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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

I love AirBnb. I use it all the time.

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.

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If there's enough Airbnb demand to drive up residential rents, then you'd also have to factor in some or all of...

• 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.

> Additionally, it raises rates for apartments. $150/night is nothing for a nice AirBnb place, but it makes for some pretty expensive 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.

Assuming the people who rent out apartments comply with the existing law, they will have to rent out at least 2BR apartments, the supply of which is already very low, and live in the 2nd bedroom while their guests are there. Do you really think that will have a large impact on rent?

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.

> they will have to rent out at least 2BR apartments Or they stay with a friend, a significant other, a cheaper apartment outside the city, their parent's house, etc.

At that point they are violating the existing law. Seems like it would be pretty trivial for a pissed off neighbor to report them then.

As long as the owner of the apartment is there fine. My upstairs neighbor used to rent out her apt on AirBNB while she was out of town. On two occasions, the occupant flooded my apartment below because they didn't understand how to user a washer and air conditioner properly. I reported the apartment owner to the city by calling 311.

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.

Net demand for apartments can only go up if people who are living in the city would move out entirely if they couldn't use AirBNB.

Do you really want to say that good policy should drive these people out of town?

Is it like über-gentrification?

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?

This is pretty spot on: http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-nations-gentrified-n...

Presumably what happens is that selling housing becomes so insanely lucrative developers throw up massive amounts of new places to live, solving the housing issue through added supply.

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.

I have rented up to four apartments at a time on AirBnB in both DC and LA. Also I advised a good friend of mine, GSB grad and former investment banker, on how to use AirBnB so he could pursue a comedy career in NYC.

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.

Airbnb guests are no more 'random' to me than any other non-fee-paying guests-of-my-neighbors who are in the building from time to time.

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.

don't agree. your edge case is very edge. most 'guests' of people in nyc are out of town friends/family that highly respect and treat the place as their own. airbnb people are not incentivized to treat it like their own unless they are that kind of person. they will litter in the hall ways, make loud noise, etc etc.

>Would you want random people having access to your building?

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 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).

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.

For what it's worth, I'd like to read a story about a redhead, a juggler, a spy, and a florist. It sounds like something interesting would happen.

It is about knowing who is responsible. Part of the deal of renting is your contract is with a single entity who takes the lion share of the responsibility: the landord/management corp. You trust them to vet the people who rent alongside you at entry point and handle issues within that subgroup of vetted people who will be there for a longish term and are accountable. Airbnb diffuses responsibility to everyone in the building, including people who you don't have a contract with (fellow renters) and people have no skin in the long term harmony of the building and little accountability (the Airbnb patrons).

In my city (Amsterdam), most of the apartment buildings that are popular for short term rental have no more than 3 to 6 apartments. I know all my neighbors. They don't change all the time.

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.

Yes, I am fine with random people coming into my apartment building into other people's apartments, so long as they don't get a key to my apartment.

Are you okay if 50% of the units in your apartment and apartments across the city were used for this purpose? 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?

> Are you okay if 50% of the units in your apartment and apartments across the city were used for this purpose?

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.

...apartments across the city were used for this purpose? Are you fine with the rent increase...

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.

Your second claim that this would increase rents doesn't make sense on the larger scale. For every apartment that is rented out on Air Bnb a hotel room goes vacant. After a bit of time the hotel industry would decrease it's capacity to meet the decrease in demand. That would open up former hotels as new apartments.

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.

No, as the hotels shrink capacity, unless there's a corresponding rise in amount of residential property, it'll be more people packed into a smaller space. The higher end hotels and rooms will go first, and that's the money that will end up sloshing around the residential and rental market. All that's left will be shitty motels, insanely expensive apartments and houses for purchase or long term rental, and short-term rental at current rates or maybe a tiny bit lower (I agree that the market will force short term rates down.)

>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.

For every apartment that is rented out on Air Bnb a hotel room goes vacant.

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.

Well, a lot of people aren't ok with that - and they live where they live specifically because they were sold on that 'feature' of the building.

I guess gated communities are popular too, but I don't like the idea at all.

I betcha the market will take care of the "random people" thing.

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.

I don't think this can work. A person is either legally entitled to AirBnb their place, or they aren't. If the choice is given to the landlord to create "no AirBnb" buildings, you can bet your ass that just about every single building will be declared no-AirBnb.

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 don't think this can work. A person is either legally entitled to AirBnb their place, or they aren't. If the choice is given to the landlord to create "no AirBnb" buildings, you can bet your ass that just about every single building will be declared no-AirBnb.*

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?

Probably.

Airbnb would make recognizing that it's your property nontrivial. They don't show a specific address until a reservation is accepted; the point on the map is randomized and can be a few blocks away; photos are supplied by the host and may not match photos the landlord has (if the place is sufficiently well decorated and not distinctive, it may be hard for even a human to determine it's the same place).

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.

>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.

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.

I did not think the incentives for landlords through, it seems. I think I agree with you that the market would not find a solution that would practically preserve the right of a renter to AirBnB his or her place.

The friends of my neighbors are every bit the stranger to me that a renter is, and there are easier ways to get into an apartment building than Airbnb.

Uh, it's not the amount of familiarity that is the factor here. The main factor to think about is the distance people are shitting from where they sleep. Your neighbors may be strangers, but they have more incentive to be on good terms with their landlord for many, many legal reasons that their subleasers do not. They also have personal reasons to not screw things up too much with their neighbors, reasons which are ephemeral for their renters.

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.

Looking at TFA, the Airbnb tenant was sharing the apartment with the renter, which is legal under NY law and not really the same thing as an absentee renter Airbnb-ing 24/7 and turning their place into a hotel.

How do you support the last statement? If rates can be higher on rentals, they would be higher. If landlords could make more on AirBnB tenants, they'd provide AirBnB booking.

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