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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Or having a guest house on your property and running a Craigslist ad to rent it out for the summer.

At what point does somebody giving me money in return for staying on my property turn my property into a hotel? I'm not talking the legal definition, I'm talking common sense.

The only working definition I can come up with is "when you reach a scale where the government can start taking a cut"

Back in the old days, that was a good-sized establishment. With computers, however, the government can go after anybody -- including lots of folks that earlier slipped through the cracks.

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Easy: at the point where your sole use of the property is for short-term rentals.

The guy in question stayed in the apartment himself and let friends stay for free. So he's off the hook; short-term rental wasn't the sole use of the property.

Easy!

This entire line of argumentation relies on the fact that there is (maybe) not a clear distinction between hotel and not-hotel.

Engineer-ish types take this to mean that the line is arbitrary and therefore irrelevant, concerns addressed by that distinction are invalid, and efforts to circumvent/exploit it are victories in the battle against analog logic. Other people understand that fuzzy definitions do not mean that the distinction therein is imaginary, merely difficult to identify.

If you've ever heard the phrase "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater," it applies here.

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is preventing people like OP from doing what he's doing just because some guests might be a nuisance. What about we fine the house owner over those guests instead?

The problem is that the article itself tells us that AirBnB's protection mechanism to keep bad renters out it is broken (don't leave bad reviews for fear of getting bad reviews yourself). So AirBnB is taking all the benefit from this market, without providing a working way to curb any abuses.

My guess is that the fine is either a slap on the wrist (so the house owner just chalks it up to business expense) or so sever that the house owner stops doing short-term rentals entirely. I've not used AirBNB, but I assume that the house owner doesn't really know anything about the renters most of the time.

One solution might be to pass the fine onto the renters, but that leads to another problem: "Quiet" renters would probably be more put off by the possibility of an extra surprise charge than "Party" renters. The latter category probably ignore the penalty clause when booking the apartment and then try to avoid paying the fine after the fact. So now your set of renters is mostly loud partiers and the problem is even worse.

> My guess is that the fine is either a slap on the wrist (so the house owner just chalks it up to business expense) or so sever[e] that the house owner stops doing short-term rentals entirely.

This is tautologous. Either the owner does not cease to rent out his unit, in which case fines are a business expense, or he does. What sort of third option were you imagining might happen?

The fine should high enough to serve as deterrent. If the house owner doesn't know anything about the renters, s/he can either ask for a bond from the tenants that covers the fine (and deal with the loss of customers) or AirBnB or a competitor could offer better vetting of tenants.

I think we agree on this point.

My post was in response to the parent, which suggested that any property "solely" used for short-term leases should be regulated.

I was not suggesting that was a useful or appropriate test. Leaving aside the question of whether regulation is necessary, a "dominant purpose" or even "substantial purpose" test would lead to less absurdity.

So the guest house example. A hotel? Or because it's part of the property you also live in, not-a-hotel?

If I bought an apartment building and lived in the penthouse, could I rent all the apartments out short-term and not be a hotel?

No. Hotels do this all the time (see, e.g., the Ritz Carlton, which sells condos at the top of its hotels). Just having someone live in the building is not enough to make a hotel not a hotel.

Letting someone live in your apartment while you're temporarily away (or while you're still present) is a very different thing from regularly renting out a unit in which you don't reside. If you can't see the difference between those situations, I don't know much more clearly I can make it.

No.

You just deferred the problem to the definition of "sole."

Indeed, for many Airbnb hosts occupy their property at least part of the time. In fact, I think that's the niche it has filled best. There were already rental agencies (indeed, online ones!) to deal with permanent short-term rental properties. Airbnb offered a particularly hassle-free conduit for those who just want to rent their property out some of the time, such as folks who have multiple properties in various locations, occupy it seasonally, travel a lot for work, live abroad part-time, etc.

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