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Comment by shadowflit | Hacker News Reader

Just to clarify, since it took your second comment to get me to this understanding -

Someone who was not the real owner of the apartment (presumably thief/criminal) put the place up on AirBnB. You unknowingly rented the place from this person, and during your stay, the real owner showed up and asked what you were doing in his house?

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that is correct. The person who put up the listing claims to be friends with the tenant. The tenant has not paid rent in 4 months and his contract explicitly forbids subletting. So I am staying in this apartment illegally. Luckily, the owner is nice enough to let us stay for the remainder of our time without compensation. I have no idea how common this situation is but this is only our 6th time using airbnb and if this is a common occurrence then airbnb has a HUGE problem on their hands. Don't get me wrong I'm a big fan of the business so I'm hoping for better countermeasures in the future against this kind of thing. It's a very very tough problem to solve.

I don't know about in Germany, but in the UK it's common for contracts to have a clause ban subletting, but in practice it's considered unenforceable. Also unless the landlord has been through the formal eviction process the tenant probably still has a legal right to the property.

From when I lived in Berlin it seemed subletting rental apartments wasn't uncommon. Subletting where you live has been common practice in Germany for a long time predating the rise of AirBnB, etc. Typically on classified ad sites or through specialist agencies. I've seen stores like yours before from a few years back discussed on toytown (an expat forum for people living in germany), so it's not just an AirBnB thing.

Not so true about the UK. In my building in London, one unit was being quietly sublet for holiday-type use, in violation of the contract, and when complaints from the residents' association were not heeded a court order put an end to the illegal sublettings.

Berlin resident here. I agree that it's a tough problem to solve and would make verification of hosts (maybe prohibitively) expensive. You'd have to check that the person listing the place is a) actually the tenant, b) is in good standing with the landlord, c) has permission to sublet (without pre-approval of individual subletters by the landlord).

In practice, most Berlin landlords won't ever notice their flat being occasionally sublet to tourists by the tenant, but they will probably not be too happy when they notice.

well in this case the tenant did not pay rent for 4 months, and instead rented it out on airbnb for those months and pocketed the change. If the tenant funneled the airbnb money into rent I'm sure it wouldn't be as big of a deal as it is now.

Sure, in your case, the tenant's move was particulary bold. Owing two months rent to the landlord is grounds for immediate termination of the contract and eviction in Germany btw.

Actually, verification of hosts is not THAT tough and Airbnb already has a solution - "Airbnb verified" photos of the listing. Airbnb offers (in big cities at least) to send a photographer to your address and have him take pictures and upload to your listing page. This verifies to a reasonably decent degree that the person listing the property is the owner too.

This storm just keeps getting bigger, like turning over a rock that had an ant on it, now has gobs of ants underneath that weren't seen before. If AirBnB cares about its future, they'll patch this up publicly and then get some serious crisis management consultation people in the mix. Yikes!

Yes that seems to be the correct understanding. The thief probably stayed at the place and made a copy of the key. Afterwards they rented it out on abnb.

Not sure if he is actually a thief. He claims to be a friend of the deadbeat tenant who actually rents here. That does sound like a likely story. I don't want to get involved more than I need to, I'm on vacation anyway. Makes for one heck of a story back home though.

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