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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

Almost like Uber was marketed, AirBnB was not initially sold as a "make primary income off this". It was a way for people with excess assets (spare car and some time, spare room in a big house, etc) to make some money and the companies were the broker.

Turning Airbnb into a full-blown rental market with people and LLCs buying houses just for AirBnB was the downfall. At least, that's my interpretation.

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You got it the wrong way around. The goal for both was to offer full time incomes and compete with taxis/hotels.

The “offer a spare room” and “pick up someone going the same way as you” narratives were about skirting regulations.

I think Paris tried to curb this buy allowing Airbnb, but you can only rent out max 50% of the year. This makes it so local owners can make some money, but corporations wouldn't be able to get the yield they need at 50% occupancy.

And did it work?

I ask because corporates usually figure out how to use the rules to their advantage and I am now trying to sniff through how they would play this.

Can I buy a property, rent it out for six months, then re-sell it to this other, totally independent corporation I own?

This seems both obvious and difficult to prevent.

Usually there are large and unavoidable transaction costs involved in selling/buying properties. It's a liquidity event on a large amount of capital so it's pretty much inevitable that government want to get involved with taxes, duties, fees etc.

Yeah, doesn't this just end up increasing short term rental prices across the board? It's not like there is a shortage of demand for lodging in Paris.

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