> I think everyone wins here.
Everyone except the cities that have already lost a quantity of apartments and offices that have been repurposed as AirBnBs...
Everyone except the cities that have already lost a quantity of apartments and offices that have been repurposed as AirBnBs...
Airbnb "hosts" use their ever growing stream of reverse mortgages to purchase more and more single family homes at cash offers over what others can afford.
Hosts now have to be officially registered with the city. AirBnB lost something like 90% of their hosts overnight!
Well... a moderate amount of tourism is fine, even beneficial; but excessive tourism in any given location becomes a blight. Airbnb has contributed to that, by facilitating short-term profits for "hosts" and the company and ignoring the negative impact.
In some places this is incredibly visible (think Las Vegas Strip vs Las Vegas) but you can also see it in many famous tourist destinations.
Of course, large cities like Tokyo are quite resistant to tourism, just because of how big they are - certain areas and attractions may be tourist heavy but the city is still Tokyo.
With AirBnB the problem has expanded massively. I cannot find a 3-room office that is not miles away from the city center because everything that size is an AirBnB. An employee I just hired that moved here from a different city has been forced to live for months in an AirBnB because there are no long term rentals in the city (ah!).
Since every wall-confined space can be an AirBnB, every wall-confined space becomes one. The lack of regulation makes a real difference, compared to shop and hotels.
If you want, text me where you are, I’ll put up $10k for a bet and then if I can find you a 3 room office, you give me $10k. If I can’t, I’ll give you $10k. Gotta be anglophone, though and none of this long-term rent controlled shit because no one wants to get locked into that. My French is atrocious and my German worse and I can’t speak anything else.
EDIT: Fine, fuck it, give me a year to learn the Spanish and up the bet to $100k and I’ll do it. I find very often that things that are impossible for others are easy for me. But list your conditions up front here. I think I could manage anyhow.
It's not the primary source of the housing problem, but it definitey contributes to it.
or unless you can make significantly more money as a short term rental. Also if you can theoretically hide your earnings (although I guess you can't most places anymore)
also, I believe most EU countries have some form of renter protection laws.
>There's also a shortage of $15/mo Manhattan Beach rentals.
oh yeah, right the cost under discussion is $15 a month, forgot about that. I thought it was that the cost to rent an apartment in lots of areas took up such an exorbitant amount of a monthly income that natives to the area could not afford to do it.
Reading it back, it does sound kind of gauche, but I'm pretty sure the stated issue is a non-problem. Like I said, people have lots of trouble getting things done and I find that the things are not that hard.
weekly short term rental price in summer = monthly rental price for long term resident.
So if you rent for 12 weeks between late may and end of september you already make as much money than having a rental resident, and can still rent more expensively than a short term resident. For example owners typically rent a lot to tourists during the hottest months and in autumn/winter/fall a lot of digital nomad are filling the gap. They also usually have done the math and can swallow the higher rent than a local would.
Having said that, I don't want to be an owner here. Administration is horrible but basically everyone you will meet are either lazy or want to defraud you in some way and they have absolutely no sense of quality work. A friend of mine is renovating a small house all by himself because he got fed up by the locals. Maybe the end result won't be , but here the pros won't give you professionnal quality job anyway so at least he won't feel screwed.
I've seen entire floors of apartment buildings being converted into AirBnb flop houses. People will convert every room, besides bathrooms, in a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment into separate AirBnb rooms. Instead of renting an entire 1 bedroom apartment to one person, you can easily stick 3+ people in there as an AirBnb setup.
And if the large cities are a problem, there still are some new building projects done here, if you want to massively overpay an apartment,... the rural areas near tourist areas are even worse... 20km from the mountains and 20km from the seaside, almost nothing new is being built ("preserving the heritage" ... after being a communust country for 50 years, and most of the "heritage" was built in the 1970s in 80s), and anything already built being sold is massively overpriced (literally not worth it unless you're lending it out via airbnb).
I'm usually against banning stuff, but if airbnb was banned, it would be a good thing. Tourist belong in hotels, hostels, etc. and apartment buildings are for people who actually live there. And lets not forget the additional problems airbnb brings to an otherwise residential apartment building (parties (=noise), drunk tourists, destroyed shared property, etc.).
This! As a user of Airbnb when traveling, I've found that renting "real" homes has been a superior experience. They actually have sensible furniture and decorations. They also tend to have common-sense items available, like plungers next to toilets.
The problem here in Atlanta is so bad that the core city has now banned airbnb without an explicit permit. We are hoping that gets adopted across the metro area.
The problem obviously exists beyond AirBnB, but AirBnB massively escalated the problem.
It really is so problematic that cities like Berlin, Amsterdam (and I believe Venice) and many more crack down on AirBnBs. Hard. You are allowed to rent out the apartment where you live, but for limited time and with high fines or even extradiction on renting out beyond the limits (e.g. 90 days per year). You are certainly no longer allowed to have AirBnBs for the sole purpose of renting out to AirBnb.
Edit: and in e.g. Berlin, AirBnB does not hand over the data of their users/renters (which Is good, I presume). So they have people scanning the renting-websites, visting homes and even posting outside to find evidence something is rented out beyond the allowed duration.
That's a ridiculous requirement. Owning real estate for the sole purpose of renting has been an income source for ever. Just because Airbnb exploded this practice in popularity doesn't give governments the right to say what purpose owners can use their property for. If Airbnb is causing issues, then address those specifically, not ban the practice of owning property exclusively used for renting.
Even laissez faire countries like America use things like 'zoning' and 'setbacks' to control what you're allowed to do on your own property.
Banning short-term rental properties feels like a quick bandaid to gain political points, not a solution to a market with a large demand.
Seems more that you want government to facilitate running a business where it's not in the interest of that government, nor in the interest of the locals. Airbnb's aren't beneficial, plus they aren't checked as properly as a hotel.
Usually it isn't banned, what they're after is that it is limited (days/year), plus the AirBnB income is properly taxed.
So bad, that you often cannot even have a neighborhood café, corner pub, or local shop in modern suburbs. So bad, that you need to take the car to do shopping. For someone from western Europe, this is mind blowing insane: you need to take the car to buy your milk!
But short-term rentals are basically identical with hotels which are commercial properties and have substantially different requirements - the people staying there will not frequent supermarkets, etc as much as they will restaurants, etc. They will not be sending their children to the local school, and so on.
Mixed use property can be (and should be!) encouraged, but it does have externalities that have to be handled and accounted for.
of course the government is gonna govern.
quoting you here
"governments told what purpose owners can use their property for, for ever"
That’s true.
The power of government to govern does not originate with AirBnB, but predates it considerably.
The particular use of the power may be responsive to situations created by AirBnB, though.
The original idea of AirBnB was to easily rent your couch or guest room for a few nights and I think regulations should be made to keep it this way.
Building them if there is an actual housing shortage? Sure! Building them so people from the silicon valley can be digital nomads? Hell no.
Also, building apartments has a huge environmental impact? Ok?.... So does rural sprawl? So does... everything? There is nothing inherently more damaging about those.
Beauty of a city? Cities are cities because of apartments. And you want.. fewer of them? Perhaps you would enjoy the suburbs more?