lose $50k this is a game of russian roulette.

My heart goes out to the author of this; I hope the person who did this to her is put in jail, and the system (AirBnB) that enabled that person prevents landlords who can't afford the financial & emotional risk from listing properties going forward.

This is one those places where laws make sense to me; the average person needs to be protected from unknowingly gambling with their family's future.

> This is one those places where laws make sense to me; the average person needs to be protected from unknowingly gambling with their family's future.

What kind of laws do you suggest?

At the very least requiring theft/fire/vandalism insurance for people renting out their home.

Also interesting: limiting vacation rentals to accredited investors.

(edit: and requiring places like AirBnB to verify those requirements before you can list with them)

Why don't you start a business that offers competitive insurance packages to people who want to use airBnB (and similar products) instead of demanding a law that obviously would have a lot of unwanted side effects on people who _do_ know about the risks they are taking by entering this business?

Protective laws have very high hidden costs. These costs are hard to quantify and routinely are neglected when discussing pros and cons of said laws.

Are you against requiring car insurance to drive? (another situation with a small chance of a large loss that most people can't afford)

If yes, please explain why. If not, please tell me what's different here. I'm genuinely confused why you said what you said.

Usually the only insurance you're required to have is for damage you do to others, not your own car. You're allowed screw yourself over.

But if the driver who hits my car can't afford insurance or the repairs for my car, then the other driver has screwed me over.

Car insurance is different, because it also covers damages you inflict on others and other people's property.

I am speaking out against mandatory insurance of your own property. Yes, there will be cases where people are underinsured. But mandatory insurance would make some people overinsured. There is a long argument to be made for balancing this tradeoff, but in short: Owners are in a better position to judge whether they should insure their property than lawmakers and thus it should be up to them (again: as long as their property doesn't have a high probability of damaging other people; in such cases mandatory insurance might be reasonable).

It's very easy for younger smart people to be anarcho-capitalists (which I take it you are), but IMHO becomes progressively harder as you age.

The basic problem is that a "people know what's best for themselves" policy screws over dumb people for the simple reason that they don't.

Car insurance is a very interesting thing to legislate, because although the expected value of buying insurance is slightly negative, when you factor in the economies of scale on dealing with someone else's car getting repaired (figuring out if a bill is over market, handling multiple bills, tracking any medical expenses, etc), purchasing car insurance is strongly positive EV.

I think landlord insurance is similar.

>> Car insurance is different, because it also covers damages you inflict on others and other people's property.

Landlord insurance of course also covers this (if your property catches fire while you're renting it out, you may very well be legally responsible, if a previous renter breaks in and steals the new renters belongings you are probably legally responsible, etc).

Regardless, it seems based on what you said that you might be in favor of requiring renters to buy insurance. Is this correct?

No. I wasn't even making an argument for mandatory car insurance. I was merely pointing out the difference to mandatory property insurance and said that this difference _might_ be the basis for a convincing argument in favor of the former.

Rental property insurance is not a brand new idea.

Probably not worth to be codified as a law, after all, some may choose to bypass it, but other than that there are plenty of companies selling it (vacation properties and rentals existed long before AirBnB), and AirBnB could benefit from linking to those vendors.

Of course. I didn't mean to say that she/he should actually start an insurance company. I wanted to point out that there are market-incentives that might motivate someone to offer such a service without the need for a law.

That split seems wrong. There seems to be no deterrent to the type of behavior the author experienced, so it would seem that everyone with an inkling will try to steal the renter's identity. I'd estimate that population to be 1-3% of people, which implies the expected value is strongly negative

I think you are dramatically overstating the risk at 0.01%. Suppose past performance predicts future results. AirBnB has had, what, 10 million rental deals? And this has only happened, as far as we can tell, once. That's not an 0.01% risk. It's more like 0.000001%.

Overstating the risk by a factor of ten thousand is a very substantial exaggeration.

It's hard for human beings to understand very large and very small numbers, so to put that in context, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_traffic_safety says about ten people are killed per billion vehicle kilometers in most developed countries, so perhaps five people per billion passenger kilometers. So you have a one in ten million chance of getting killed by riding about twenty kilometers in a car.

Surely you would not advocate making laws to "protect" "the average person" "from unknowingly gambling with their family's future" by traveling tens of kilometers by car, thus possibly orphaning their children?

> I think you are dramatically overstating the risk at 0.01%.

Perhaps, but the chance of losing >$100 one way or another (negligence, accidents, outright theft) is going to be a lot greater than 0.01% anyway.

Update: Airbnb's new post http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/on-safety-a-word-from-airbn... says "undermined what had been – for 2 million nights – a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good." If I take that to mean that 2 million nights had been booked via Airbnb to date, then I underestimated the (frequentist) risk by a factor of around 350: 2 million nights are only a quarter of a million weeks, so this is a one-in-a-quarter-million chance, 0.00035% rather than 0.000001%. Also, my original figure, "It's more like 0.000001%," was wrong; that would have been one in a hundred million, not one in ten million. And the original "0.01%" was an overestimate by only about a factor of 300, not ten thousand.

So the risk of this happening to you is not like the risk of dying by traveling 20 kilometers by car, but more like the risk of dying by traveling 700 kilometers by car.

(Of course that's assuming that past performance is some kind of a guide to future results. It could be that all kinds of tweakers are going to get on Airbnb now and trash things that one of their friends has had a taste, or it could be that future people thinking of doing this kind of thing will be deterred by the rapid arrest of the apparent culprit in this case.)

>will be replaced with commercial properties

They won't be replaced, just added to. Many travelers prefer the local flavor to some sterile hotel.

> As the service expands, regular people's homes (with unrestorable personal value and charm) will be replaced with commercial properties using airBnB as just another advertising channel.

This could happen (especially if people get scared off by one-in-a-million crimes like this one) but it isn't economically rational. The marginal cost of having someone stay in your spare bedroom is often very small, even negative. This is never the case for commercial hotels.

I would go as far as to say that commercial hotels only exist at all because of an information deficiency: on the traveler's side, about the available spare bedrooms, and on the host's side, about the trustworthiness of the traveler. (Except in exceptional cases, say, Gualeguaychú, which has enormous tourism, dwarfing the city's population for a few weeks a year, and nothing the rest of the time. But I still stayed in a spare room with some random family I met on the street when I went there for Carnaval, not in a hotel.)

It occurs to me that the people with the strongest incentives to trash someone's apartment like this would be hotel owners and managers. Many of them might not be willing or able to do it themselves, but they could certainly hire someone else.

Same here. I'd be more than willing to use the service as a customer, but as a host? Never. If you're a customer the worst of the worst than can happen is you lose the rental fee and have to find a hotel. As a host, the worst that can happen is this.

No, the worst that could happen is the host is a psycho who wants to murder / rape / take nude pics of you without you knowing.

There's a reason hotels exist, and there's a reason why it's a bad idea to hitch-hike, or even worse, stay with people you don't know.

Everything in life carries risks. Trusting strangers is nice. I'd rather live in a world where I can. Then again I live in a place where people leave their cars unlocked.

Sure, but the whole premise is that you're traveling. Going to unknown territories.

If I'm going traveling, I'm sure as hell in "untrusting" mode since I don't have a clue what the locals are like.

There's strangers as in "local resident I see each day but don't know", and there's strangers as in "I've just traveled to a completely different country and have no clue who this person is"

Wanting to trust everyone and believing majority of people are good is a nice hippy dream. There's some nasty horrible people out there.

This family bicycled 26,000 miles over 43 months and didn't run into a single one of those nasty horrible people. Maybe they were extremely lucky, but I like to think you can't live your life worrying about the few nasty horrible people.

http://familyonbikes.org/blog/2011/01/isn’t-bike-touring-dan...

For an alternative anecdote see this 2008 BBC article: "'World peace' hitcher is murdered". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7344381.stm

A woman hitchhiked through the middle east dressed as a bride to promote world peace and was murdered and raped.

Are either of these anecdotes indicative of people's experiences when travelling? No. Is there potential danger in relying heavily on stranger's good intentions? Perhaps.

People generally don't like outliers. If not-so-decent people see someone not like them (probably noticeably better), they would have a natural desire to make them harm. At least of envy.

> a nice hippy dream.

Bullshit. Live in fear of strangers your whole life or trust the basic humanity of strangers. Either way you're still going to die of heart disease like the rest of us. Why don't you live in constant fear of that?

Stranger danger is a result of a fear-mongering media. Are you seriously worried about serial killers? Do you know how few of them there are and how freaking many people there are in the world?

People love to live in fear of things like strangers because it's immediate and controllable. They can just choose to stay away from them. It gives people a sense of control. Heart disease is long-term and amorphous. It's harder to gain immediate relief from fear of that.

By all means, don't leave a bunch of cash around while staying at a stranger's house. Take reasonable precautions. But fearing people by default is irrational.

I also believe it is much worth to live with a strong faith in the good nature of people.

However I believe one should not indulge in it.

This faith is very precious and this is exactly why it is a sin to rely upon it in the wrong circumstances. I live in Japan, that has a very low crime rate, but I found it very interesting when they told me "Don't leave anything valuable at the office. There is very little chance that something might happen, but can you imagine how you will feel and act towards your colleagues if something happens..." What you value you must protect. Although it sounds controversial, this means that it is your obligation to protect your faith to the goodness of people from the ones that could destroy it.

"Live in fear of strangers..."

Strawman. I don't live in fear of strangers. They don't haunt my dreams or make me break out in cold sweat or make me stop going places. But I keep my eye out, because I am not stupidly naive about it.

It's not as irrational as you think, either. The majority of people are decent, or society wouldn't exist at all. However, the non-decent ones tend to seek out travelers and other people who can be victimized. This is why the best advice to give to your kids is that they can probably trust anyone they walk up to if they have a serious problem, but anyone who approaches them for anything out-of-the-ordinary should probably be treated with great skepticism. Statistically speaking there are many situations, such as traveling, where you are disproportionately likely to encounter the non-decent types. Ignore this fact at your own peril.

I don't live in fear. But I'm not going to go stay with random people thankyou. They might be in a cult for a start.

I'll take my hotel room thankyou.

Absolutely. The few times I've been surprised by the kindness of strangers stand out to me as some of the most pleasant experiences of my life.

Me too (live in a place where cars go unlocked), but last night I watched a burglar open my passenger door, sit in the seat and look around. I never put valuables in that car, so I wasn't concerned if only for the awareness that my neighborhood is not as safe as I once thought. I shouted at him from my second-story window and he took off like a bat out of hell. The cops came and I now lock the doors on my beater every day.

A guest can only needs to steal credit card details to attack the host. The host needs to steal a whole house. That might be possible (through, say, AirBnB), but I doubt it would be easy.

Agreed, though I see a lot of people using AirBNB for guesthouses, rooms in their house (where they'll at least be at the place), or investment houses. Those scenarios seem less risky.

Was this a total stranger? It would make a lot more sense to me if it was an ex-lover or people put up to it by an ex-lover or otherwise someone with a personal vendetta.

Put me in mind of this story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/nyregion/a-revenge-plot-so...

AirBnB already has a host rating system, but because of no set level of expectations pretty much everybody gets 5 stars. Hotels are easier to rate in that regard, and people have no qualms leaving lower ratings if they don't see extra towels, have to sit in uncomfortable chairs, or are charged $14.99 for wireless Internet.

Guest rating system is even harder, as unless you're hardcore traveler, your use of AirBnB might be limited to once or twice a year. This would also penalize any new user to the service.

I can't believe anyone would rent out their home. I assumed most people rented out spare properties, not their primary residence.

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