Huge victory in New York for Nigel Warren and our host community
publicpolicy.airbnb.com
publicpolicy.airbnb.com
But, I understand the laws in big cities. Let's say you rent an apartment in a building, which virtually anyone in NYC is doing. Would you want random people having access to your building? Random people getting a copy of the keys? It's your home, and your neighbor is treating the space like a hotel. You'll have random people all over who don't necessarily respect your space.
Additionally, it raises rates for apartments. $150/night is nothing for a nice AirBnb place, but it makes for some pretty expensive rent.
Yes. I fundamentally don't want a gated community.
> Are you fine with the rent increase you will incur because of the demand for units from folks who want to make a profit and can afford to pay much higher rent than someone like you?
I'm not convinced your premise is correct. But I'll roll with the punches.
ISTM that contracts can enforce one's preferences with respect to a particular building, but only in a very few exceptional neighborhoods could they do anything to hold down rent. After all, one can't very well demand contract terms for the building across the street.
The possible increase in flexibility and therefor efficiency is more likely to lower rental costs across the city, and increase income opportunities when apartments have a room to rent.
>and increase income opportunities when apartments have a room to rent.
This will increase income opportunities for landlords. Especially all of those cash buyers that were riding the upside of this last rally, buying hundreds of properties at a time. In cash.
Edit: Even though, now that I think about it, there's a lot of shadow inventory that will come back into the system with price rises. Residential might be able to keep up with demands for a while.
This isn't true. NYC already prevents a lot of short-term visits because of the high nightly hotel rentals. If that price becomes cheaper, then more people will travel there.
Yes yes, you might say, that's why your neighbors have an incentive to only rent to the best. And I agree. Funny how things slip when third parties are involved though, best intentions be damned.
Note: I've only had good experiences with Airbnb (and Craigslist, for that matter)...I just think your reasoning doesn't quite address the issues here.
There will be some buildings that advertise as "No AirBnB places". They will capture some portion of the market that is interested. If the law does not support a landlord doing that, we could probably work something out.
There will be other buildings that allow AirBnB type short-term renting. I can think of lots of folks that would like that type of housing, or be fine with the rent decrease that would probably be associated with it.
My opinion, the "random" people allegation is a problem in people's minds more than it is a problem in real life.
Short term rentals present risk to landlord - damage of common property, excessive resource consumption (electric, hot water, gas, etc, that may not be paid directly by lease-holder). How high this risk is is a topic of hot debate, but it's certainly a non-zero number.
Considering that the landlord sees nothing from the AirBnb'ing, and they have some legal ability to classify their building as "no AirBnb", what sane landlord wouldn't do it? This goes doubly if rents in non-AirBnb buildings are, as you suggested, higher.
This leads naturally to the thought that we can incentivize landlords to allow AirBnbs (read: kickbacks) - at which point AirBnb starts looking an awwwwful lot like traditional hotels, or worse, the slum-tels of old.
Side note: giant companies like AirBnb keep using the word "sharing economy", which I find highly disingenuous. This isn't early-stage eBay, where you list things you don't need. It also isn't Craigslist. The vast majority of places on AirBnb aren't "I'll be out of town and I'd like to make some money on my apartment", the vast majority of AirBnbs are dedicated operations. A far cry from the "peer to peer" "efficient use of excess resources" that Lyft, Sidecar, AirBnb, et al, like to talk about.
We hate it when politicians use doublespeak, why do we so readily allow it when it's being done by a company that's on our good side?
I wonder if landlords would pay for tool that automatically crawls listings on AirBnB for their property listings, and notifies them when matches are found?
If however you licensed some good facial recognition technology, perhaps you could compare the face in the Airbnb host's avatar with that on the ID each of your tenants supplied when applying for an apartment. It would be far from bulletproof, but could get you somewhere. In a less-densely populated place maybe you could even get away with "notify us if someone named Bob offers a new room within 0.5 miles of 622 Cedar St", perhaps hiring low-paid humans to sanity-check the results before passing the notification on to the landlord.
Landlords won't allow AirBnB, they'll be AirBnB. They'll disallow it for long term tenants, yet always have every vacant unit listed on the site. If they can book it for a week, they'll make what you currently pay for the month's rent. Depending on how well you're located, there's going to be some pressure on your rent.
Yes, this is my issue. People who rent out apartments with the intention of running them like a hotel, will inflate rent for everyone else bc anyone who doesn't have the intention of running their apartment like a hotel won't be able to afford the market price. There are more of them than you might think, I know of atleast two.
On a side note, corporations already effectively do this. I lived in a building in Midtown that was at least 50% corporate housing and there were constantly people there for short stays and the rent increases were massive since the companies weren't price sensitive. However, afaik, that is legal.
Unless the apartment owner is responsible and insured, this is why it is illegal in New York.
What wasn't trivial was the damage. Thousands of dollars to electronics, desks, furnishings, etc.
AirBNB should be ashamed of themselves for pursuing profits at any costs.
It's one thing to rent your house out in the middle of nowhere. It's another to rent it to eurotrash and let them destroy your building.
Do you really want to say that good policy should drive these people out of town?
gentrification: demolish and/or renovate existing structures so people can move in and pay $2500 to $6000 per month for studio to two bedroom apartments. This forces the native element of "I've lived here my whole life" to move elsewhere typically against their will.
über-gentrification: All $2500/month studios are now billed out at $150/night and all $6000 two bedrooms are now billed out at $300/night. The rich jerks who gentrified the native population now can't afford to live there because their next lease re-up will take into account the surplus not being captured by the landlord, so all studios will be $4500/month and all two bedrooms will be $9000/month.
So the professionals move to... Idaho?
What happens if we let the vacation market out price professionals from living close to work? What happens when we let professionals out price service workers from living close to work?
Self driving megabus cars. Three deckers.
When are we going to get self driving busses and limos?
If the city is prohibiting that construction from happening, perhaps that's where you should point the finger rather than the people buying and selling at market prices.
From my experience, if you are renting apts to put them on AirBnB, you seek out low cost apts where you a guaranteed a return. I don't think that apt pricing overall increases by this behavior, because as a sub-letter (unlike if you are paying a mortgage), you are looking for monthly positive cash flow because you don't get the real estate appreciation.
For the last three years, I just look for studios and small one-bedrooms that if rented for 12 or less nights covers the rent. So in DC, I'd never rent a $2000 month place for AirBnB because that would require me to rent out the place 15 nights a month just to break=even. Too much risk. But a studio at $1200 a month starts to make a lot of sense. Yet, I would not want to personally live in a studio.
So I don't think AirBnB leads to increases in overall rents. It does lead to winnowing of small cheap well located apartments though, that you would otherwise move from but now you have a great opportunity to hold onto and put on AirBnB indefinitely. Oh, and if you really get into AirBnB, it can really affect your relationship with your gf/bf . . . let me crash at their place for three nights so I can make this $450 :) But that's another story.
I don't understand this argument. You already have "random" people having access to your building. You don't get to vet a single one of your neighbors, and they change all the time (simply less frequently). It's currently entirely within the realm of possibility that a drug addict or noisy college kid could move into the room next to you.
The only argument I can sympathize with is that the people may not necessarily respect your space.
You say this like it's insignificant, but it could mean the difference between 10 people and 10,000 people. If you're saying that the chance of encountering a bad element isn't higher when there are more people coming through, that's silly. Your chances of encountering a redhead, juggler, undercover spy, or florist will go up, also.
In that context it's extremely invasive to suddenly have strangers in your building.
Luckily I have good contact with all my neighbors, two of them rent out their apartments regularly, but also live there part of the year. But often apartments are owned by people who just own the property and don't give a fuck about the people that live there.
Unregulated, AirBnB would ruin the quality of living for many people.
Perhaps Airbnb guests are less random, given the sticky reputations, payment/identity auditability, and commercial guarantees/incentives.
For example, outside of Airbnb, a neighbor might feel a loyalty obligation to let some sketchy down-on-his-luck friend/relative stay over. In such a case there'd be minimal third-party recourse if this guest causes problems. (Provided the guest is legal under the lease, I don't think you'd have any case, against the host, for the guest's errors/crimes. You'd have to go after the guest, which could be a blood-from-a-stone errand.)
OTOH, when mediated by Airbnb, my neighbor-host can coldly avoid any particular Airbnb-guest by risk/reward calculations... and if the guest misbehaves then Airbnb's guarantees and reputation become additional avenues for remedy. That is, some factors make temporary (but accountable) commercial guests even less risky than other casual guests – and maybe even less-risky than some permanent residents!
There are plenty of hypothetical things that can go wrong, but we have to sum up the outcomes over all eventualities, under these new incentives, not just imagine worst-case scenarios. Let people flexibly work it out via contract, as we learn, rather than with blanket legislation.
• Hotel rates go down from the competition; some hotel space/development at the margin is shifted into residential/Airbnb units
• Those renters who take vacations to other cities pay less when on vacation (in either Airbnb units or competed-lower Hotel rates)
• Some renters make up some or all of the raised rents through occasional re-renting via Airbnb (as when they are on vacation)
Ultimately, holding both people and housing units (including hotels) constant, it's not at all clear that a new commercial system for reallocating who-is-in-what-bed-when causes any net increase in prices paid. By better utilizing stock that might otherwise have been empty, it might increase a city's effective carrying capacity with no costly new construction. Even if it does drive up rents, that's only happening in concert with a bunch of other value - more people on vacation, more useful density/utilization in the most desirable locations, more options for many renters – that helps offset the negatives.
From the blog posts it seems as if the guy's landlord was on-board with him subletting, which is a different situation than many I hear about where the landlord has no idea (and may in fact be the one going after the renter if he or she finds out). Also it seems the guy was present and only renting out a room during the guest's stay which allowed him to get off on a technicality in this case while many Airbnb renters will rent the entire space during vacation times, etc.
This has never been clear to me. His landlord was the one cited for (supposedly) violating the law, so he naturally was interested in a defense to avoid the fine and having a citation on record. I'm not sure he actually approved of his tenant renting a room of his apartment on airbnb.