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Comment by Delumine | Hacker News Reader

It feels to me that AirBNB hosts are an entitled group of people. They want all the benefits of renting out their place (in most cases, it goes against the original intent of renting a spare room, or family home), but want to make the experience less than ideal for customers. There's a multitude of rules, chores, invasions of privacy (Cameras, decibel monitors, et al).

These are supposed to be vacations, not a walking-on-eggshells experience because the host is constantly spying on you. If there's damage, submit a claim against the person.

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In a lot of countries many of the hosts are violating zoning laws and evading tax to.

A lot of people are getting very tired of being subjected to weekend after weekend of stags and hen parties because the neighboring apartment was turned into a hotel room.

Not to mention the extra pressure it's put on property and rents.

Secret recording is also a serious crime in most jurisdictions.

I wonder if nuisance laws can be used against the host if repeated violations are coming from the same property, even if the renter is different.

I agree. AirBNB was a mistake. It used to be that an apartment could be rented out for a decent amount above your mortgage, and expenses. But now there's no incentive to opt for long-term rentals, when a short-term one is more profitable.

Then the rich get richer and consolidate more properties under their companies, leaving the rest to fend for themselves. Think of people who had been making sacrifices so they could save up to purchase something, just to be outbid by collective groups of people just purchasing property to rent them out. There's no competing.

> now there's no incentive to opt for long-term rentals

this happened very, very quickly in some markets.. +10 years ago

The worse part is how the “success stories” or airbnb hosts have brainwashed lots of people: my middle class friends strongly oppose regulating airbnb because they dream of someday buying a place to rent on airbnb and get passive income, when they don't realize the reason their rents and housing prices are so high is because of this kind of behavior and that they'll never make it in the first place because of the high prices. The ones who owned before airbnb came where the ones who made real money.

> They want all the benefits of renting out their place (in most cases, it goes against the original intent of renting a spare room, or family home), but want to make the experience less than ideal for customers.

In the first part of that sentence you characterize the transaction as akin to renting out a spare room, but in the second part you characterize the guests as "customers." Historically, if you rented a room from someone, you were subject to all sorts of rules, invasions of privacy, etc. In many circumstances, that's still the case (e.g. with live-in nannies).

What's actually happening is that guests treat AirBnBs like hotel rooms, and hosts are doing the same thing. It's just a commercial, arm's-length transaction.

Exactly, in the former situation you obviously don't have a full expectation of privacy. But when you're paying a premium for an entire property, onerous rules and spying are uncalled for.

We already have a solution, and they're called hotels.

Society forgot why hotels were created, so now we're re-learning it via AirBnB.

"Hotels" does not solve "I'd like to stay in an isolated cabin in the countryside", or various other things that are readily available on vacation rental sites.

(AirBnB has lots of other problems, but "hotels" alone are not a complete replacement for what it provides.)

Fair enough, hotels don't fully cover the entire AirBnB usecase, but cabin rentals and bed-and-breakfasts in the country have been around forever, too.

My point is, commercial rentals exist because of the problems AirBnB are having. They're trying to "disrupt" the industry by not providing the protections and safeguards to save money, and basically running into all of the problems that led to the commercial rental industry in the first place.

Their innovation is collecting a fee while pushing the dirty work off to unsophisticated 3rd party property owners.

Yeah, and this rule change won't change any of those problems. We can already see that the prior rules were being ignored by the problem hosts.

Yup.

I have never had an Airbnb that was not clearly an illegal hotel.

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