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Comment by gerikson | Hacker News Reader

A flat owner is not an atomic actor. If you purchase a flat, it's under the implicit assumption that you or your family will be the only ones occupying it.

I live in Sweden and most "condo" associations (bostadsrätt) have rules regarding short-term hires and subletting. I imagine it is the same in the Netherlands.

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> I live in Sweden and most "condo" associations (bostadsrätt) have rules regarding short-term hires and subletting.

I don't know why you're using Sweden as a 'good' example of democratic control of Airbnb: the opposite is actually true, where the authorities are very well-disposed to people hiring-out their apartments, and see it as an opportunity to get more tourists visiting locations in Sweden[0] From the article in the citation:

"Politicians in Copenhagen want to introduce a maximum limit of 60 rental days per year via Airbnb - but Stockholm is choosing a different path and continues to welcome private rentals via the US giant. According to statistics from Airbnb, there are now over 3,600 listed homes actively offered as tourist accommodation in Stockholm."

In that article there are officials saying the same as you - that local restrictions put some sort of 'natural' limit on the number of Airbnb apartments - but the reality is that for people working here in Stockholm and trying to find an apartment to rent, the only option has now become Airbnb or the black-market in rented accommodation - effectively pricing normal people out of the market altogether.

As for these supposed restrictions on hiring-out apartments that are in the 'rulebook' of a house, it's perfectly easy to circumvent them. In my house in central Stockholm it's forbidden, but I often meet small groups of Italians, Spaniards or other obvious tourists coming and going in the communal areas of the house, and looking very sheepish at being seen - very obviously hiring an apartment illegally.

[0] In swedish: https://www.svd.se/stockholm-gar-emot-airbnb-trenden-inget-p...

Maybe it is starting now?

https://www.thelocal.se/20210916/swedens-first-case-against-...

If you purchase a flat, it's under the implicit assumption that you or your family will be the only ones occupying it

I also live in Sweden and that is a very Sweden specific assumption. Even just across the border in Norway that assumption doesn't hold.

Sweden on the whole is very anti small private landlords and have lots of laws making it basically impossible to make money by buying a few flats and renting them out, but that is also a pretty uniquely Swedish take on the property market.

> Sweden on the whole is very anti small private landlords and have lots of laws making it basically impossible to make money by buying a few flats and renting them out, but that is also a pretty uniquely Swedish take on the property market.

This is an extremely idealized version of the real situation - at least in Stockholm. Here, the only real cap on the number of apartments being bought for (often illegal) hire, is the spiralling cost of real estate. Many of my colleagues rent their apartments on the black market - which is often the only way to get a home within the city.

Official rental apartments generally have a waiting-list of around 20 years within the city-limits, and even needing to commute from far out in the suburbs a newly-arrived person will probably need to rent on the black-market. This is a well-known and documented situation.

Airbnb has definitely made the situation much worse in Stockholm - the supposed '3600' apartments are actually far greater in number, as can be seen if one switches off location-permissions in your browser, and take a look at available rentals in the area.

You're of course right. I should have written that Swedish law is very anti small private landlords and that legally making money by buying a couple of flats and renting them out is basically impossible.

In fact when I moved back to Sweden after working abroad for a few years after University I spend the first 18 month living in a illegally rented flat, so I'm painfully aware of how the system works in real life.

So how is there housing for people to rent? Does the government build and maintain all rental property?

You’d usually rent from someone owning an entire building. Usually a company but sometimes an individual.

No, there are private and council-owned landlords.

Can you explain more? That still sounds like you are able to "make money by buying a few flats and renting them out" but with extra steps.

Expanding on 'dawg, it's generally only profitable to rent if you're a company devoted only to renting, and the regulatory regime punishes the landlord with only a few units. This is because rents are not market-based, but instead are based on "use value" (bruksvärde). A 19th C apartment in the middle of the city can theoretically be worth "less" from a rental perspective than a newly built apartment in the suburbs.

Any annual rent increases are set via a form of collective bargaining, and if a landlord charges more, the renter is entitled to their money back.

The upshot of this is that it's much more profitable to buy a rental building and flip it to the renters via a bostadsrättsförening (a bit like a condo) or to only build to sell.

No, the landlords in these cases own the whole building, not just a few flats. If you own the whole building then you can of course rent out the flats in that building. But if you just own a couple of flats in the building, then you generally cannot easily rent them out.

Thanks for expanding, I do admit writing from a parochial perspective.

In the UK at least, the expectation would be 50/50 that you are buying to let.

However, a six month minimum rental period is very different from having new neighbors every weekend.

> it's under the implicit assumption that you or your family will be the only ones occupying it.

Says who? This is a rather bold assumption to make and does not have any connection with the reality in most of the world.

My comments were made from my experience as a renter and condo owner in Stockholm, Sweden. I did speculate that similar norms were present in the Netherlands, but I must confess I have not studied the issue deeply.

>If you purchase a flat, it's under the implicit assumption

There might be such implicit assumption somewhere, but it for sure isn't a general one.

I for one don't have any such expectations regarding the neighbours in my condo. (I don't live in Sweden/Netherlands though.)

I, for one, am renting, so if my neighbors expected my landlord would live at the flat with his family - then my wife, my newborn son and I are certainly failing to meet their implicit assumptions.

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